Quotes

And what the hell?--such truths, FOXFIRE made softer.


Like when you know the long history of Time, going back to--the beginning?--but how's there a beginning, exactly?--how can you say Now, now we start, now we start clocks ticking?--it's like that, so difficult. Because there has got to be a beginning logically yet you always ask yourself--O.K. but what came before?


"Like you're falling, Maddy, I mean really seriously falling like through the sky, for a long time, you wouldn't feel heavy would you?--you wouldn't feel your weight any more than if it was a feather. There wouldn't be any gravity for you." -Legs


The things that link us deepest, we can't feel.


Then the noise faded and Legs squinted up at the sky, the moon so bright you'd never think it could be merely rock like the earth's common rock and lifeless, merely reflected light from an invisible sun and not a powerful living light of its own...


And when you're older you keep these flights of fancy to yourself. You've learned.


The most degraded images of God would have aroused her adulation had Legs commanded it thus.


Allusions to the past annoyed Legs, like fingers plucking at her as she ran. Ran and ran and ran.


Do you solemnly swear to consecrate yourself to your sisters in FOXFIRE yes I swear to consecrate yourself to the vision of FOXFIRE I do, I swear to think of your sisters as you would they would think of you I do in the Revolution of the Proletariat that is imminent in the Apocalypse that is imminent in the Valley of the Shadow of Death and under torture physical or spiritual I do, I do never to betray your FOXFIRE sisters in thought word or deed never to reveal FOXFIRE secrets never to deny FOXFIRE in this world or the next above all to pledge yourself to FOXFIRE offering up all fidelity and courage and heart and soul and all future happiness to FOXFIRE yes I swear under penalty of death I swear so help you God I swear forever and ever until the end of time Yes I will: I swear.


Afterward they asked Legs how had she thought of the name FOXFIRE that lovely perfect name FOXFIRE of which we were already proud FOXFIRE FOXFIRE and Legs said that the initial name for the gang that she'd thought of had been "Foxes of Fairfax Avenue" but then in a dream she'd heard "FOXFIRE"--"So FOXFIRE is a code for the other, and the other is a code for us."


What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.


That was the look from Them we began to notice we were drawing, and there was a fearful sort of pleasure in it. Because though we'd pledged our secrecy this secrecy in itself was palpable to those it excluded. As if we were no longer individual girls as we'd been before but walking FOXFIRE-flames like our tattoos and, seeing us, people registered FOXFIRE when they believed they were seeing just an individual.


When we told Rita of our plans it was typical Rita: jamming her fingers into her mouth, looking frightened, even guilty. Saying, "Oh--what if we get in trouble? Expelled?" But the crucial word was we.
Said Legs, "Before that's gonna happen we got to get caught."
And we didn't: we didn't get caught.
FOXFIRE being too smart, too precision-coordinated.
FOXFIRE being blessed with the grace of Rightness.


The oppressed of the Earth, rising, make their own law.


"If you don't respect living life, you don't deserve to live yourself." -Maddy


The more you see of the world the more enemies you discover.


"Well, getting it backward's a one hundred percent better than nothing." -Rita


Over the years, well into adulthood, recalling that insight of Rita's: whatever you do, with whom you do it or whether you do it alone, and when, and how, and why, to what mysterious end--it's balanced against nothing, against Death and forgetting. You balanced against oblivion.


Because one thing rises out of something that came before it, or many things that came before it, so it's like a big spiderweb in Time going back forever and ever, no true beginning nor any promise of an end the way in those years it was believed the Universe was, a steady mostly unchanging pool of galaxies and gases and emptiness going on and on like a dream to no purpose in all directions and forward and back too in Time, the kind of Time that, if you tried to show your place in it, not even the snap of your fingers could count for it. Not even the idea of snapping your fingers.


Or maybe it was Maddy who'd had the idea, scientific-minded Maddy Wirtz who never forgot some vision or understanding she'd had one day in Buttinger's math class, the world of Numbers that doesn't change, immutable facts, celestial bodies.


It doesn't look as if there's any logic to it, the TREE OF LIFE, man's position on the tree, Homo sapiens: thinking man: created by what humanoid God in His own image?


