Everything is put into it

“For the head of a crowd is like a pudding en surprise.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XIV, p. 67.

4

On the video screen scenes of a gondola floating down a canal. “Of course music will be added later,” said the filmmaker, “this is the early stages”. We’d met him at one of Ficino’s parties and he had invited us over to view some of what he called his raw footage. The camera zoomed in on the Chinese gondoliers face. “This was taken in Venice Aquatic City in Hangzhou,” said the filmmaker, “an imitation Venice in China. I also have footage of an imitation Venice in the United States, and an imitation Venice in Japan. My plan is to film all the imitation Venices in the world so people can experience imitation Venice without leaving their homes.”

There is nothing so ‘romantic’ as advertisement

“Advertisement is the apotheosis of the marvellous and the unusual.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. II, p. 11.

“The world in which advertisement dwells is a one-day world. It is necessarily a plane universe, without depth.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. II, p. 12.

Brewery and laundry receipts

“At the end of a long reading of Ulysses you feel that is the very nightmare of the naturalistic method that you have been experiencing.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 91.

The poor craftsman

“The painful preoccupation with the exact place of things in a room, for instance, could be mildly matched in his writing. The things themselves by which he is surrounded lose, for the hysterical subject, their importance or even meaning.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 91.

External nature of the machine age

“There is nothing for it today, if you have an appetite for the beautiful, but to create new beauty You can no longer nourish yourself upon the past; its stock is exhausted, the Past is nowhere a reality. The only place where it is a reality is in time, certainly not in space. So the mental world of time offers a compensating principle.

From this devastating alternative – the creation of new beauty – most people shrink in horror. ‘Create!’ they exclaim. ‘As though it were not already difficult enough to live’ – But it is questionable if even bare life is possible, denuded of all meaning. And the meaning put into it by millennial politics of the current type is as unsubstantial as a mist on a Never-Never landscape.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XVI, p. 83.

So dead

“Gertrude Stein’s prose-song is a cold, black, suet-pudding.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. XIII, p. 61

Returns

“Feminism, to take another political movement, is a revolution that aims at reversing the respective positions of the sexes, and so returning to the supposed conditions of the primitive Matriarchate.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. VIII, p. 36.

3

A dissolute summer of sex and perplexed speculations. We abstracted the many relations from the one thing, until we were left with nothing. I’m told she lectures at a small college in the Midwest these days, her bored students oblivious to her penchant for not wearing underwear.

Our incurably romantic outlook

“Our civilization is much more artificial than that of Greece or Rome; and the main cause of this is the Christian ethic. Where Romance enters the sphere of morals is at the gate of sex; nearly all the diabolism (helping itself to the traditional Sadic and invert machinery), springing up so eagerly in Puritan soil can be traced to a sex-root. It is even extremely easy in the modern West to sexify everything, in a way that would have been impossible in the Greek world, for instance.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. III, p. 15.

2

“The monumental is my sickness,” he said, “so naturally I was attracted to the Generalissimo, to the possibility of expressing my need for monumentality.”

Ficino and I had been surprised to learn he was still alive and living in the city, and now here we were in his tiny apartment.

“In an age of bureaucrats and salesmen-“ he jabbed a thick finger at us “- to discover a man with broader ambitions...so rare. I could not resist him. I could not miss my chance.”

He showed us the original plans for a tower which, if it had ever been built, would’ve been the greatest of what he called his Apocalyptic Towers.

"What was to go inside the tower?" Ficino asked.

“It would have been a museum, or possibly a prison. What’s important is the scale.”

This Obscure Point

“The less you are able to realize other people, the more your particular personality will obsess you, and the more dependent upon its reality you will be. The more you will insist on it with a certain frenzy. And the more ‘individualist’ you are in this sense, the less ‘individualist’ you will be in the ordinary political sense. You will have achieved a fantastic hegemony with your unique self feeling.” - Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, Book I, ch. I, p. 8.

1

Tell me, was it you I saw that night, or some gentle ghost? My view was obscured by the encroaching bougainvilleas.