A blond boy wearing thick glasses just looked in my window, or rather at my window, for he used it as a mirror in which he confirmed his coiffure and his expression. I was afraid he might catch sight of me behind his reflection but he quit his work unaware of the self-centred host of this sunken room, and I did not have to confront him in the midst of his vanity.
— Leonard Cohen, ‘The Window’
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Posted in Leonard Cohen
Sometimes we feel we haven’t even begun to understand ourselves, to understand anything, to think, to be. We must become aware of the urgency of all this, we agree, we must become our own most merciless critics so we can begin to understand, be, think! But most of the time we’re lazy, we agree – in fact beyond lazy! Most of the time we’ve convinced each other, like silent partners in a crime, that the best way to spend time is to waste it.
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Posted in Writing
‘God’, said Angela of Foligno, ‘gave his son, whom he loved, a poverty such that there never was, and there never will be a poor man equal to him. And yet he had Being as property. He possessed substance and it was his such that that belonging is above human speech. And yet God made him poor, as if the substance was not his’.
That the immovable substance should not be, even for God, sovereign satisfaction, that destitution and death should be the beyond required for the glory of He *who is* eternal beatitude – as well as for that of whomever possesses in his or her way the illusory attribute of substance –, a truth as ruinous could not be nakedly accessible for the saint. Still: starting from an ecstatic vision, it can’t be avoided.
— Bataille, Guilty (tr. Kendall)
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I couldn’t stand the ordinariness of life. I couldn’t stand family life, I couldn’t stand job life, I couldn’t stand anything I looked at. I just decided I either had to starve, make it, go mad, come through or do something. Even if I hadn’t made it on writing… I could not do the eight-to-five. I would have been a suicide or something. I’m sorry. I could not accept the snail’s pace eight-to-five, Johnny Carson, happy birthday, Christmas… to me this is the sickest of all sick things.
— Bukowski
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Posted in Bukowski
He was an asshole and he was a coward and his blood is in my blood. Sometimes I feel it happening to me, when I’m arguing with a woman or something, I feel kind of shitty, and I’m not quite JUST. That’s my father’s blood in me, that chicken-shit blood I’ve got in me. It’s a bad feeling.
— Bukowski
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‘Tell you something else occurred to me now, since you guys wanna listen to such shit… I feel like throwing that beer right in your face.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ll tell you why. I always thought sometime in my life this time might come, a little bit. Guys marching in on me with cameras and all that shit. Somehow I almost felt it and knew it. I was always gonna crash it down and say “Jam it up your ass” … You know, they got to me too late. I don’t think I can be destroyed, basically, I don’t think they can destroy me. I’m too strong, they came too late with too little. The young blondes with the tight pussies came too late. The cameras came too late… Don’t grin at me like that, it’s true. They came too late, I’m too strong. The gods have really put a good shield over me, man, they really have. I’ve been toughened up at the right time and right place. They’re still good to me.’
– Bukowski
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Everything is gone but the echo of the burst of a shell
And I’m stuck here waiting for a passing feeling
In the city I built up and blew to hell
I’m stuck here waiting for a passing feeling
Still I send all the time
My request for relief
Down the dead power line
Though I’m beyond belief
In the help I require
Just to exist at all
Took a long time to stand
Took an hour to fall
— Elliott Smith, ‘A Passing Feeling‘
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It certainly is a warning. It says there is a danger, but maybe, once you realize the danger, you have good reasons for confronting that danger. And I think it’s important for us to confront the danger that is literature. I think it is a very great and real danger, but that you are not a man if you do not confront that danger. And I think that in literature, we can see the human perspective in its entirety, because literature doesn’t let us live without seeing human nature under its most violent aspect. […] Finally, it’s literature that permits us to perceive the worst and learn how to confront it, how to overcome it. In short, a man who plays finds in the game the force to overcome the horror the game contains.
— Bataille
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But after a while I begin to take brief glimpses and at length I watch again with thirsty interest, like a child who tries to maintain his sulk when he is offered the bribe of candy. My parents are now having their picture taken in a photographer’s booth along the boardwalk. The place is shadowed in the mauve light which is apparently necessary. The camera is set to the side on its tripod and looks like a Martian man. The photographer is instructing my parents in how to pose. My father has his arm over my mother’s shoulder and both of them smile emphatically. The photographer brings my mother a bouquet of flowers to hold in her hand, but she holds it at the wrong angle. Then the photographer covers himself with the black cloth which drapes the camera and all that one sees of him is one protruding arm and his hand with which he holds tightly to the rubber ball which he squeezes when the picture is taken. But he is not satisfied with their appearance. He feels that somehow there is something wrong in their pose. Again and again he comes out from his hiding place with new directions. Each suggestion merely makes matters worse. My father is becoming impatient. They try a seated pose. The photographer explains that he has his pride, he wants to make beautiful pictures, he is not merely interested in all of this for the money. My father says: “Hurry up, will you? We haven’t got all night.” But the photographer only scurries about apologetically, issuing new directions. The photographer charms me, and I approve of him with all my heart, for I know exactly how he feels, and as he criticizes each revised pose according to some obscure idea of rightness, I become quite hopeful. But then my father says angrily: “Come on, you’ve had enough time, we’re not going to wait any longer.” And the photographer, sighing unhappily, goes back into the black covering, and holds out his hand, saying: “One, two, three, Now!,” and the picture is taken, with my father’s smile turned to a grimace and my mother’s bright and false. It takes a few minutes for the picture to be developed and as my parents sit in the curious light they become depressed.
— Delmore Schwartz, ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’
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Notes from a Room 