W. dreams of a thought that would move with what it thinks, follow and respond to it, like a surfer his wave. A thought that would inhabit what was to be thought, like a fish the sea – no, a thought that would be only a drop of the sea in the sea, belonging to its object as water does to water.
— Lars Iyer, Dogma
Now an angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a blazing fire —
a fire that devours fire;
a fire that burns in things dry and moist;
a fire that glows amid snow and ice;
a fire that is like a crouching lion;
a fire that reveals itself in many forms;
a fire that is, and never expires;
a fire that shines and roars;
a fire that blazes and sparkles;
a fire that flies in a storm wind;
a fire that burns without wood;
a fire that renews itself every day;
a fire that is not fanned by fire;
a fire that billows like palm branches;
a fire whose sparks are flashes of lightning;
a fire black as a raven;
a fire, curled, like the colours of the rainbow!
– Yannai, ‘The Celestial Fire’, from The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse (via here)
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Posted in Writing
She used to say to him, If people knew what I was thinking they would put me away forever. But they would put us all away, he said. They have put us away. We are put away for our thoughts, one way or another. We have put ourselves away, he said.
— Don DeLillo, Mao II
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Posted in Don DeLillo
There is an idea in Finland that it is good to sit in silence as the light goes, to observe nightfall as a time of contemplation – ‘pitaa hamaraa’, ‘keeping the twilight’.
– Peter Davidson, The Idea of North (via here)
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Posted in Writing
Ben Jeffery, in a book-length essay recently published by Zero Books, fittingly labels Houellebecq’s caustic literary approach “depressive realism,” likening his narrative style to the cognitive deadlock that can characterize clinical depression. His protagonists accept that their problems are meaningless in the cosmic scheme of things yet cannot stop mulling them over. Though they believe that a cure for their malaise is impossible, they are compelled to continually refine their self-diagnoses. They appear determined, or consigned, to have no illusions about themselves, even though a certain amount of illusions may be necessary for staving off paralyzing solipsism. Stringing one’s experiences into a coherent narrative, positing an ability to sympathize with others, developing a sense of personal identity — these are ultimately faith-based notions after all. We have to get past our own insignificance to regard anything else as worthy of contemplation and connection. “Depression is the pathological frontier of individualism,” Jeffery writes, “the point at which the whole world is eaten up by the self.” Houellebecq’s work inhabits that frontier and attempts to present it as the universal truth of the human condition.
— Rob Horning (via here)
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Posted in Houellebecq
Into the cage they put a young panther. Even the most insensitive felt it refreshing to see this wild creature leaping around the cage that had so long been dreary. The panther was all right. The food he liked was brought to him without hesitation by the attendants; he seemed not even to miss his freedom; his noble body, furnished almost to the bursting point with all that it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it too; somewhere in his jaws it seemed to lurk; and the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded around the cage, and did not ever want to move away.
— Kafka, ‘The Hunger Artist’ (tr. W. and E. Muir)
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Posted in Kafka
What guarantee is there that the five senses, taken together, do cover the whole of possible experience? They cover simply our actual experience, our human knowledge of facts or events. There are gaps between the fingers; there are gaps between the senses. In these gaps is the darkness which hides the connection between things…. This darkness is the source of our vague fears and anxieties, but also the home of the gods. They alone see the connections, the total relevance of everything that happens; that which now comes to us in bits and pieces, the ‘accidents’ which exist only in our heads, in our limited perceptions.
— Idris Parry, Kafka, Rilke, and Rumpelstiltskin (via here)
The first moments of sleep are the image of death: a hazy torpor overcomes our thoughts, and it is impossible for us to determine the precise instant when the I, in another form, resumes the creative work of existence. Little by little an obscure underground cavern grows lighter, and the pale, solemnly immobile figures that inhabit the realm of limbo emerge from shadows and darkness. Then the picture takes form, a new light illumines and sets in motion these old apparitions: –the world of Spirits opens before us.
— Nerval, (via here)
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Posted in Sleep
Sam: ‘All writing is a sin against speechlessness. Trying to find a form for that silence. Only a few, Yeats, Goethe, those who lived a long time, could go on to do it, but they had recourse to known forms and fictions. So one finds oneself going back to vieilles compétences [know-how] – how to escape that. One can never get over the fact, never rid oneself of the old dream of giving a form to speechlessness.’
About his new work, he said [the problem is] ‘qui est qui. One would have to invent a new, a fourth person, then a fifth, a sixth – to talk about je, tu, il, never. Qui est qui. The logical thing to do would be to look out the window at the void. Mallarmé was near to it in the livre blanc. But one can’t get over one’s dream’. Avigdor said, ‘Because of energy.’ Sam: ‘And entropy. And between these two we know which one wins.’ Avigdor: ‘That’s being.’ I: ‘Being isn’t logical.’ Sam repeated: ‘A sin against speechlessness. When one tries to say it, one uses the old forms, one tells all kinds of stories.’
– Anne Atik, How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett
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Posted in Beckett
‘God’, too, comes forth, is fabricated by the power of naming, from nothing. In this sense, the God that is named is an impostor. Whereas verbal richness constitutes the lie of the language of men, nudity and poverty are the lies of God (‘La nudite´, la pauvrete´ sont mensonges de Dieu’, Livre des questions, p. 93). The inventive, mythifying power of the word is human in its wealth of flourishes and divine in its dearth, its blankness clearing space for infinity. But in either case, language is an artifice, a lie relative to the truth of infinite silence that outstrips it and is always already there where words end. So that the saying even of nothing betrays it into the guise of something: some sound or sign is given to represent the unrepresentable. This makes language constitutively mendacious.
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Posted in Jabés
Notes from a Room 