The poet

Posted on June 3, 2009 | Leave a comment

The poet, though to be fair he never calls himself this, has lost count of the pints he’s drunk. The girl is keeping up with the empties. She’s pretty as a doll and has stuck a pencil in her bun. The pencil distracts him pleasurably. She’s fast but he’s an expert drinker, that much is true. His work is very profound and becomes more so as the night wears on. Though he’s an expert drinker the poet struggles to keep up with the girl as she moves about collecting glasses. He considers speaking to her but doesn’t. The following day even his eyeballs hurt and his work has turned into a perfect illustration of Romantic excess. Then the real self-work begins, to be undone again at some later stage.

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Posted in Writing

Being and nothingness

Posted on June 3, 2009 | Leave a comment

You may be asked: ‘How did God bring forth being from nothingness? Is there not an immense difference between being and nothingness?’

Answer as follows: ‘Being is in nothingness in the mode of nothingness, and nothingness is in being in the mode of being.’ Nothingness is being, and being is nothingness. The node of being as it begins to emerge from nothingness is called faith. For the term ‘faith’ applies neither to visible, comprehensible being, nor to nothingness, invisible and incomprehensible, but rather to the nexus of nothingness and being. Being does not stem from nothingness alone but rather from being and nothingness together. All is one in the simplicity of absolute undifferentiation. Our limited mind cannot grasp or fathom this, for it joins infinity.

— Azriel of Gerona

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Posted in Azriel of Gerona, Kabbalah, Religion

Psalm

Posted on June 2, 2009 | 1 comment

No one moulds us again out of earth and clay,
no one conjures our dust.
No one.

Praised be your name, no one.
For your sake
we shall flower.
Towards
you.

A nothing
we were, are, shall
remain, flowering:
the nothing-, the
no one’s rose.

With
our pistil soul-bright,
with our stamen heaven-ravaged,
our corolla red
with the crimson word which we sang
over, O over
the thorn.

— Celan (trans. M. Hamburger)

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Posted in Celan, Poetry

God spoke

Posted on June 1, 2009 | 1 comment

(‘God spoke, and what He said became our symbols. The shape of a letter is perhaps the shape of His face. God has as many faces as there are letters in an alphabet. God is written in all languages.
   ‘You will be able to contemplate God once you have learned to listen to words, to look at them carefully, that is, once you have learned to read’, he had noted.
   ‘His voice is inaudible, but it is the supporting silence which allows our sounds to be discrete’, he had added.
   ‘You will shatter the image of words. You will take away their sound. You will divert them from their meaning. You will turn them into holes.
   ‘Then reading and writing will throw you into the vortex of a voice absorbed into the void’, he had also noted.)

— Jabés, El, or the Last Book (trans. R. Waldrop)

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Posted in Jabés, Religion

Thus they died

Posted on June 1, 2009 | Leave a comment

I must warn you: writing leads to suicide. Is it only one human life that is at stake in the act of writing? And what is a human life compared to the life of a word? Perhaps nothing. Or all. Or all of a Nothing or again Nothing of an All.

Thus they died. Thus he again picked up his pen, and this natural, almost automatic gesture seemed so loaded with unknown forces that he shivered.

— Jabés, El, or the Last Book (trans. R. Waldrop)

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Posted in Jabés

The borders of life

Posted on June 1, 2009 | Leave a comment

I build a book on our sacrificed lives. Could there be a life at the borders of life where we repeat once more — but for which impenetrable purpose? — our characteristic gestures, our most intimate, our most weighty words?
   Could it be that writing is this other life stuck in the fens of the page? Here, any life devoted to its disconcerting duration gets bogged down.
   A decoy, I tell you, the open wounds of a decoy which the meaning given to our words — and woes — keeps us and others from contemplating.
   From these wounds we shall have drawn milk.

— Jabés, El, or the Last Book (trans. R. Waldrop)

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Posted in Jabés

Revolt

Posted on June 1, 2009 | Leave a comment

I refused the reduction of experience to the poverty which I am. Even my ‘poverty’, in its own interest, demanded that I emerge from it. Revolt often has humble beginnings, but once begun doesn’t stop: I first wanted to return from a contemplation which brought the object back to me (as usually happens when we enjoy scenery) to the vision of this object in which I lose myself at other times, which I call the unknown and which is distinct from Nothingness by nothing which discourse can enunciate.
[…]
Experience would only be an enticement if it weren’t revolt: in the first place against the attachment of the mind to action (to project, to discourse — against the verbal servitude of reasonable being, of the servant); in the second place against the reassurances, the submissiveness which experience itself introduces.

— Bataille, Inner Experience (trans. L.A. Boldt)

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Posted in Bataille

Ecstasy

Posted on May 31, 2009 | Leave a comment

I could have told myself: value, authority — this is ecstasy; inner experience is ecstasy; ecstasy is, it seems, communication, which is opposed to the ‘turning in on oneself’ of which I have spoken. I would have in this way known and found (there was a time when I thought myself to know, to have found). But we reach ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge. Were I to stop at ecstasy and grasp it, in the end I would define it. But nothing resists the contestation of knowledge and I have seen at the end that the idea of communication itself leaves naked — not knowing anything. Whatever it may be — failing a positive revelation within me, present at the extreme — I can provide it with neither a justification nor an end. I remain in intolerable non-knowledge, which has no other way out than ecstasy itself.

— Bataille, Inner Experience (trans. L.A. Boldt)

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Posted in Bataille

Wonderful

Posted on May 30, 2009 | Leave a comment

He had the most wonderful thought in his head and no matter how much filth and grime he for some reason would cover himself in he could always think of this wonderful thought, and how pure he would then think himself or at least try and think himself. But for some malicious reason its power faded, who knows — perhaps through overuse — which left a quandary. Should he, to remain in bliss rather than in grime, try and keep this thought ever in mind — to ward off the grime — or should it be kept treasured in the dark, so to speak, purposely not thinking of it, not dirtying it with this overuse, but, and yet, ever dimly aware of its existence, its glowing secretly and gloriously in the dark; and then when most needed, when feeling I suppose most grimy, to produce it and vanquish all foes, however falsely great and powerful they had appeared!

But in time does even the idea, great and lofty, rather than glow triumphantly, sink into the muck also? And if it does, who knows, perhaps all the better. The muck is truth! Why try and overcome it? And maybe that’s all the idea was all along — the muck and a lure into the muck.

— In Abstentia Out

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Posted in In Abstentia Out

Brilliant

Posted on May 30, 2009 | Leave a comment

He’s found out what his life’s like, X tells me. It’s going headlong into a cul-de-sac and coming back out only to realise he’s in another cul-de-sac. Isn’t that brilliant? he says. He’s very pleased, he says, now he can move on.

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Posted in Writing