With today’s model [of the orgone box], it is no longer necessary to sit in cramped quarters for a specific time. Improved and enlarged to encompass the continent, the big machine works on its subjects continuously, day and night.
— Christopher Turner on Wilhelm Reich
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Posted in Wilhelm Reich
There was just a certain sweetness to daily life that began asserting itself. I remember sitting in the corner of my kitchen, which has a window overlooking the street. I saw the sunlight shining on the chrome fenders of the cars, and thought, ‘Gee, that’s pretty’. I said to myself, ‘Wow, this must be like everybody feels’. Life became not easier but simpler. The backdrop of self-analysis I had lived with disappeared. It’s like that joke: ‘When you’re hitting your head against a brick wall, it feels good when it stops’. When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you. It happened to me by imperceptible degrees and I could not really believe it; I could not really claim it for some time. I thought there must be something wrong. It’s like taking a drink of cold water when you are thirsty. Every tastebud on your tongue, every molecule in your body says thank you.
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Posted in Leonard Cohen
The job is infinite, the job is never-ending. When was it you gave up, fell away and became lazy? When did you realise it was too much for you? Not for others, perhaps, but for you, and therefore for us? When did you realise you didn’t even know what the job was?
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Posted in Writing
Today art can only be made from the starting point of that which, as far as Empire is concerned, doesn’t exist. Through its abstraction, art renders this inexistence visible. This is what governs the formal principle of every art: the effort to render visible to everyone that which for Empire (and so by extension for everyone, though from a different point of view), doesn’t exist.
— Badiou
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Posted in Writing
[The words] play, answer, echo one another. They reverberate. They reflect one another, they sparkle… And he is caught in the labyrinth of their mirrors, imprisoned in the interlacings of their reflections… He turns, mirrored from one to the other… This is the moment when we must become two persons. One half of me becomes detached from the other: a witness.
— Sarraute, Between Life and Death, quoted here
In fact, writing teaches, paradoxically, that someone else seems to write for us: that there is a ghostwriter in every hand […] The blankness of starting […] compels the one who writes to relive […] the queasy feeling that the definitive statement one is about to make is subject to interfering thoughts that seem to come from nowhere – and often subject to words rather than thoughts, words that turn you this way or that. The very instant of writing, Pascal’s fly buzzing, the book your eye chances to light on, a telephone call, the hangover of a dream, a literary echo – these are the stuff guiding the pen that claims authority. We notice, and are amused by, a slip of the tongue, and we have learned to study such parapraxes; but who can tell a slip of the pen that is always slipping on the pathless page?
— Geoffrey Hartman, quoted here
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Posted in Louis Sass
We sit beside each other, like two uncomfortable men on a couch. It’s the end of the day, dusk is settling. We can’t talk like women can, there’s an empty space between us, all around us. It’s up to us. What’s up to us? To make contact, to make life bearable, to give the evening, as they say, some semblance of meaning. You start. No, you start. But what is there to say?
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Posted in Writing
As if what was greatest about these artists (and there are others — Duras, say) is a kind of asceticism that leads them through their art as though it preceded it; as though writing (or painting, or filmmaking) was only a means, just as Zen can combine with both the art of archery and that of flower arranging. A kind of asceticism, a great sobriety that can lead a right-wing monarchist Catholic like Blanchot, young and privileged, very far from himself. Who is he, become writer? Who does he become?
Vague questions poorly posed. But I wonder in my foolishness whether there is not a kind of ethics in writing, in filmmaking, in painting… an art of life from the perspective of which (from its great heights) one would not laugh at Giacometti’s prose. This question, though: are we (this ‘we’ again — how laughable!) not too late for that, too late altogether? That asceticism must also be combined with a terrible self-mockery, an unsparing suspicion as the importance of writing, of painting, of filmmaking disappears altogether (only an idiot would call himself a poet; only a fool an artist. And who could call themselves a philosopher? Laughable, all laughable).
— Spurious
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Posted in Spurious
The fact that I am a woman clearly shapes my writing: thematically, in attitude, in awareness of social conditioning, marginality—but does not determine it exclusively. The writer, male or female, is only one partner in the process of writing. Language, in its full range, is the other, and is beyond gender […] The language a poet enters into belongs as much to the mothers as to the fathers.
— Waldrop, via here
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Posted in Waldrop
He was seventeen. An age with wide margins. And then one night, a little before day. And then one day, and then one night, and then nights, and days which were nights, the confrontation with death, the confrontation with the dawn and dusk of death, the confrontation with himself, with no one.
Jabés, The Book of Questions (tr. Waldrop)
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Posted in Jabés
Notes from a Room 