I’m reluctant to call [my work] poetry. I like your idea of footnotes, or notes or some other kind of activity, because I think there is an enterprise called poetry today and I don’t really feel part of it […] I don’t have that mind that seems to be valued today. I can’t understand a lot of the stuff that’s written.
— Leonard Cohen, via here
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Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life…. A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers … Live things, things that are alive — that are conscious of us — are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last to have known such things.
–- Rilke (via here)
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One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
— Wallace Stevens
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Posted in Wallace Stevens
“Are you as lonely as that?” I asked.
Kafka nodded.
“Like Kaspar Hauser?”
Kafka laughed.
“Much worse than Kaspar Hauser. I’m as lonely as…..as Franz Kafka.”
— Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka
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I realize more and more that I am so constituted that I shall not succeed in realizing my ideals… Ordinarily, most people aim their ideals at the Great, the Extraordinary, which they never attain. I am far too melancholy to harbor such ideals. One would smile at my ideals… I aspire to be as little as possible; that is precisely the core of my melancholy. For that very reason I have been content to be regarded as half-mad, though this merely was a negative form of being something out of the ordinary. And this may quite possibly remain my essential form of existence, and I shall never attain the pleasant, becalmed existence of being something very small.
— Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, via here
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The everyday is not exact, it is a cliché; realism requires vertiginous originality. But how can one be exact about what is truly unspeakable? One can only write knowing that one approaches and approximates, and that language fails you the while; you run after exactness, but the world gets away and your words fail. Beckett taught us about this failure because he knew failure and writing were synonymous.
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Black: How long you felt like this?
White: All my life.
Black: And that’s the truth.
White: It’s worse than that.
Black: I dont see what could be worse than that.
White: Rage is really only for the good days. The truth is there’s little of that left. The truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. Or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life. Its words. Why would I seek the company of such a thing? Why?
Black: Damn.
White: You see what it is you’ve saved.
Black: Tried to save. Am tryin. Tryin hard.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited
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Black: What is it you believe in?
White: A lot of things.
Black: All right.
White: All right what?
Black: All right what things.
White: I believe in things.
Black: You said that.
White: Probably I dont believe in a lot of things that I used to believe in but that doesnt mean I dont believe in anything.
Black: Well give me a for instance.
White: Mostly the value of things.
Black: Value of things.
White: Yes.
Black: Okay. What things.
White: Lots of things. Cultural things, for instance. Books and music and art. Things like that.
Black: All right.
White: Those are the kinds of things that have value to me. They’re the foundations of civilization. Or they used to have value. I suppose they dont have so much any more.
Black: What happened to em?
White: People stopped valuing them. I stopped valuing them. To a certain extent. I’m not sure I could tell you why. That world is largely gone. Soon it will be wholly gone.
Black: I aint sure I’m followin you, Professor.
White: There’s nothing to follow. It’s all right. The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didnt know that. I thought they were indestructible. They werent.
Black: And that’s what sent you off the edge of the platform. It wasnt nothing personal.
White: It is personal. That’s what an education does. It makes the world personal.
Black: Hm.
White: Hm what.
Black: Well. I was just thinkin that them is some pretty powerful words. I dont know that I got a answer about any of that and it might be that they aint no answer. But still I got to ask what is the use of notions such as them if it wont keep you glued down to the platform when the Sunset Limited comes through at eighty mile a hour.
White: Good question.
Black: I thought so.
White: I dont have an answer to any of that either. Maybe it’s not logical. I dont know. I dont care. I’ve been asked didnt I think it odd that I should be present to witness the death of everything and I do think it’s odd but that doesnt mean it’s not so. Someone has to be here.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited
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If our life were an eternal standing by the window, if we could remain there for ever, like hovering smoke, with the same moment of twilight forever paining the curve of the hills…. If we could remain that way for beyond forever! If at least on this side of the impossible we could thus continue, without committing and action, without our pallid lips sinning another word!
Look how it’s getting dark! …The positive quietude of everthing fills me with rage, with something that’s a bitterness in the air I breathe. My soul aches … A slow wisp of smoke rises and dissipates in the distance… A restless tedium makes me think no more of you…
All so superfluous! We and the world and the mystery of both.
Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (tr. Zenith), via here
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Posted in Pessoa
Wasn’t that your first lesson in anonymity, there in that room with nothing to do, with the endless hours stretching ahead of you? Wasn’t that when the other ‘you’ was first born, the you I’ve written so often about in the past? The you with the capital Y, I could call it, the You beyond us both. The Anonymous itself.
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Posted in Writing
Notes from a Room 