Author: Lars Iyer

– And how many new gods are still possible! As for myself, in whom the religious, that is to say, god-forming instinct, wants, from time to time, to come back to life, how differently, how variously the divine has revealed itself to me each time! So many strange things have passed before me in those timeless meoments that fall into one's life as if from the moon, when one no longer has any idea how old one is or how young one will yet be – I should not doubt that there are many kinds of gods.

Nietzsche, Will to Power, 1038

Every inner and outer occurrence of lunar nights possesses the nature of the unrepeatable. Every occurrence possesses an enhanced nature. It has the nature of an unselfish liberality and dispensation. Every communication is a sharing without envy. Every giving is a receiving. Every reception inextricably interwoven in the excitements of the night. To be this way is our only way to know what is happening. For the 'I' does not retain for itself any elixir of its past possession, scarcely a memory; the enhanced self radiates outward into a boundless selflessness, and these nights are full of the senseless feeling that something will have to come to pass that has never come to pass before, something that the impoverished reasonableness of the day cannot even visualise. And it is not the mouth that gushes forth but all the body from head to foot, and the body above the darkness of the earth and beneath the light of the sky, the body that is yoked to an excitement that oscillates between two stars. And the whispers we share with our companion are pervaded by an utterly unfamiliar sensuality, which is not some person's sensuality, but the sensuality of the earth, of all that compels our sensibility, the suddenly unveiled tenderness of the world that touches all our senses and that all our senses touch.

Robert Musil, from a discarded draft of The Man Without Qualities

I have taken a truth drug and seen through all the lies I tell myself. I have laughed so long, so loud, so incurably at myself and all my pompous moralistic self-deceit that I almost died. Every single thought seemed so shallow, so weak so facile, so laughable. Every thought  hovered between affirmation and gelation, laughing at itself, laughing so hard at itself, laughing at the thought of laughing at itself, laughing at the thought that this laughter is all there is…

[…] Blasphemy, switching from God to not God and back again became my greatest joke, my original sin… this loneliness, this unattainable outside, meant that I had to die. I had to be crucified, to wake up on the other side in a resurrection.

Aristodemus, in Philip Goodchild's On Philosophy as a Spiritual Exercise

Car driving is a religion. Modernism as a whole resembles an arena, a self-contained circuit. That's why Formula One races are so important. They are the modern proof of what St Paul the Apostle wrote: the godless go round in circles. The circular rides in the circus contradict the elemental hope, the key theme of the modern age: the primacy of the journey out, opening up new spheres. If technology is the perfect control of sequences of movement, this leaves us with only one progressive function: braking.

[…]

… the culture of soul journeys begins with the observation that individuals can lose their souls. In depression some people become separated from the principle that animates them[…] Shamanism became important here because they know the art of looking for the depressed person's lost free soul somewhere at the edge of the world, and bringing it back to its owner. The early movement experiments and shamanic soul journeys were meant to revive the alliance between humans and their animators, that is, their companion spirits, the forces that help to arouse enthusiasm[…]

… the car is a machine for increasing self-confidence. The difference is that an external engine causes the movement. The car gives its driver additional power and reach. I think we have to see the vehicles of humans in the first place as a means of idealization and intensification, and consequently as a kinetic anti-depressant[…] Two our of three movements are escapes: people drive to their lovers, they take trips to the countryside or on holiday, they go visiting, or they use the car for letting off steam. We could almost think people use the car as revenge on the heavy demands of settledness.

Peter Sloterdijk, Selected Exaggerations

I cherish what Thomas Bernhard does, but in my view it isn’t literature.

