"It seems a good place to ask him exactly how he first got interested in spiders and their webs. He laughs and turns the question around. "The strange thing to me," he says, "was always the question of why scientists were not more interested in them. I mean, here is a creature which, according to its size, can build from its own body a structure on the scale of a football pitch overnight, every night, and can catch the equivalent of an aeroplane in it. Why would you not want to study how it did that?""

"Never lose sight of the fact that you don't know much."- Dennis McKenna

The hope that if we keep blindly knitting Ariadne's line there'll be something stylish to walk out of the labyrinth in.

A Base Plate For Odysseus

"I think we should let Odysseus stay for a while."
"This isn't a hotel. He's so slovenly...look at his boot straps."
"I know, I know, but he needs a base...or at least a base plate."
"What's a base plate?"
"You know, a spring board. Some assumptions. Some conceptual fixed point? An amputation of enquiry?...A fact, if you will. Something to launch off of."
"Oh bloody hell, he's always launching off. He's like a fucking transcendental system.. and I don't care if you say its just his nature, he's going to trip over and knock his teeth out if he keeps on yanking his laces like that."

Machado About Something

“Mankind owns four things
That are no good at sea:
Rudder, anchor, oars,
And the fear of going down.”