Monthly Archives: March 2010

To begin again

Posted on March 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

‘Those weren’t the right days, it was all wrong. And when the time came at last it was too late. I still look for a way to begin again.’

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Posted in Writing

Company

Posted on March 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

‘For a long time I saw every little thing. Each mesh in the net curtain, each drop falling off the branches. The light made everything clear and still. I heard every sound, for a long time. It was as if something was rustling about somewhere in the empty house. No, as if someone were occupying the room I was sitting in, in my body, rustling around. The grandfather clock ticked in and out of his heartbeat. I admit it scared me, this keeping watch. Sometimes I didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. That was before you arrived, a new watchman, and added a new rustling, a new ticking. Are you company? Are you here to keep me safe? Outside me now something like myself, a thick palpable dust made of dead skin. I breathe it in and out, feel around me, look for the door. Are you the dust? The door?’

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Posted in Writing

Posted on March 13, 2010 | Leave a comment

He perceived all the strangeness there was in being observed by a word as if by a living being, and not simply by one word, but by all the words that were contained in that word, by all those that went with it and in turn contained other words, like a procession of angels opening out into the infinite to the very eye of the absolute.

– Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure (tr. R. Lamberton)

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Posted in Blanchot

Posted on March 13, 2010 | Leave a comment

Around his body, he knew that his thought, mingled with the night, kept watch.

– Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure (tr. R. Lamberton)

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Posted in Blanchot

Posted on March 11, 2010 | Leave a comment

If a hand, a situation, a wave were ever to raise me up and carry me to where I could command power and influence, I would destroy the circumstances that had favoured me, and I would hurl myself down into the humble, speechless, insignificant darkness. I can only breathe in the lower regions.

– Walser, Institute Benjamenta/Jakob von Gunten (tr. C. Middleton)

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Posted in Walser

Tired

Posted on March 11, 2010 | Leave a comment

I’m tired of waking up tired, X tells me, tired of being tired. Do me a favour for once and end it now. But it’s already ended, hasn’t it, you’re right, this is it, the endless end. Oh stop your bullshit, he says, listen to me for once and end it for real, I’m so tired.

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Posted in Writing, X

Posted on March 11, 2010 | Leave a comment

As mystery, the word remains remote. As a mystery that is experienced, the remoteness is near.

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His renunciation having pledged itself to the world’s mystery, the poet retains the treasure in remembrance by renunciation. In this way, the treasure becomes that which the poet – he who says – prefers above all else and reveres above all else. The treasure becomes what is truly worthy of the poet’s thought. For what could be more worthy of thought for the saying one than the world’s being veiling itself, than the fading word for the word?

– Heidegger, On the Way to Language (tr. J. Stambaugh)

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Posted in Heidegger

‘I don’t sleep’

Posted on March 9, 2010 | Leave a comment

First it’s a sound that makes another sound, in the nocturnal hollow of things. Then it’s a low howl, accompanied by the creaking of the street’s swaying signboards. And then the voice of space becomes a shout, a roar, and everything shudders, nothing sways, and there’s silence in the dread of all this, like a speechless dread that sees another dread when the first one has passed.

Then there’s nothing but wind, just wind, and I sleepily notice how the doors shake in their frames and how the glass in the windows loudly resists.

I don’t sleep. I interexist. A few vestiges of consciousness persist. I feel the weight of slumber but not of unconsciousness. I don’t exist. The wind… I wake up and go back to sleep without yet having slept. There’s a landscape of loud and indistinct sound beyond which I’m a stranger to myself. I cautiously delight in the possibility of sleeping. I really do sleep, but don’t know if I’m sleeping. In what seems to me like a slumber there is always a sound of the end of all things, the wind in the darkness, and, if I listen closely, the sound of my own lungs and heart.

– Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (tr. R. Zenith)

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Posted in Pessoa

Posted on March 6, 2010 | Leave a comment

The way I rake the desert :: that would be my poverty

– Falling off the Mountain

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Posted in Writing

War all the time

Posted on March 6, 2010 | Leave a comment

It’s war all the time, X tells me, there’s no letup. And even if there is it turns into a war of its own. In fact that is the war, he says, it’s war all the time.

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Posted in Writing, X