Ah yes, Thomas Bernhard, the room-clearer of Austrian literature.  “His suggestive power consists in his ability to exploit and assemble prejudices.  It affects me like an article from Der Spiegel.  I often think he is our best Spiegel correspondent in Austria.  Because the things he writes don’t tackle problems of narrative or form at all, they seem to me to be having an almost detrimental effect on art.  I found his last few books to be almost criminal in their shoddiness.  Apart from his suggestive power, which of course is unique to him and always extremely effective, there was nothing there.  But in his new book, Extinction, I am suddenly seeing the rudiments of description, of enthusiastic description of locales and spaces, which for me is of course the most important thing in literature.  Otherwise it is of course difficult not think of this drama about the lord of a castle as [Ludwig Ganghofer’s 1895 novel] Castle Hubertus, only with a negative spin.  But I was cheered and relieved by those descriptions of the orangery or of the kitchen, because I was able to enjoy a feeling of parity.  Of course I wish I could approve of him; I have indeed revered him for 25 years as a kind of secular Austrian saint.

Handke on Bernhard, from an article in 1986 (letter 501 here)

OLDHAM: […] the ways that I do things are not in tune with how I can do them commercially. My dream 10 years ago would've been to continue to write and record songs in record/album form for years to come, but now records aren't what they were then—and so it doesn't actually feel very good to make a record of songs.

RACHEL: Is it because it feels like making records doesn't have the same kind of cultural value to people than it did before, so you're kind of working on this ephemeral thing that no one wants?

OLDHAM: Absolutely. It feels kind of disrespectful to the songs. It's good when someone says, "Would you write a song for this purpose," or "would you record a song for this purpose," or "would you help me realize this song," again, for this purpose.

Will Oldham, interviewed here.

…present-day literary production has attained a nadir and a level of tastelessness not seen in centuries. I hope you also realize this. Nothing but kitschy and mindless pap is printed; over so many years it gets quite depressing. The writers are artless morons, and the critics are sentimental gossips. I myself cling to life in an atmosphere of envy and hatred by means of uninterrupted work. This life, the life of work, is for me the greatest pleasure imaginable.

Thomas Bernhard writing to Siegfried Unseld (via)

Everything is possible, and yet nothing is. All is permitted, and yet again, nothing. No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent. There is an explanation for everything, and yet there is none. Everything is both real and unreal, normal and absurd, splendid and insipid. There is nothing worth more than anything else, nor any idea better than any other.

Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more republicans, no more socialists, no more royalists, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more Bolsheviks, no more politicians, no more proletarians, no more democrats, no more bourgeois, no more aristocrats, no more armies, no more police, no more fatherlands, enough of all these imbecilities, no more anything, no more anything, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

We hope something new will come from this, being exactly what we no longer want, determinedly less putrid, less selfish, less materialistic, less obtuse, less immensely grotesque. 

Francis Picabia, DADA Manifesto

God is dead. A world disintegrated. […] An epoch disintegrates. A thousand-year-old culture disintegrates. There are no columns and no supports, no foundations  any more – they have all been blown up. […] Above is below, below is above. The transvaluation of values came to pass. Christianity was struck down. The principles of logic, of centrality, unity, and reason were unmasked as postulates of a power-craving theology. The meaning of the world disappeared. The purpose of the world – its reference to a supreme being who keeps the world together – disappeared. 

Hugo Ball, lecture on Kandinsky

Until now we thought nihilism was tied to nothingness. How ill-considered that was: nihilism is tied to being. Nihilism is the impossibility of being done with it and of finding a way out even in that end that is nothingness. It says the impotence of nothingness, the false brilliance of its victories; it tells us that when we think nothingness we are still thinking being. […] Nihilism tells us its final and rather grim truth: it tells of the impossibility of nihilism. 

Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation

To write is to affirm at the very least the superiority of this order over that order. But superiority according to what code of values? Any answer will necessarily contradict complete nihilism. For the complete nihilist, suicide, not the creation of significant forms, is the only consistent gesture.

Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction

W: Well… I don’t know. I’ve had comedians tell me that all comedians wish they were musicians… which I’m not sure if it’s true or not, but a comedian did tell me that… and I know that on some level, among say The Marx Brothers or Abbot And Costello or The Little Rascals or the stand-up comedy of Steve Martin or Richard Prior, when you’re experiencing that, the impression is they’re living on the correct plane of existence. Living moment to moment, and very quick with their brains, quick with their voices, or in the case of Harpo Marx, quick with their actions. And also using that speed of thought to turn dark situations into light situations. So they’re the ultra-wizards of society, because they can conquer the most complex and devastating of issues and turn them into something that’s nothing but laughter, really just release the power of those things.

Will Oldham, interviewed

Chosen by God … for damnation?

He who has no secret, has nothing to lose.

Human stupidity is an expression of humanness itself.

the most natural form of openness to the world is naivete.

Yes damns no. No postpones yes.

Time – bleeding tumour of eternity.

Tragic love does not exist. Love is tragic.

Life is for a life span, death is for eternity.

Words don't have to understand themselves.

Truth is a myth of thought.

From the bottom you cannot fall.

[…] Pain is in some ways the condensation of time, a state produced by the fact that time is lacking.

If thinking is painful, what else is a thinker, but a masochist?

A diary entry: 'To grasp time as a summons, for one may burrow into memories. To grasp space as a cult zone. To find correlations. Not to seek, but to find. With discrete steps forward to predestine one's path'.

The meaning of life is what remains when life loses its meaning.

From Róbert Gál, Signs and Symptoms

A child cannot love, for it doesn't know what it means not to love.

Heavens induced anxiety, screaming into the heavens.

A Cabbalist who has no idea about Cabbala.

The life-long battle with one's whole life.

From Róbert Gál, On Wing

The paranoid as Buddhist: Schopenhauer’s uniqueness.

The thinker has emptiness around him. He pushes everything away until there is enough emptiness around him, and then starts leaping from this to that. In his leaps, he creates his road. The ground is sure only because he steps on it; everything in between is doubt.

The illuminating mind is like lightning, it flashes rapidly over the greatest distances. It leaves everything aside and shoots for one thing, which it does not know before illuminating it. Its effectivity begins when it strikes. Without some minimum of destruction, without terror, it never takes shape for human beings. Illumination per se is too boundless and too shapeless. The fate of the new knowledge depends on the place of the striking.

All days referring to days that will never come.

The unbroken, how do they do it? The unshaken, what are they made of? When it is past, what do they breathe? When it is still, what do they hear? When the felled one does not stand up again, how do they walk? Where do they find a word? What wind blows over their eyelashes? Who opens the dead ear for them? Who breathes the frozen name? When the sun of eyes goes out, where do they find the light?

It might be that only the unhappiest man is truly capable of some happiness, and this could almost seem like justice – but then there are the dead, and they seem to be silent about that.

I knew him when he walked down the street with hateful fingers and snarled. He was still young, and he thought he needed no one. The distaste he felt towards aging passers-by influenced his motion; he walked along in kicks as it were. He noticed everyone, because he disliked everyone. As for friends, he knew – and he was fortunate – that he had no friends. It rained on everyone, and it humiliated him that the others felt the very same drops on their skin as he did.

He would like to start from scratch. Where is scratch?

The new, the actual discoveries about animals are possible only because our pride as God’s highest creature is a thing of the past. It turns out that we are really God’s highest creature, that is to say, God’s executioner in his world.

‘The Oriental church fathers claimed that Christ was uglier than any man who ever lived. For in order to redeem mankind, he had to take upon himself all of Adam’s sins and even his physical blemishes.’

Wretched the man who knows. How wretched God must be, all-knowing.

More than ever before, there are things in the world that would like to be said.

The prestige that writers draw from their martyrs: from Holderlin, Kleist, Walser. Thus with all their claim to freedom, vastness, and inventiveness, they merely form a sect.

I wonder whether among those who build their leisurely, secure, linear academic lives on the lives of writers who lived in poverty and despair – I wonder whether even one of those people is ashamed.

