Everything I wrote was in cafés, mostly quiet cafés, but also in bustling, crowded cafés. It never bothers me when people talk. Many writers have tortured their families because the noise made it difficult for them to concentrate […] I have a great deal of respect for an artist who doesn’t impose his moods on those around him. Writing is a struggle, and it should be between you and yourself, without involving additional people.
— Appelfeld (quoted here)
Posted in Aharon Appelfeld
Q. This film feels like you were out of [depression], that you had come to another place.
A. Yes, and that’s what I’m not so proud of somehow. That it was too easy to do the film.
Q. It feels like it was easy, it feels like it was like butter.
A. Yeah.
Q. Why is that bad?
A. That’s a very good question. I think it has to do with the Protestantism of my country, even though I’m not religious. I think it has to with that … It’s like, you have a great view and if you crawl there with your nails and see the view, or you go there in your car, stop the car, get out, see the view… that’s something different… even though it’s the same view.
Posted in Lars von Trier
– To become yourself you must first be unmade.
– But I’m already unmade.
– That’s only half the battle.
– But I’m already defeated.
– There are different ways to be defeated.
– ?
– Maybe it’s a question of space.
– ?
– … of finding the space in which something may grow out of your unmaking like a plant that grows out of a broken shell.
– What space?
– There are spaces that free and spaces that cripple. You can be freed in the space inside yourself or in the space between you and another. You can be crippled in the space inside yourself or in the space between you and another.
– But I’m already crippled.
– Then find a better space.
– I have either too much or too little.
– Then find a space in between.
– Between what?
– Between yourself and others, or between you and yourself. A fertile space.
– Those spaces are only momentary.
– Then live in those moments.
– Time drags, one moment moves into the next and both are lost in the drag, like the spaces. All is one, all is confusion.
– You’re hopeless.
– It’s you yourself who’s made me hopeless, who’s unmade me.
– Frenet, Journal
Posted in Frenet
Sometimes, he cannot help but think that animals are close to the divine.
It is we who were expelled from paradise, he says. Not the animals.
The world outside of mind we can know only from the beast’s face, he says. He is quoting.
He cannot help but think that animals show him something. That an animal is nothing but that — showing.
There is a lesson he is being taught. There is a lesson that animals are trying to teach him. But how can he heed it?
What an animal is — is obvious. It is there, simple. As to what a human being is …
What would an animal say if it were able to speak? Of course, but animals remain on the other side of speech. On the far side of speech. Still, all the animals around us can be understood to interrupt our speaking, he says. To cut across it.
He has always thought of himself as awaiting the Word which will release him. It seems to him that it is this Word which resides with animals, on the side of animals.
The animal exists in a state of grace, of that he is sure. The animal is already in paradise.
— Lars Iyer, Wittgenstein Jr.
Posted in Lars Iyer
Love the other as yourself. What can it mean but that that you too are another, that love lives in the space between others? That love is a space that makes you by unmaking you.
— Frenet, Journal
Posted in Frenet
Q. You reject the idea that your lyrics were at all whimsical in Felt, don’t you?
A. The lyrics are pretentious, but they’re knowingly so. I wanted to introduce a poetic vision into it. I thought poetic lyrics were up there: Horses, Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine. I wanted to bring something like that, but with my own Birmingham aesthetic –I didn’t want to copy anyone. And I had a funny way with words. I started writing poems when I was very young – I had 17 of these poems and they had lines in them like “Crumbling the antiseptic beauty” and stuff like that, those were the kind of poems I wrote. So it was easy to take the way I wrote poems and put it into lyrics, it was a natural thing to do.
You’re living in a little terraced house with no money, money problems, a gambling father, a horrible world you can’t bear and you’re just dying to get out of it. People around you, you can’t bear. You felt on your own all the time – you wanted to escape into a different world, the world of words. It was very different to the way I lived, having jobs in warehouses and factories. I didn’t want to write about drudgery of everyday life.
*
Q. Is it about not letting them down, young people?
A. I love kids, young people who have ideals. Something happens when you get to a certain age, people get married, have kids, and move away from music, their whole artistic vision goes down the drain. I see it all the time, and it saddens me. It always happens, now it’s happening to my generation. I get it, it’s life changing, but they lose the naïve innocence, the seriousness of music – it doesn’t seem serious to them any more. I think I’m trying to prove you can get older and still have the same convictions you had when you were 15 or 16. Maybe that kid I’m talking about is me.
— Lawrence
Posted in Felt
Notes from a Room 