Feelings for Orm

‘Now that the living outnumber the dead,' is an evocative line from Laurie Anderson’s song, Speak my Language.  But the question is not always an issue of the quality of this lived moment set against the background quantity of the dead, or even of the monstrous proliferating of the living as a thing in itself. The question of the dead sometimes concerns the low quality of remembrance which is illuminated within the blessed quality of forgetting – the memory of one unexpectedly retrieved from the process of decomposition that is the forgetting within forgetting. 

Bent down by the absence of meaning and worn out by need for its presence

“List my goods too!” asked Voshchev as he unpacked his bag.

In the village he had gathered every beggarly and rejected object, unconsciousness of every kind and all the trivia of unknownnesss–to be avenged by socialist vengence. This worn-out, enduring frailty had once touched brotherly, laboring flesh; in these things was imprinted forever the burden of a life bent down, a life that had been expended without conscious meaning and that had perished without glory somewhere beneath the earth’s rye stubble. Without fully understanding but with miserly thrift, Voshchev had accumulated in his bag the material remnants of lost people who had lived, like him, without truth and who had passed away earlier than the victorious end. Now he was prsenting these liquidated laborers to the attention of the authorities and the future, in order to achieve vengeance through the organization of eternal human meaning–on behalf of those who are now lying quietly in the earthly depth. 

The Foundation Pit, Andrey Platonov

Insufficient members

“... Two Kulaks have just distanced themselves from us!”

“Go and kill them then!” said the little girl.

“That’s not allowed, my daughter. Two persons don’t make a class.”

“There was one, and then another one,” countered the little girl.

“But overall there were still too few of them,” regretted Safronov. “Our task, according to the plenum, is to liquidate them as a class and nothing less–the landless laborers and the entire proletariat must be orphaned from their enemies.”

“Who will you be left with then?”

“We’ll be left with tasks. With the hard line of the furthest measures–get what I mean?”

“Yes,” replied the little girl. “You mean kill off all the bad people because there aren’t enough good ones.”

The Foundation Pit, Andrey Platonov

Kipling; or communisation is the first act of communisation, it then becomes an obstacle which communisation has to overcome

"She moves!" said Peroo, just before dawn. "Mother Gunga is awake! Hear!" He dipped his hand over the side of a boat and the current mumbled on it. A little wave hit the side of a pier with a crisp slap.

Rudyard Kipling The Bridge Builders