The end, no matter how one glosses over it, is so senseless that no attempt at explaining Creation will mean anything, not even the concept of God as a playing child: the child would have lost interest long ago.

Stupidity has become less interesting, it spreads in the twinkling of an eye and is always the same in everyone.

[…] But he is naturally so much, that he needs a different balance from other people. It is not stilts that he walks on, he always rests roundly upon himself as a gigantic world-globe of the mind; and in order to understand him, one has to orbit him like a small moon, a humiliating role, but the only suitable one in his case.

Everywhere, two paces from your daily paths, there is a different air sceptically waiting for you.

There is a wailing wall of humanity, and that is where I stand.

So long as one says ‘tomorrow’, one means ‘always’; that’s why one loves saying ‘tomorrow’.

It is true that he seduces one into taking leaps. But who is capable of them? Lichtenberg is a flea with a human mind. He has that incomparable strength to leap away from himself – where will he leap to next?

To find an old man who has forgotten how to count.

What are you ashamed of when you read Kafka? You’re ashamed of your strength.

Not to wait until dreams become laments.

God put the rib back into Adam’s side, blew out his breath, and deformed him back into clay.

The last people will not weep.

What if it should turn out that we, the everlasting penitents for the future, had lived in the best of all possible time!

If people were to keep trying, even a thousand times, to examine how we managed to have so much freedom, so much air, so many ideas!

Many worm-thoughts: cut in two, they continue to grow.

This whole immense life, multiplying endlessly – for us? Only God can believe that.

I always know better, I have a terribly accurate knowledge of people; yet this knowledge does not interest me, anyone who has lived a while could have it. I am interested in what refutes this knowledge, what annuls it. I would like to turn a usurer into a benefactor, a bookkeeper into a poet. I am interested in the leap, the surprising metamorphosis.

There is nothing more to be found, no unknown species of man. Now is the time for entangling all that we know.

The Stoics overcome death by death. The death one commits on oneself doesn’t harm one any more, so one need not fear it.

Pause until the rediscovery of eternity.

Long before the creation of the world, there were philosophers. They were lying in ambush in order to be able to say that everything is good. For hadn’t they thought of it? And how could something they had thought of fail to be good? As their thought, they brought forth the dubious formation, and they giggled over the correctness of their prophesy.

It’s long, long past that he lived under cover of hatred.

It is possible that we are seeing a false history. Perhaps the correct one can be revealed only when death is beaten.

When one knows how false everything is, when one is capable of measuring the extent of falseness, then and only then is stubbornness the best thing: endless striding of the tiger along the bars of the cage so as not to miss the single tiny instant of salvation.

From Elias Canetti’s The Human Province

You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation: close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind; in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob.

Charlotte Bronte, Vilette

The redescription in Updike’s criticism is obviously of a high order, and [of] a certain kind of generosity, too—that’s to say, he was a very patient and hospitable quoter of other people’s texts. But I always felt that there was a certain kind of ungenerousness in Updike’s work, too. The maddening equilibrium of his critical voice—never getting too upset or too excited—enacted, I always felt, a kind of strategy of containment, whereby everything could be diplomatically sorted through, and somehow equalized and neutralized, and put onto the same shelf—and always one rung below Updike himself. That’s perhaps unfair. But I think his fiction worked in the same way, too, despite the passionate attention of his prose: It existed to clothe the world in superb words, to contain it, somehow.

James Wood on Updike

Part of the process of generating the precariat comes from dumbing down the educational system. The game is to maximise profits, by maximising 'throughput'. In the United Kingdom, hundreds of publicly funded university courses provide academic qualifications even though the subjects are non-academic. The Taxpayer's Alliance in 2007 identified 401 such 'non-courses', including a BA Honours Degree in 'outdoor adventure with philosophy', offered at University College Plymouth St Mark and Saint John […]

From Guy Standing's The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class