Notes from a Room

An hour, lapped up by wolves

Posted on February 7, 2019 | Comments Off

121 An hour, lapped up by wolves — in these parts one knows all too well what that means. Grey, wolf-grey it creeps up, unnoticed it sneaks up on you, crouches behind a last, halting moment of daylight, and then — before you notice, it jumps you, grabs ahold of you. You try to resist, you tear and shake the claws that have grabbed you — in vain, it doesn’t let go. Or rather: it only lets you go when it wants to, not earlier. When? You cannot foresee the moment, no experience can give you a hint. Before long you give up resistance. That’s when it starts its real work, slowly, thoughtfully, with relish: its wolfishness recedes, and it, the hour, the time-splinter drills into you, deeper and always deeper — how far in?

In these parts this is well known. Some even claim to know that one has resigned oneself to this, that one knows how to experience this hour as if it were a change in the weather. One doesn’t think too much about it, one simply lives through the day, undisturbed, a little blind, a little deaf, a little mute. A quiet “Ah yes, of course, here it comes again,” is all one comes up with when it hits — barely more. I have often been astonished by how inconspicuous the trace it leaves in people’s memory is.
At any rate, I have so far not succeeded in making this trace clearer. It turns out that questions are pointless: people act as if they didn’t understand you, or turn the conversation to another subject. No facial expression betrays them: your question seems to belong to those that one does not let the other repeat because they are irrelevant.
This did not satisfy me, however, and I did not let go. Maybe, I told myself, this is because they do not yet see you as one of theirs. How long have you lived here already? Six years — a span barely worth mentioning in a country like this. A few moments, I decided. What weather! The friendliest one could imagine, true friends’ weather. I grabbed my cane on the table and started on my quest.

On the street below I ran into Karin.
That is: I didn’t really run into her, in fact I hadn’t noticed her at all and had walked past her. Suddenly I felt that something was pulling me backwards — my walking stick, which no longer obeyed me. I turned around and recognized Karin: she had grabbed the lower end of the cane and didn’t let go anymore; with bent back she now stood behind me, her little fists clenched around the end of the cane, not looking up.
A good sign, I thought; the first jest I was allowed to take part in.
I felt myself smiling. Slowly I began to rotate the cane — Karin’s small firsts accompanied this movement. How wonderful! I now grabbed the cane with my left hand too, roughly in the middle, and slowly twisted it upward with my right hand — in this too Karin obeyed. While pursuing this movement I turned toward her completely.
Her gaze was still lowered. Soon I would meet it — my smile was growing larger and larger.

— Celan (trans. Joris)

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Posted in Celan

Gift and threat

Posted on February 4, 2019 | Comments Off

A being happens as a given composition or arrangement, something simply there, but not inertly there. ‘There’ as a saying, as coming forth, as a claim, as an event with which I am immediately in the possibilities that it occasions. The immediate complement of ‘claim’ is ‘answer.’ Human existence says itself. That means that it is present always as someone. To be someone is to be a state of giving heed in the presence of beings. Even when I refuse a claim and turn away from it, I am attending to it, and I am in conformity with it in the sense that I respond with it, hear it, and answer.
[…]
The vulnerability of human existence is frequently remarked, and man’s fear of his own state of being is frequently discussed. We are remarkably undefended in the immediacy of our being. We are constituted by givennesses which have at once the character of gift and threat because immediacy is neither deserved nor avoidable. When we answer by backing away from our own state of givenness, from what is given, and from the inevitability of answering, we literally refuse our own being, a refusal that immediately countenances what we refuse. This deep contradiction is lived as injury and misery, self-encroachment in the most profound sense, because in this case we are open in the disclosure of what is present by denying both our responsiveness and the meaningful presences.

– Charles E. Scott, ‘Heidegger, Madness and Well-Being’

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Posted in Charles E. Scott, Heidegger

No longer natural

Posted on January 26, 2019 | Comments Off

Flaubert was in a sense the forerunner of writing scruples. I do believe that in the eighteenth century, say, Voltaire or Rousseau wrote much more naturally than people did from the nineteenth century onwards. Flaubert sensed this more than any other writer. If you look at Rousseau’s letters, for instance, they’re beautifully written. He dashed off 23 in a day if necessary, and they’re all balanced, they’re all beautiful prose. Flaubert’s letters are already quite haphazard; they’re no longer literary in that sense. He swears, he makes exclamations, sometimes they’re very funny. But he was one of the first to realise that there was appearing in front of him some form of impasse. And I think nowadays it’s getting increasingly difficult because writing is no longer a natural thing for us.

