Rich Bailey 2011

I just finished A4Q-ating for the first time. I've known about the the tradition for years, but somehow living in a mid-size southern city where there is no subway and I know most of the people who run around downtown, it just didn't seem right. I moved to New York City last summer, and now it feels right. I left two copies each of the following quotes in swath of lower Manhattan running from Chelsea Market at 9th Avenue westward along 14th and 15th Streets, dipping south into Greenwich Village around Bleecker and 7th Ave, then continuing along 16th Street to Union Square. I did not see the Gom Yawncher man, but I watched some buskers and made a cash deposit in a homeless person's cup.

Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillness blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of mystery in which we are never allowed to rest.

- from Fremder

There is a point where pattern becomes motion; the pattern has found me and I must move, must be aware of moving, must be a motion, an action of the Word. Poor bare tuned fork.

- from Pilgermann

To me it seems that everything that happens is language, everything that goes on is saying something.

- from The Moment Under the Moment

We are the children of the mystery that inhabits us and I believe that it wants us to meet it with innocence of becoming; not to meet it is to be a failed child.

- from The Moment Under the Moment

The black howled in the tunnels, the tracks fled before the train. Whatever lived walking upside-down in the concrete put its paws against the feet of the people standing on the platform, its cold soft paws. One two, three, four, walking softly in the chill silence upside-down with great soft cold paws. Underground said words to itself, names. No one listened. Footsteps covered the words, the names.

- from Kleinzeit

Right, said Kleinzeit. Enough. He opened the door of the yellow paper's cage, and it sprang upon him. Over and over they rolled together, bloody and roaring. Doesn't matter what the title is to start with, he said, anything will do, HERO, I'll call it. Chapter 1. He wrote the first line while the yellow paper clawed his guts, the pain was blinding. It'll kill me, said Kleinzeit, there's no surviving this. He wrote the second line, the third, completed the first paragraph. The roaring and the blood stopped, the yellow paper rubbed purring against his leg, the first paragraph danced and sang, leaped and played on the green grass in the dawn.

- from Kleinzeit