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“these impossibly delicate things were the result of a thousand rapid choices and adjustments, movements of the hand” (20).

“kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck–rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed” (20).

“The flowers were recording instruments of exquisite sensitivity” (21)

“Yes, but the cut, the meaning is in the cut, the splice. So what you cut is present, the dark matter” (33).

“It was on even when off. Because it structured experience even when quiet” (37).

“But there is always music playing that we cannot hear: beneath twenty hertz or higher than twenty thousand. We are deaf to the bats singing in ultrasound, or the elephants conversing in their infrasound, slow waves that travel miles and pass through rock. We did not know the elephants spoke until someone accidentally sped up a field recording—at least we Westerners had no idea. But none of us truly knows what’s in the air; that is one of few universals. A negative universal. The air is alive with messages. Messengers, angels” (39).

“It’s like the device takes you out of the real world, shields you from all the pressures and information, but then it administers this series of subtle sensory inputs and muffled shocks, these mild effects, as compensation for the unmanageable reality it’s made disappear” (101).

Ben Lerner, Transcription (2026)