Intellectual aims

Posted on 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.’

— Thomas Bernhard

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Posted in Thomas Bernhard

‘I am not an artist’

Posted on 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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Posted in van Gogh

Blanchot on suicide

Posted on November 1, 2009 | Leave a comment

The anguish which opens with such assurance upon nothingness is not essential; it has drawn back before the essential; it does not yet seek anything other than to make of nothingness the road to salvation. Whoever dwells with negation cannot use it. Whoever belongs to it can no longer, in this belonging, take leave of himself, for he belongs to the neutrality of absence in which already he is not himself anymore.

*

I go to meet the death which is in the world, at my disposal, and I think that thereby I can reach the other death, over which I have no power – which has none over me either, for it has nothing to do with me, and if I know nothing of it, it knows no more of me.

*

Whoever wants to die can only want the borders of death, the utilitarian death which is in the world and which one reaches through the precision of a workman’s tools.

*

It is the fact of dying that includes a radical reversal, through which the death that was the extreme form of my power not only becomes what loosens my hold upon myself by casting me out of my power to begin and even to finish, but also becomes that which is without any relation to me, without power over me.

*

The expression “I kill myself” suggests the doubling which is not taken into account. For “I” is a self in the plenitude of its action and resolution, capable of acting sovereignly upon itself, always strong enough to reach itself with its blow. And yet the one who is thus struck is no longer I, but another, so that when I kill myself, perhaps it is “I” who does the killing, but it is not done to me.

— Blanchot, The Space of Literature (trans. A. Smock)

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Prayer

Posted on October 30, 2009 | Leave a comment

Another terrible night. It was raining so hard I didn’t dare go to the church. I couldn’t pray. I know very well that the desire to pray is already prayer, and that God couldn’t ask for more. But it wasn’t a question of duty. At that moment, I needed prayer like I needed air in my lungs or oxygen in my blood. Behind me, there was no longer familiar day-to-day life which one can leave behind in one fell swoop. Behind me there was nothing, and before me was a wall. A black wall. Suddenly something seemed to shatter in my breast, and I was seized by a trembling that lasted over an hour. What if it had only been an illusion? Even the saints knew their hour of failure and loss.

— Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest

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The vanishing point

Posted on October 19, 2009 | Leave a comment

When we look at the sculptures of Giacometti, there is a vantage point where they are no longer subject to the fluctuations of appearance or to the movement of perspective. One sees them absolutely: no longer reduced, but withdrawn from reduction, irreducible, and, in space, masters of space through their power to substitute for space the unmalleable, lifeless profundity of the imaginary. This point, whence we see them irreducible, puts us at the vanishing point ourselves; it is the point at which here coincides with nowhere. To write is to find this point. No one writes who has not enabled language to maintain or provoke contact with this point.

— Blanchot, The Space of Literature (trans. A. Smock)

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Posted in Blanchot, Giacometti

Strange laughter

Posted on October 16, 2009 | Leave a comment

And at the thought of the punishments Youdi might inflict upon me I was seized by such a mighty fit of laughter that I shook, with mighty silent laughter and my features composed in their wonted sadness and calm. But my whole body shook, and even my legs, so that I had to lean against a tree, or against a bush, when the fit came on me standing, my umbrella being no longer sufficient to keep me from falling. Strange laughter truly, and no doubt misnamed, through indolence perhaps, or ignorance. And as for myself, that unfailing pastime, I must say it was far now from my thoughts. But there were moments when it did not seem so far from me, when I seemed to be drawing towards it as the sands towards the waves, when it crests and whitens, though I must say this image hardly fitted my situation, which was rather that of the turd waiting for the flush.

– Beckett, Molloy

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For days and weeks on end

Posted on October 10, 2009 | Leave a comment

For days and weeks on end one racks one’s brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.

— Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (trans. M. Hulse)

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I just feel things

Posted on October 7, 2009 | Leave a comment

– I never read philosophy.
– Why not?
– I don’t understand it.
[…]
– Why did you write your books?
– I don’t know. I’m not an intellectual. I just feel things. I invented Molloy and the rest of the day I understood how stupid I’d been. I began then to write down the things I feel.

– Beckett, interview

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Posted in Beckett, Spurious

Flowing unbroken

Posted on October 5, 2009 | 3 comments

Only the words break the silence, all other sounds have ceased. If I were silent I’d hear nothing. But if I were silent the other sounds would start again, those to which the words have made me deaf, or which have really ceased. But I am silent, it sometimes happens, no never, not one second. I weep too without interruption. It’s an unbroken flow of words and tears. With no pause for reflection. But I speak softer, every year a little softer. Perhaps. Slower too, every year a little slower. Perhaps. It’s hard for me to judge. If so the pauses would be longer, between the words, the sentences, the syllables, the tears, I confuse them, words and tears, my words are my tears, my eyes my mouth. And I should hear, at every little pause, if it’s the silence I say when I say that only the words break it. But nothing of the kind, that’s not how it is, it’s for ever the same murmur, flowing unbroken, like a single endless word and therefore meaningless, for it’s the end gives the meaning to words.

– Beckett, Texts for Nothing, #8

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Posted in Beckett

Roots in the question

Posted on October 5, 2009 | Leave a comment

A sound response puts down roots in the question. The question is its sustenance. Common sense believes that it does away with the question. Indeed, in the so-called happy eras, only the answers seem alive. But this affirmative contentment soon dies off. The authentic answer is always the question’s vitality. It can close in around the question, but it does so in order to preserve the question by keeping it open.

– Blanchot, The Space of Literature (trans. A. Smock)

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Posted in Blanchot