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Well I swear affective life is water: variously formed and regulated, curiously colored and abounded, but at heart always the same wet element. And we are made of it. No single thing, or unremitting motion, it can fall (as joy) in flashes from high rocks, in sprays of spectra (by its virtue, sun can be broadcast); or rise as sorrow, once and for all, to muddy the living room, rob the lover of her breathing space . . . Sometimes its affect is half-bred: a trickle on a cobblestone, a swamp with flesh-colored flowers in it, ice from an eave . . . What ranges of ringing, of whooshing and whisking it makes. Inside our heads (the experts say) there's nonstop noise: what we call silence, it's our grounds for sound . . . Maybe it's water, what broke so we'd be born; maybe it bore and goes on bearing us, till humankind and animals and gods themselves are swept up in its school of thought, 24 till the exploding stars are only quiet points, afloat. I tell you, even anaesthesia's a feeling. (It's the feeling we forgot.) 25 ...

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