A poem, as a manifestation of language and, thus, essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the — not always greatly hopeful — belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.
— Celan
Posted in Celan
The dream of writing without rewriting, of writing itself (of not thinking but being thought)… Years of treading water in language, far from any shore, have taught me better. But the dream remains, to be one with the words that flow through you, through which you flow…
— Frenet, Journal
Posted in Frenet
Are we hearing from Derrida again, does he still live, or is this what is left of him in the words we read and speak? A certain haunting or spectrality is induced through this equivocation, and this equivocation, he tells us, is structural, even originary. We expect survival to come later, as a concept that follows a life, as a predicament we face upon the death of the author, but Derrida tells us, here, at the end of his life, that the predicament was always there and that this equivocation, this question of survival, even this imperative to affirm survival, is there from the outset, built into the language that precedes us.
— Judith Butler (via here)
Posted in Derrida, Judith Butler
It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of a death-bent speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, ‘enriched’ by all this.
— Celan, Bremen Literary Prize Acceptance Speech, 1958
Posted in Celan
False, false, false. False even to ask where our real faces are behind our masks… A sudden plunge of anxiety, of emptiness… My life! What have I done to it, how can I repair it?
But a voice says it’s good as it is, your very survival makes it so.
— Frenet, Journal
Posted in Frenet
What I couldn’t have achieved if I hadn’t been hindered by this double who follows me around like a bad twin, who squints at me, smirks at me, leaps on my back, light as a ghost, so I can carry him through my life! I’d have slipped into the world, wouldn’t I? Straight from childhood into adulthood. I’d have been like those people who can talk and sleep in public. So I say, he says.
— Frenet, Journal
Posted in Frenet
There are people who work out of a sense of great abundance. I’d love to be one of them but I’m not. You just work with what you’ve got.
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When I speak of depression I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse. I’m happy to report that, by imperceptible degrees and by the grace of good teachers and good luck, depression slowly dissolved and has never returned with the same ferocity that prevailed for most of my life. I read somewhere that as you grow older certain brain cells die that are associated with anxiety so it doesn’t really matter how much you apply yourself to the disciplines. You’re going to start feeling a lot better or a lot worse depending on the condition of your neurons.
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Well, you know, we’re talking in a world where guys go down into the mines, chewing coca and spending all day in backbreaking labour. We’re in a world where there’s famine and hunger and people are dodging bullets and having their nails pulled out in dungeons so it’s very hard for me to place any high value on the work that I do to write a song. Yeah, I work hard but compared to what?
— Leonard Cohen, interview
Posted in Leonard Cohen
‘Have contemporary philosophers had any influence on your thought?’
‘I never read philosophers.’
‘Why not?’
‘I never understand anything they write.’
‘All the same, people have wondered if the existentialists’ problem of being may afford a key to your works.’
‘There’s no key or problem. I wouldn’t have had any reason to write my novels if I could have expressed their subject in philosophic terms.’
‘What was your reason then?’
‘I haven’t the slightest idea. I’m no intellectual. All I am is feeling. Molloy and the others came to me the day I became aware of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write the things I feel.’
— Beckett, 1961 interview
Posted in Beckett
What is more true than anything else? To swim is true, and to sink is true. One is not more true than the other. One cannot speak anymore of being, one must speak only of the mess. When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast between being and existence, they may be right, I don’t know, but their language is too philosophical for me. I am not a philosopher. One can only speak of what is in front of him, and that now is simply the mess.
— Beckett, 1961 interview
Posted in Beckett
To confess! To God — to the absence of God. To be absolved, absented from my past. To be emptied out and yet to live: what else do I seek with these words? To be given life. Words without me — or me without words.
— Frenet, Journal
Posted in Frenet
Notes from a Room 