To return to what is here

Posted on November 13, 2012 | Leave a comment

To return to what was here in the beginning, to what’s always been here, patient, indifferent, waiting. That’s what I seek in this journal. To end this journal, so I can begin to live. No: so that life can begin in me. But is this not living? No. This journal was a failure from the beginning, from before it began, it’s enmeshed in failure like a fish thrashing in a net. It should seek its own invisibility, its own never-having-been, as though it were being written in disappearing ink. To return to what was here, to what is here – impossible dream.

– Frenet, Journal

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Posted on November 11, 2012 | Leave a comment

JOURNAL 1914
THE TURKISH JOURNEY

For Em.

April (1914)

For you I tear from my travel diary and copy out as a postscript to the insufficient letters I sent you these even more insufficient leaves. I was planning to complete and to perfect them; I cannot do so. While travelling, one notes down from day to day in the hope of recomposing these stories at leisure and of carefully retracing the landscapes on one’s return. Then one notices that all the art put into this work only manages to dilute the original emotion, of which the most naive expression will always be the best. Consequently I transcribe these notes just as they are, without sweetening their tartness. Alas! the days which were most completely filled with the liveliest emotions are also those of which nothing remains in this notebook, those when I had time only for living.

— Gide, Journal (tr. O’Brien)

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Posted on November 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church… Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don’t mean just going without food and drink.

*

Any man who is half-way decent will think himself extremely imperfect, but a religious man thinks himself wretched.

*

If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn’t be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.

— Wittgenstein

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Not a theory

Posted on November 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.

— Wittgenstein

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I Step Outside Myself

Posted on November 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

I step outside
myself, out of my eyes,
hands, mouth, outside
of myself I
step, a bundle
of goodness and godliness
that must make good
this devilry
that has happened.

— Ingeborg Bachmann

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Most people want to dominate

Posted on November 8, 2012 | Leave a comment

Most people want to dominate. They fear the worst. But you can’t control anything in the least. You must surrender. It is only to the extent that one accepts the worst that one has anything relevant to say. But the more intensely inner reality is seen, the less possible its expression becomes.

— Bram van Velde (tr. Tweed and Roman)

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Posted in Bram van Velde

The last man on earth

Posted on November 8, 2012 | Leave a comment

Strange to see the contents of my head strewn about here, as if they’d been dropped from a pocket and lay unnoticed, like obsolete objects. As if I myself were obsolete… If I were the last man on earth, if no one were ever to see these notes, would I go on writing them? But that’s precisely how one should write, as if one were the last person on earth, as if one were obsolete. What makes a wolf howl? What makes him stretch his neck and send his cry through the freezing air? Would he still howl if he were the last wolf on earth?

— Frenet, Journal

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The hopeless dream of being

Posted on November 8, 2012 | Leave a comment

The hopeless dream of being – not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don’t have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn’t play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn’t watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you’re forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you’re genuine or just a sham.

— Bergman, Persona

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Something strange is happening

Posted on November 8, 2012 | Leave a comment

‘I tell myself I have the ability to love, but it’s all been shut up in a locked room. The life I’ve led has limited my life more and more. And the time has come to change it. The first step is to get a divorce. I think my husband and I hinder each other in some deadly way.’

‘That sounds frightening.’

‘Yes, it’s frightening. Something strange is happening. My senses, sight, hearing, touch are starting to fail me. This table for example, I can see it and touch it. But my feeling is dried-out, shrunken. Do you understand what I mean?’

‘I think I understand.’

‘It’s the same with everything. Music, smells, faces and voices. Everything seems smaller, greyer, without dignity.’

— Bergman, Scenes from a Marriage

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What *are* you interested in?

Posted on November 8, 2012 | Leave a comment

‘So you’re not interested in progress, Mr Jastrau. What *are* you interested in?’

It was so unreal, this way of thinking. And it was as if the unreality spread. The buildings on the other side of the street became gathering rainclouds; the oval table, the visiting-card bowl and the hat tree seemed like random pieces of furniture that had been put out on the sidewalk by the king’s bailiff; and there, in those chairs on the sidewalk, sat Vuldum and Father Garhammer, and suddenly it occurred to Jastrau how feminine they both were. Vuldum tall and unrelenting as only a redhead can be, and the priest short and dark, constantly biting his long lips, greedy for a new, bloodless, logical problem; but who are as grim and implacable as old virgins?

‘I’m only really interested in myself’, Jastrau replied cautiously, avoiding Vuldum’s cold smile. ‘That is, in psychology, in what’s at the bottom of the soul, and – well, I’m interested in how I can build up an objective world, a reality.’

— Tom Kristensen, Hærværk (‘Havoc’), my trans.

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