Category Archives: Frenet

Every word I utter to another is a call into a cave, and its echo is an ethical demand. It says: who are you that you can say this and mean it? It says: who are you that you think you can you help me?

Frenet, Journal

This journal is impossible. To use writing, the very thing that distances us from life as a tool to bring life close, to get life back, is a ridiculous enterprise.

— Frenet, Journal

The struggle is this: to allow all that’s said to enter into you as into a graveyard, to believe nothing, not even your disbelief, to seek no answer, accept no answer…

More and more the fragment, the fragment of the fragment, the swallowing and giving darkness.

— Frenet, Journal

These notes my go-betweens to no one. In lieu of a line to God.

I send them out, offer them up, let them fall from my hands.

I dream of a form of writing that would write itself. Of writing without writing. Absolution.

— Frenet, Journal

There are strange lucid mornings when everything around me seems new and unfamiliar, like when you move into a new home. An uncanny silence descends on everything, like an interruption… I drink my tea, leave the flat and the world’s white noise returns, the town’s sounds and signs sweep over me, sweep me away, sweep away the silence which now seems an illusion. All is confusion.

– Frenet, Journal

Sometimes I sense a cocooned world of feeling inside me that would connect me to others for good if only I could release it: that would make the world come alive with meaning. But when others get too close, I want to float off into the world of words and images that continually passes through my head, into the void from which they arise, and never return: to subtract myself from the world until nothing is left and I’m free.

– Frenet, Journal

A few months ago, out of a kind of desperation, I started walking. In the beginning I’d walk one or two hours a day, later whole afternoons, sweat running down my head. I walked all over the city, through parks, forests, industrial estates where lorries with advertisements on their sides rumbled by me. I walked myself into the ground, day after day. I’m slowly getting stronger, my pace grows lighter and faster. Our bodies are built to walk, I’ve discovered, built to find their natural rhythms in the steady pace of a long walk. I let my shoulders relax and my limbs move in loose counterpoint until I’m just a body moving through space. There’s always something missing, some goal out of reach, which is why I started walking in the first place. I’m walking in circles. Walk then, I tell myself, walk your circles.

— Frenet, Journal

It’s too late, I said to myself, it’s over, there’s nothing for it but to start to live. To wrench something into these sinkholes of time, these gaps between self and others, self and self.

But I’m too far away – or too close. The border between self and world either recedes out of sight or dissolves and lets the whole world in.

– Frenet, Journal

The young women in those tight denim shorts that are fashionable now, in their skirts, in their summer dresses. They own me, they make me small. Look at me, they say, look at me and… go on home.

– Frenet, Journal

Sleepy pubs in the afternoon. Soft drafts, light through the leaves, through the windows. Heat. I seep out of myself, float in the air.

I sit with the jobless and old-timers. Workers in splattered overalls filter in. Soon the suits will arrive and it’ll be time to leave.

But there comes a point, after a few pubs, when I can gather myself in and sit still, where I am, in my own skin.

And then I can sit for what seems like hours, in the slanting light, hardly moving, hardly thinking, half-listening to the muffled chatter in the background.

– Frenet, Journal