It used to be possible to say: we cannot know God but he has made himself known to us, and at that point analogies from the world of personal relations would enter the scene and help us. But somehow, the situation has deteriorated; as before, we cannot know, but now it seems that he does not make himself known, even as enemy.
— Altizer & Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God
Posted in Thomas Altizer, Writing
To be human is to be amongst those whose thoughts we don’t know; to be in the dark. Perhaps this condition is the source of our urge to speak. Language, born of absence, filling a lack, generating light. To be human is to be alone, and also to know that we are in thrall to thoughts we call our own, yet are barely aware of. Perhaps this very unknowingness is the source of writing. Writing from out of a void, to fill a void. Both speaking and writing, then, veil ignorance of ourselves and of others even as they display it, even as they ameliorate it.
Posted in Mark Thwaite
‘Do you know what I really think?’ he blurts, ‘my own opinion? I think time is running short. I think time is running short. I think there are forces of evil in the world. I think that global capitalism is just, like, one inch away from being everywhere. I think now is not the time to be frittering away playing in a silly-assed post-rock band. I think everything you do in the face of this is inadequate.’ Everything? ‘Yeah!’ he exclaims. ‘Which is good, it’s all good, it’s good to make feeble attempts, right? I think that’s what they are. It’s like throwing yourself up against a big fucking wall and the wall is just getting bigger and bigger…’
Posted in Writing
But at the same time, a death that results in being represents an absurd insanity, the curse of existence—which contains within itself both death and being and is neither being nor death. Death ends in being: this is man’s hope and his task, because nothingness itself helps to make the world, nothingness is the creator of the world in man as he works and understands. Death ends in being: this is man’s laceration, the source of his unhappy fate, since by man death comes to being and by man meaning rests on nothingness.
— Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ (tr. Davis)
Posted in Blanchot
‘See here, my precious, see how I am organising for fear, see how I cannot touch those primary laboratory elements without immediately trying to put a hope together. So as of yet my inner metamorphosis makes no sense. In such a metamorphosis, I lose everything I have had, and what I have had has been myself – all that I have is what I am. And what am I now? I am: a standing in the presence of fear. I am: what I have seen. I don’t understand and I am afraid to understand, the matter of the world frightens me, with its planets and its cockroaches.’
— Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. (tr. Sousa)
Posted in Lispector
Brod, who could lend a touch of kitsch to anything, described Kafka’s stay in Zürau as an ‘escape from the world into purity’. He also viewed it – he wrote to his friend – as a ‘successful and admirable enterprise’. It would be hard to find two adjectives that irritated Kafka more. He replied to Brod with a closely argued letter in which he explained that the only sensible solution he had ever reached in his life was ‘not suicide, but the thought of suicide’. If he didn’t go beyond the thought, it was due to a further reflection: ‘You who can’t manage to do anything, you want to do this?’ And here was his closest friend speaking to him of success, of admiration, of purity.
— Roberto Calasso, K. (tr. Brock)
Posted in Kafka, Roberto Calasso
In the morning they came up out of the ravine and took to the road again. He’d carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a travelling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Posted in Cormac McCarthy
As in all of Beckett after the great crisis of 1945-50, when he gradually realised that the ‘dark he had struggled to keep under’, as he wrote to a friend, was actually what he had to write about rather than escape from, a voice searches for the right formulation, does not find it, and gives up, but the search becomes the work. To read such pieces is not to enter another world but to enact a desperate movement in the inner reaches of one’s being and to find, at the end, that the enactment of failure has led not to triumph but to a quite physical sense of release.
Posted in Gabriel Josipovici
Worse still (and heading worstward) what about ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’, surely the most misread sequence in all of Beckett? He would have been horrified to see it appropriated as a catch-all stoic maxim (e.g. ‘OK, you’re destined to fail, but never mind, keep trying, keep failing in such a way that your failures come closer to success’). Beckett would have poured scorn on this sort of chocolate-box philosophy. The intended meaning is, directly and literally, ‘fail more fully, more catastrophically. Absolutize your failure.’ Not especially Guardian-friendly, is it?
— From a comment here.
Posted in Beckett
There’s something else going on – an asceticism, but in a novel form. If Beckett suffered from depression, he was able to make it an instrument better than most. Which reminds me of George Steiner’s thought that Proust and Dostoevsky were artists who used their own illnesses as great perceptive instruments. It’s in Beckett’s rejections (that we start to see in the first volume of letters), for instance going from a positive to a negative on Jane Austen, that we start to see something like depression become a true instrument.
— From a comment here
Posted in Beckett
Notes from a Room 