– Sebald (via here)

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Posted in Sebald

Why did blogs die?

Posted on January 23, 2019 | Comments Off

Why did blogs die? If, that is, it can even still be remembered that once they were alive […] Back when blogging still seemed comparatively healthy, I remember resenting terribly the little ‘Share This’ buttons that all my colleagues in blogging began to place at the end of each post. There was one little button for Facebook, then another for Twitter, then another for Stumble Upon, then one for Reddit, et cetera until every post in the blogosphere seemed to be staggering under a Lilliputian colony of parasitic buttons, like an immune-compromised deer studded with ticks. The blackmail was straightforward: If you didn’t add the little buttons to your posts, then fewer people would share your posts, and fewer people come to your blog. If you did add them, however, you were giving free advertising to the big social media sites, which some day, everyone knew, were going to ingest into themselves, macrophagically, the impulse for self-expression that had once gone into blogging, where at least it seemed to have some independence.
The poisoned bait of social-media traffic weakened the herd of bloggers, but it didn’t quite constitute a cull. The cull came as a reflected blow. Since the dawn of blogging, even Luddite bloggers like me had had little hit counters, where we could track how many visitors came to our site. One week […] I watched my hit counter as the daily population of visitors to this blog drained away, steadily. Google had adjusted its algorithm, I soon discovered. Previously, when you had searched Google for, say, “does television impair academic performance,” the results had been ranked according to how many times your website was linked to by other websites concerned with the same topic, and this ranking had been more or less independent of time. On social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, however, the newest information was always at the top, and people seemed to prefer seeing newer content first, even if older content was more pertinent to their interest, or more rich in information and context. Under the pressure of competition, Google rejiggered its ranking, and overnight, it, too, began to discount heavily for time. A blogger who only posted a few times a month was doomed.

Caleb Crain

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A balloon with ballast

Posted on January 11, 2019 | Comments Off

I write this diary reluctantly. Its dishonest honesty wearies me. For whom am I writing? If I am writing for myself, then why is it being published? If for the reader, why do I pretend that I am talking to myself? Are you talking to yourself so that others will hear you?
How far I am from the certitude and vigour that hum in me when I am, pardon me, ‘creating’. Here, on these pages, I feel as if I were emerging from a blessed night into the hard light of dawn, which fills me with yawning and drags my shortcomings out into the open. The duplicity inherent in keeping a diary makes me timid, so forgive, oh forgive me (perhaps these last words are dispensable, perhaps they are already pretentious?).
Yet I realize that one must be oneself at all levels of writing, which is to say, that I ought to be able to express myself not only in a poem or drama, but also in everyday prose — in an article or in a diary — and the flight of art has to find its counterpart in the domain of regular life, just as the shadow of the condor is cast onto the ground. What’s more, this passage into an everyday world from an area that is backed into the most remote depths, practically in the underground, is a matter of great importance to me. I want to be a balloon, but one with ballast; an antenna, but one that is grounded.

— Gombrowicz, Diary (tr. Vallee)

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Posted in Witold Gombrovicz

Alien and identical

Posted on January 10, 2019 | Comments Off

Once I was explaining to someone that in order to feel the real cosmic significance of man for man, he should imagine the following:
I am completely alone in a desert. I have never seen people nor do I imagine that another man is even possible. At that very moment an analogous creature appears in my field of vision, which, while not being me, is nevertheless the same principle in an alien body. Someone identical but alien nevertheless. And suddenly I experience, at precisely the same moment, a wondrous fulfilment and a painful division. Yet one revelation stands out above all the rest: I have become boundless, unpredictable to myself, multiple in possibilities through this alien, fresh but identical power, which approaches me as if I were approaching myself from the outside.

– Witold Gombrowicz

To be human is to be among those whose thoughts we don’t know; to be in the dark. Perhaps this condition is the source of our urge to speak. Language, born of absence, filling a lack, generating light. To be human is to be alone, and also to know that we are in thrall to thoughts we call our own, yet are barely aware of. Perhaps this very unknowingness is the source of writing. Writing from out of a void, to fill a void. Both speaking and writing, then, veil ignorance of ourselves and of others even as they display it, even as they ameliorate it.

