Notes from a Room

Sacrifice is heavy but relinquishment is light. There are mysteries in this that we’ve been allowed to glimpse, aren’t there? There’s a way of life some people can only reach beyond the point of no return, which is the wish to die. There’s a way to live lightly, almost without yourself, smiling at your other self’s desires. For us: with and without each other, in mutual surrender to luck. Is that how we’ll live when we give up grasping, when we give up hating?

You had a run of luck, you found the right people, the right street, the right flat. Dates fell into place. Things could come together after all, it sometimes happened. There was some interplay between what you did and what happened to you. Currents could gather under the froth of your failure. Or a strange synchronicity would reveal itself, as when random numbers start to form a pattern. It wasn’t that you made your life or that life made you: but sometimes acts and events coalesced, pulling you into the world and the world into you, hiding you in the world’s inner space.

Sometimes a small shift seemed to change everything and the effect was simple, like night turning into day. Some turn of direction or a modulation of frequencies. What was revealed then, what new view opened up? But it wasn’t quite a question of revelation, more like a possibility actuated and so trailing new possibilities behind it. You’d turn your head and see something you’d sensed all along, or it would see you. Those changes made a gentle mockery of you when you put yourself in a position to receive them.

Sometimes things came together when you needed it, even when things seemed to go wrong. Sometimes things went wrong in order to come together. There was a current beneath acts and events that could carry you or turn against you. When it found you, or when you found it, and it brought you towards other people, you called it grace, in the old style.

Luck came only through playing. So how could you start playing, how emerge from your refusal to play, from your grey timid life? How else but by a stroke of luck that carried you with it? What game were you playing, what game was playing you? What did you find as you played, as you renewed your search for luck? You crossed a line and found something that was searching for itself. When you got lucky luck played its game with you, without you. You got lucky: you were ruled by a game that didn’t know its own rules. You got lucky: your luck ran through your fingers…

I am profoundly convinced that the only antidote which can make the reader forget the everlasting ‘I’s’ the author is going to write, is perfect sincerity. Will I have the courage to recount what is humiliating without salvaging my self-esteem with an infinite series of prefatory remarks? I hope so.

— Stendhal (via here)

My head is heavy, it must be the barometric pressure declining. My muscles are twitching, and I am nonetheless on the mend from something. When I turn, I find myself strangely estranged from my self. And then I turn again, and recognize something. The point is to keep turning, and not to look back, at least not now. No, not now.

I’m not at all sure that this blog still makes sense. But I guess I will give it a try for a while.

— Falkenburger’s Dream

You longed for the days of heretics, for the days of revolutionaries, didn’t you? When there was still such a thing as heretics and revolutionaries. As long as it was a quick death, you said, a quick chop, a merciful end, you wouldn’t care if it was noble. Sometimes you even longed for a death at the hands of a criminal, didn’t you? Take whatever you want, you’d say, just make sure you kill me. Or the police! I don’t care what you think I’ve done, you’d say, spreading out your arms, shoot me just in case, shoot me now.

There was a suburb, wasn’t there? A suburb under a lifeless Scandinavian sky. Laid out in a grid once and for all. The suburb where your parents’ house was.

There was a wet black path through a darkening grove that seemed to take forever to walk through. Nothing stirred. A sort of eerie stillness over everything, resisting feelings. A standardised suburb in the middle of nowhere, managed down to the ground: a conquest of spontaneity. Words meant so little in a place like that, could do so little, so why talk? It was hard to explain to people, wasn’t it? Along a clean empty lane, in the gloaming. Nothing, said the dusk each evening. Wasn’t that where your dusk dread began?

You walked through the grid, towards the forest, with me trailing behind you, or pulling you along, or hovering above you. You’d sit on your damp bench by the pond, the forgotten bench that was hidden behind the reeds, that you had to negotiate your way through the tall wet grass to get to. You’d open a beer and sit until you got cold.