Above all, W. says, I should work earnestly on another book. It’s the only way I experience my own inadequacy, he says. He knows me: without some project, I’ll become far too content. My idiocy will become an alibi, an excuse — which is precisely a way to avoid it altogether. You have to run up against your idiocy, to plunge into it, W. says. Nothing can begin unless you experience your idiocy.
— Spurious
Posted in Spurious
It’s your own and some other’s, you and not you, babbling on day and night in a lunatic monologue. A man muttering in a room, a man and his skull, a man in his skull, a man carrying around his skull, babbling on. Repeat, cease, start, forget, remember, circle, abandon, stop, continue. Prodded into speech, prodded and prodder. Sometimes it seems it could go on without you, a babble with a voice of its own, warring with its own words.
God knows where words go.
Dust to dust.
The poet loves and distrusts them.
Someone must.Trust no one, least of all yourself. Least of all your own best beloved blather, those sentiments and instincts that seem to elevate you into one of life’s nobler specimens, that render you a Mensch, a judge of character, a person who, according to your secret internal PR, is someone to be trusted. If you must trust in something, trust in distrust, or at least listen to it sometimes. As they say: Just listen to yourself! At least have the decency to be just a little disgusted with yourself.
Can you hear the shakiness of those words, those little drops of sound as they fall, those traces of black and white certainty as they imprint themselves across the page? Something — a shadow, as Eliot would have it — intervenes between, what shall we call it? Idea and reality? Motion and act? Conception and creation? What do you read, my lord? Words, words, words.
They really are terrible things: small objects of pain, strange myopic blurs that suddenly rush together to form an avalanche tumbling from one or other Mount Sinai. Tablets of cant. Here, take one. If it doesn’t cure you at least you can flatten yourself with it. See how treacherous they are, these mixed metaphors, these puns?
Posted in George Szirtes
There was no such thing as consistency, life would always end up holding your ideas up to ridicule. That’s what life did, ridiculed your ideas and forced you to look at yourself until nothing remained. Eventually he had nothing left to hunt, nothing to grasp for or look down on. It was beautiful, it couldn’t get any worse! A voice told him to own up and start again in an empty place, then start over again.
Posted in Writing
They could not rush into it then and there. They weren’t safe from intrusion. Not only that, children have a highly developed sense of ritual and formality. This was important. They had to decide whether they were in love. Because if there was one thing the pictures showed, you had to be in love. They thought they were but they would give themselves a week just to make sure.
They hugged again in what they thought would be among their last fully clothed embraces.
How can Breavman have regrets? It was Nature herself who intervened.
Three days before Thursday, maid’s day off, they met in their special place, the bench beside the pond in the park. Lisa was shy but determined to be straight and honest, as was her nature.
‘I can’t do it with you.’
‘Aren’t your parents going away?’
‘It’s not that. Last night I got the Curse.’
She touched his hand with pride.
‘OK.’
‘Know what I mean?’
‘Sure.’
He hadn’t the remotest idea.
‘But it would still be OK, wouldn’t it?’
‘But now I can have babies. Mummy told me about everything last night. She had it all ready for me, too, napkins, a belt of my own, everything.’
‘No guff?’
What was she talking about? The Curse sounded like a celestial intrusion on his pleasure.
‘She told me about all the stuff, just like the camera.’
‘Did you tell her about the camera?’
Nothing, the world, nobody could be trusted.
‘She promised not to tell anyone.’
‘It was a secret.’
‘Don’t be sad. We had a long talk. I told her about us, too. You see, I’ve got to act like a lady now. Girls have to act older than boys.’
‘Who’s sad?’
She leaned back in the bench and took his hand.
‘But aren’t you happy for me?’ she laughed, ‘that I got the Curse? I have it right now!’
— Leonard Cohen, The Favourite Game
Posted in Leonard Cohen
I get up too late
The day is lost
I don’t bless the rooster
I don’t raise my hands to the water
Then it’s dark
and I look into all the spots
on rue St-Denis
I even talk religion
to the other wastrels
who, like me, are after new women
In bed I fall asleep
in the middle of a Psalm
which I am reading
for a magic cure
— Leonard Cohen
Posted in Leonard Cohen, Poetry, Religion
A deep happiness
has seized me
My Christian friends say
that I have received
the Holy Spirit
It is only the truth of solitude
It is only the torn anemone
fastened to the rock
its root exposed
to the off-shore wind
O friend of my scribbled life
your heart is like mine —
your loneliness
will bring you home
— Leonard Cohen
Posted in Leonard Cohen, Poetry
‘Alas’, said the mouse, ‘the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into’. ‘You only need to change your direction’, said the cat, and ate it up.
— Kafka
*
What Kafka’s stories have is a grotesque and gorgeous and thoroughly modern complexity. Kafka’s humour — not only not neurotic, but anti-neurotic, heroically sane — is, finally, a religious humour, but religious in the manner of Kierkegaard and Rilke and the Psalms, a harrowing spirituality against which even Ms. O’Connor’s bloody grace seems a little bit easy, the souls at stake pre-made.
And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance. It’s not that students don’t ‘get’ Kafka’s humour but that we’ve taught them to see humour as something you get — the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke — that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It’s hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it’s good that they don’t ‘get’ Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens… and it opens outward: we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.
Posted in David Foster Wallace, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Religion, rilke
‘I dreamed I had in front of me’, he wrote, ‘this marvellous text which contained the narrative of a number of my dreams. Each dream had been condensed into a separate phrase and it was these phrases, strung together, that formed the text. Every phrase was pregnant with possibilities and meanings of a magical kind. I was both admiring this text and trying to explain it to someone. The person I was explaining it to may have been Gerard de Nerval, or maybe in the dream I was Nerval. As I woke up, there was one phrase in my head, the only one I can now recall. It was “The scent of Cybele”. At that moment all I knew about this phrase was that it was not one of the phrases in the text I had dreamed.’
Posted in John Welch
I recall one of my oldest ideas. The Czar is the leader and spiritual father of a hundred and fifty million men. An atrocious responsibility which is only apparent. Perhaps he is not responsible to God, but rather to a few human beings. If the poor of his empire are oppressed during his reign, if immense catastrophes result from that reign, who knows if the servant charged with shining his boots is not the real and sole person guilty? In the mysterious dispositions of the Profundity, who is really Czar, who is king, who can boast of being a mere servant?
— Léon Bloy
Posted in Léon Bloy