– Mark Thwaite

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Posted in Mark Thwaite, Witold Gombrovicz

All is always now

Posted on December 31, 2018 | Comments Off

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.

– T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

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Posted in T.S. Eliot

I am learning to restore myself

Posted on December 29, 2018 | Comments Off

I must organize myself. I must, as they say, pull myself together, dump this cat from my lap, stir—yes, resolve, move, do. But do what? My will is like the rosy dustlike light in this room: soft, diffuse, and gently comforting. It lets me do . . . anything . . . nothing.
My ears hear what they happen to; I eat what’s put before me; my eyes see what blunders into them; my thoughts are not thoughts, they are dreams. I’m empty or I’m full . . . depending; and I cannot choose. I sink my claws in Tick’s fur and scratch the bones of his back until his rear rises amorously. Mr. Tick, I murmur, I must organize myself. I must pull myself together. And Mr. Tick rolls over on his belly, all ooze.
I spill Mr. Tick when I’ve rubbed his stomach. Shoo. He steps away slowly, his long tail rhyming with his paws. How beautifully he moves, I think; how beautifully, like you, he commands his loving, how beautifully he accepts. So I rise and wander from room to room, up and down, gazing through most of my forty-one windows. How well this house receives its loving too. Let out like Mr. Tick, my eyes sink in the shrubbery. I am not here; I’ve passed the glass, passed second-story spaces, flown by branches, brilliant berries, to the ground, grass high in seed and leafage every season; and it is the same as when I passed above you in my aged, ardent body; it’s, in short, a kind of love; and I am learning to restore myself, my house, my body, by paying court to gardens, cats, and running water, and with neighbors keeping company.

– William Gass, ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’

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Posted in William Gass

North

Posted on December 29, 2018 | Comments Off

North, to the Lancashire uplands to spend Christmas with S.’s family. N. picks up Rookie in a carboard box, along with a box of cat food. The next morning we get a taxi before sunrise, then three trains. The passengers get chattier as the landscape gets hillier. I manage to sleep a little. It’s dark and rainy when we get to the final station, where S.’s father is waiting for us in the car.
It seems as though every available space has been paved over and built up except for the great dark moors that loom over the cities and villages – many of which are themselves manmade, the results of deforestation by ancient people… Nothing but motorways, roundabouts, malls, petrol stations, business parks, offices, terraced houses… all so grey hard and cramped. I can’t help but think of those lines by Hopkins. Is there anywhere that isn’t seared with trade, smeared with toil, degraded by capital? Is there any escape?
S.’s family is large and fun, and we eat, drink and laugh all night.
It’s the home of the industrial revolution after all, S. tells me when we’ve gone to bed and I’ve revealed my thoughts about the journey. You know how you get when you travel. Don’t judge it just yet, you’ll see.
The next morning is brighter and gives us a fine view of hills on both sides of the house dotted with spray-painted sheep and crowned with mist. I go outside to smoke, feeling pleasantly small. There’s a different quality to the silence here when there’s no traffic on the road. Something to do with the topography maybe. I can hear a stream now. A horse whinnies somewhere, calling for a response as horses do, and it’s as if being itself has briefly been given voice.
S. borrows the car and drives us to Pendle Hill. We walk along the ridge through ribbons of fog to an ancient burial site she wants to see. Not a soul about, at last. As we climb the rocky path, dodging sheep droppings and sodden moss, we relax, stop chatting and fall into a rhythm. Our minds relax and expand as the horizon widens. We stop to look out over a spread of fields, hills, reservoirs and houses all around. This is more like it, I tell S., you need a horizon to think. I love the dun colours, the reddish iron-rich streams, the sheep that bound away when we get too close, the total indifference of the place. It moves us both, and it’s worth a day of rumbling through damp, littered suburbs in crowded, dirty trains.

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Posted in Writing

Mr Tick

Posted on December 25, 2018 | Comments Off

Mr. Tick, you do me honor. You not only lie in my lap, but you remain alive there, coiled like a fetus. Through your deep nap, I feel you hum. You are, and are not, a machine. You are alive, alive exactly, and it means nothing to you—much to me. You are a cat—you cannot understand—you are a cat so easily. Your nature is not something you must rise to. You, not I, live in: in house, in skin, in shrubbery.