X tells me he doesn’t want to be or think anything anymore, he just wants to drift along the stream of being, he just wants to drink himself to sleep. What’s the point of thinking, he says, since we don’t even comprehend the basis of our thought, since our words mean nothing? Better not to think, he says. No ties even to ourselves! That means you have to leave me alone, he says, because I’m not thinking or talking anymore, there’s nothing here for you. So this is goodbye, he says, just turn around, I’m walking away, nntr.
The hermit
November 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment
I wasn’t a rebel. Which is not to imply that I was resigned, for the fact was I didn’t know what I ought to resign myself to.
*
I was in a vast space, and yet it was locked.
*
When do I hit upon the truth, when I see everything as desolation and despair, or when I see all creation as a joyous month of May in full bloom? But we cannot know, our ignorance is boundless. We have neither the right to judge, nor the possibility of judging.
*
I don’t have any desires, or rather only a few, or rather I don’t have them any more. If I have any, they’re not worth being exploited and encouraged. Perhaps I actually do have desires. But they’re dormant. I’m not inclined to wake them up. What are my desires? That people leave me alone; that other people’s desires leave me alone and don’t involve me in their repercussions. What I desire most of all is not to have any desires. And yet I notice that I do have some.
*
‘Aren’t you ashamed to have no goal in life, to be living for nothing?’ Pierre Ramboule asked me one day, unless it was Jacques, I don’t remember which. After a thorough self-examination, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t ashamed […] I don’t feel obliged to answer that question.
*
People tend to avoid or forget the unthinkable; their thinking begins where the unthinkable ends; they base their thinking on the unthinkable, and for me too that is unthinkable.
*
I think that I’m at the wall of the world; forget the other side of the wall.
*
No one is guilty of anything. Or else everyone is guilty of everything, which comes to the same thing.
– Ionesco, The Hermit (trans. R. Seaver)
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Dusk
November 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment
X tells me he’s always been afraid of dusk. Summer or winter, it doesn’t matter, he says. Some sort of gloom fear or boredom always descends on him with the murk, he says, that’s when he’s confronted by whatever it is that keeps trying to peel him apart and smother him. That’s why he makes sure to be sloshed by dusk, he tells me, to push it away, to make a buffer zone.
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Intellectual aims
November 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Q. ‘What kind of intellectual aims do you…’
A. ‘These are all questions that can’t be answered because no one asks themselves that sort of thing. People don’t have aims. Young people, up to 23, they still fall for that. A person who has lived five decades has no aims, because there’s no goal.’
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A winter coat in Africa
November 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment
X tells me this is it, this is the end. He’s clapped-out, tied up and binned, finished. He’s like a winter coat in Africa, he says, irrelevant, useless, unfit for purpose. Everyone can see it, he says, even children. It’s obvious in the way they all look at him, and in the way they look away from him. Why’s he even allowed to walk around, he says, why don’t I stop him?
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You disappear
November 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment
‘You disappear and return as what has disappeared. To know you is to lose the possibility of emerging from you.’
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‘I am not an artist’
November 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Zola says, ‘Moi artiste, je veux vivre tout haut – veux vivre’ [I, as an artist, want to live as vigorously as possible -- (I) want to live], without mental reservation – naive as a child, no, not as a child, as an artist – with good will, however life presents itself, I shall find something in it, I will try my best on it. Now look at all those studied little mannerisms, all that convention, how exceedingly conceited it really is, how absurd, a man thinking he knows everything and that things go according to his idea, as if there were not in all things of life a ‘je ne sais quoi’ of great goodness, and also an element of evil, which we feel to be infinitely above us, infinitely greater, infinitely mightier than we are.
How fundamentally wrong is the man who doesn’t feel himself small, who doesn’t realize he is but an atom.
Is it a loss to drop some notions, impressed on us in childhood, that maintaining a certain rank or certain conventions is the most important thing? I myself do not even think about whether I lose by it or not. I know only by experience that those conventions and ideas do not hold true, and often are hopelessly, fatally wrong. I come to the conclusion that I do not know anything, but at the same time that this life is such a mystery that the system of ‘conventionality’ is certainly too narrow. So that it has lost its credit with me.
What shall I do now? The common phrase is, ‘What is your aim, what are your aspirations?’ Oh, I shall do as I think best – how? I can’t say that beforehand – you who ask me that pretentious question, do you know what your aim is, what your intentions are?
Now they tell me, ‘You are unprincipled when you have no aim, no aspirations.’
My answer is, I didn’t tell you I had no aim, no aspirations, I said it is the height of conceit to try to force one to define what is indefinable. These are my thoughts about certain vital questions. All that arguing about it is one of the things of which I say ‘embêtera.’
[…]
I am not an artist – how coarse it sounds – even to think so of oneself – oughtn’t one to have patience, oughtn’t one to learn patience from nature, learn patience from seeing the corn slowly ripen, seeing things grow – should one think oneself so absolutely dead as to imagine that one would not grow any more? Should one thwart one’s own development on purpose? I say this to explain why I think it so foolish to speak about natural gifts and no natural gifts.
– van Gogh, Letters
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The longest road
November 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment
‘I didn’t know you were already here, and your paths are still obscure. I remain guilty for approaching you, obscurely, for watching you make me cryptic. There’s no way back from this guilt, only further into you. The double guilt of approaching you and of not staying with you. Yours is the longest road, where you approach and recede. I have to follow it to see it. Strange demand, strange apprenticeship.’
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I start talking
November 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment
‘I start talking and my words turn into yours. I think, I’m being thought. Your words find me, lead me to and away from myself, explore and consume each other through me. I want to make myself equal to you, as anonymous as these words. I move from word to word, pass myself over in my effort to pull myself together. I leave myself behind and find my bearings in what leaves me behind, in you. I drift lightly into your search for yourself. How easy and how hard.’
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A call
November 1, 2009 · Leave a Comment
‘A call reaches me, barely. From where? I wonder if it’s my own call, myself calling my own name. But haven’t I left that call behind? I wonder if it’s your call, a call from beyond, from here. No clarion call or call to arms but a call that makes things absent, and absents itself.’
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