"Christ, you'd think our hot-shit species would count for more than that!" -Legs


Each of these all-male gangs has its "female auxiliary," an ever-shifting pool of steady girl friends and available, or promiscuous, girls, but FOXFIRE's no "auxiliary," FOXFIRE can't appropriated. FOXFIRE can't even be approached.


Maddy crouching in Legs' shape her eyes shut believes she can feel at last the spin of the Earth, the invisible current bearing you forward undetected until your speed surpasses its speed and at last you're free of gravity FOXFIRE NEVER SAYS NEVER!


FOXFIRE BURNS & BURNS! we'd come to sort of believe, I guess--like in a dream you can't tell what's askew and what's normal, it's all braided together.


OCEAN OF STORMS
SEA OF TRANQUILITY
LAKE OF DREAMS
LAKE OF DEATH


Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as the past is lost, or is it enough to know yes we lived then, and we're living now, and the connection must be there?--like a river hundreds of miles long exists both at its source and at its mouth, simultaneously?


One thing I've learned, transcribing these CONFESSIONS has taught me, we all knew a lot more at young ages than we remember knowing, later. Some kind of peculiar amnesia must set in. Some kind of reinvention of ourselves. Maybe because much of what we knew we didn't like knowing and worked to forget so if you haven't been keeping a diary or such (and nobody does, these days) you'll succeed in forgetting what's mysterious, upsetting.


But they're on the roof suddenly and the topic is forgotten as the night air washes against their heated skins, all the sky, the depth of the night sky, like a fathomless sea going on and on and on so beautiful so powerful Maddy's heart aches.


A three-quarter moon, glowering bone, with a hint of something bruised, battered, scarred. The moon has endured more than anybody can know.


Not far away the Cassadaga River looks like a living thing, cold wan-rippling waves, moonlit waves like shivers in flesh, and the farther shore is winking with lights, street lights, house lights, tiny stars lifting into the blackness of the foothills but you can't make out the actual hills, not even their contours, just night: Night. Like the true sky of the Universe that is a single substance revealing its nature not by day (for doesn't daylight fracture? blind? disintigrate into a multiplicity of parts, like a broken mirror?) but only by night.


The problem of transcribing a document like this notebook is that it's a memoir or a confession where you have not the power to invent episodes, people, places, "plot," etc. but must set everything down as it occured. Not imagination but memory is the agent but language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?
If it were not for language, could we lie?


"I'm Legs Sadovsky I'm FOXFIRE I don't fuck around with guys." -Legs


Yet our happiness was, we'd escaped Fairfax Avenue. We foxes!


Knowing FINANCES are the wormy heart of our civilization, can you live in dignity with such a truth?


Once you know to look with informed eyes you can never again see the WORLD like a palpable block or shape possessed of permanent dimensions, you can see only its swift shadowy MOTION. For all material things, we have learned in the twentieth century, are but the processes of invisible force-fields.
Thus what's visible is consequence not cause.


This corner of the cellar was warm because of its proximity to the coal-burning furnace; because too it had a few pieces of Salvation Army furniture, and the crude stone walls had been hung with brilliant flame-red fabric remnants, satins, silks, even a strip of antique crushed velvet, slight soiled but still beautiful. Illuminated by the flame of an old kerosene lamp this secret space had seemed to Maddy from the first, yes it must have seemed so to all her FOXFIRE sisters, the most precious of all their secret spaces.
How like the inner chambers of the heart.


The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, a piece of Time, has passed, and is irretrievable.


Human motives have come to interest me less, through the years, than human actions, being. The stars have no motives after all, even their death-plunges are pure, in the service of being.


Maddy Wirtz was a smart girl for Fairfax Avenue but she'd been mistaken believing the stars were permanent, telling herself the stars are there in the sky no matter how things change on earth--soon coming to learn of course the stars aren't permanent, nor are they even there, that's the most ironic fact of all. The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct.
Even our own sun, our domestic star, is eight minutes into the past. Look-back time it's called, such tricks of light and Time, such paradoxes, best not to think of it. I mean--not to think of it with any emotion, not a shred.


"--So you don't believe we have souls I guess?" and Legs laughed and said, "Yeah probably we do but why's that mean we're gonna last forever? Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?--even if there's a time it goes out?"

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