Category Archives: Frenet

Always this double movement, at once too far inside and too far outside. But inside and outside what? As if one’s eyeballs turned inwards and outwards at the same time.

— Frenet

– 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

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

I don’t escape into writing, I write to escape from writing. I am what writing’s made of me, what I’ve let it make of me. I want to put an end to it, to the whole paltry and humiliating enterprise.

*

I am looking for something. It looks for me too, through these words: it’s already here, calling me out of myself, out of writing.  Meanwhile I write to ward it off, awaiting its arrival, biding my time in infinite detours.

— Frenet, Journal

I often used to ask myself how people move from inside themselves into the world with such ease. From, say, reading a book to talking with people. How, say, writers walked onto a spotlit stage to speak about their work as if the back of the stage were part of the same space as the stage itself, as if they themselves bridged the two by walking from one to the other. All I remember from such events, which I now avoid, is what the rooms and faces looked like, who spoke, how hard or soft the chair was.

To go from your room to a place full of people, from yourself to others – as on a tightrope of unknown length, suspended above an unknown height… To hear your self come out of your mouth as if through the mouth of another, answered by yet another…

— Frenet, Journal

I confess my debt to kindness. Without small acts of kindness, my own and those of other strangers, I’d be crippled, cowed, alone. Soup brought to someone’s sickbed, a word of encouragement, a listening ear. Kindness is the last miracle on earth, a miracle *of* the earth, stronger than the chimera of truth and the chimera of love.

— Frenet, Journal

I don’t read, I skim. I’m not read, I’m skimmed. I pass by, am passed by.

— Frenet, Journal

I learned their methods too easily: it took me years to cast them off. How easy to learn, how hard to unlearn!

— Frenet, Journal

This old dusk dread, this fear of the no man’s land between day and night, will I ever be free of it? Will I ever surrender to it? The only thing that helps is to be with animals. I let the neighbour’s cat in through the window, let it purr on my lap, go and play with my friend’s excitable dogs. I walk down to the gypsies’ horses with apples. They roam free all year round on a littered field, the poor filthy beasts, they come trotting when they see me, we’re getting to know each other.

— Frenet, Journal