here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
Posted in ee cummings
Everything I wrote was in cafés, mostly quiet cafés, but also in bustling, crowded cafés. It never bothers me when people talk. Many writers have tortured their families because the noise made it difficult for them to concentrate […] I have a great deal of respect for an artist who doesn’t impose his moods on those around him. Writing is a struggle, and it should be between you and yourself, without involving additional people.
— Appelfeld (quoted here)
Posted in Aharon Appelfeld
Q. This film feels like you were out of [depression], that you had come to another place.
A. Yes, and that’s what I’m not so proud of somehow. That it was too easy to do the film.
Q. It feels like it was easy, it feels like it was like butter.
A. Yeah.
Q. Why is that bad?
A. That’s a very good question. I think it has to do with the Protestantism of my country, even though I’m not religious. I think it has to with that … It’s like, you have a great view and if you crawl there with your nails and see the view, or you go there in your car, stop the car, get out, see the view… that’s something different… even though it’s the same view.
Posted in Lars von Trier
– To become yourself you must first be unmade.
– But I’m already unmade.
– That’s only half the battle.
– But I’m already defeated.
– There are different ways to be defeated.
– ?
– Maybe it’s a question of space.
– ?
– … of finding the space in which something may grow out of your unmaking like a plant that grows out of a broken shell.
– What space?
– There are spaces that free and spaces that cripple. You can be freed in the space inside yourself or in the space between you and another. You can be crippled in the space inside yourself or in the space between you and another.
– But I’m already crippled.
– Then find a better space.
– I have either too much or too little.
– Then find a space in between.
– Between what?
– Between yourself and others, or between you and yourself. A fertile space.
– Those spaces are only momentary.
– Then live in those moments.
– Time drags, one moment moves into the next and both are lost in the drag, like the spaces. All is one, all is confusion.
– You’re hopeless.
– It’s you yourself who’s made me hopeless, who’s unmade me.
– Frenet, Journal
Posted in Frenet
Sometimes, he cannot help but think that animals are close to the divine.
It is we who were expelled from paradise, he says. Not the animals.
The world outside of mind we can know only from the beast’s face, he says. He is quoting.
He cannot help but think that animals show him something. That an animal is nothing but that — showing.
There is a lesson he is being taught. There is a lesson that animals are trying to teach him. But how can he heed it?
What an animal is — is obvious. It is there, simple. As to what a human being is …
What would an animal say if it were able to speak? Of course, but animals remain on the other side of speech. On the far side of speech. Still, all the animals around us can be understood to interrupt our speaking, he says. To cut across it.
He has always thought of himself as awaiting the Word which will release him. It seems to him that it is this Word which resides with animals, on the side of animals.
The animal exists in a state of grace, of that he is sure. The animal is already in paradise.
— Lars Iyer, Wittgenstein Jr.
Posted in Lars Iyer
Love the other as yourself. What can it mean but that that you too are another, that love lives in the space between others? That love is a space that makes you by unmaking you.
— Frenet, Journal
Posted in Frenet
Q. You reject the idea that your lyrics were at all whimsical in Felt, don’t you?
A. The lyrics are pretentious, but they’re knowingly so. I wanted to introduce a poetic vision into it. I thought poetic lyrics were up there: Horses, Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine. I wanted to bring something like that, but with my own Birmingham aesthetic –I didn’t want to copy anyone. And I had a funny way with words. I started writing poems when I was very young – I had 17 of these poems and they had lines in them like “Crumbling the antiseptic beauty” and stuff like that, those were the kind of poems I wrote. So it was easy to take the way I wrote poems and put it into lyrics, it was a natural thing to do.
You’re living in a little terraced house with no money, money problems, a gambling father, a horrible world you can’t bear and you’re just dying to get out of it. People around you, you can’t bear. You felt on your own all the time – you wanted to escape into a different world, the world of words. It was very different to the way I lived, having jobs in warehouses and factories. I didn’t want to write about drudgery of everyday life.
*
Q. Is it about not letting them down, young people?
A. I love kids, young people who have ideals. Something happens when you get to a certain age, people get married, have kids, and move away from music, their whole artistic vision goes down the drain. I see it all the time, and it saddens me. It always happens, now it’s happening to my generation. I get it, it’s life changing, but they lose the naïve innocence, the seriousness of music – it doesn’t seem serious to them any more. I think I’m trying to prove you can get older and still have the same convictions you had when you were 15 or 16. Maybe that kid I’m talking about is me.
— Lawrence
Posted in Felt
— ‘How would you like to be remembered?’
— ‘As someone who tried to love somebody.’
— ‘What’s love to you?’
— ‘Love to me is an active thing. It’s not a word. If you love somebody you prove it.’
Posted in Bob Dylan
Perhaps the real problem here is the way in which time itself always serves as the measure for all politics, and all critique of politics, whether it be the bleak future, the heroic past, the desolate present, the utopian tomorrow, the shadowy past or the dawning of a new day. […] If time is a weapon used against people fighting against the speed and brutality of what is happening, we may be forced to use a different image of time – or perhaps an image of a world without time altogether – against those whose only measure seems to be the maximisation of profit in the shortest possible period. The question of whose finitude counts and whose doesn’t – a brutal marker not only of the division between life and death but between the more important distinction between those whose life/death ‘counts’ and those about whom nothing is counted at all – is played out in the only post-religious ‘infinite’ permitted to matter: permanent accumulation. The dedication to amassing at the expense of life itself reveals a terror of time so disturbing that any politics of temporal pessimism/optimism looks insignificant by comparison.
As we defend those who await trial, or write to those in prison, or sit in courts, job centres and universities as futures are crushed all around, time may be all we have left: time in which to abolish their notion of time and replace it […] with a life in which nobody seeks to make time measurable at all, for all time.
— Nina Power, ‘The Pessimism of Time‘
Posted in Nina Power
I’ve sometimes been asked why I don’t have any thoughts or visions of a utopian country, a utopian world where everything will be good and we’ll all be good. I’d say that when you’re constantly confronted with the abomination of daily life, a paradox arises, since what we really have is nothing.
I do believe in something, and I call it ‘a day shall come’, and one day it will come. Well, probably it won’t come, because it has been ruined for us, for thousands of years it has always been destroyed. It won’t come, and I believe in it anyway. Because if I can’t believe in it any more I can’t go on writing.
— Bachmann
Posted in Ingeborg Bachmann
Notes from a Room 