There will never be any summer any more, and I am weary of everything. I stay because I am too weak to go. I crawl on because it is easier than to stop. I put my face to the window. There is nothing out there but the blackness and the sound of rain. Neither when I shut my eyes can I see anything. I am alone…. There is nothing else in my world but my dead heart and brain within me and the rain without.
Edward Thomas
But it is always a question of whether I wish to avoid these glooms…. These 9 weeks give one a plunge into deep waters; which is a little alarming, but full of interest…. There is an edge to it which I feel is of great importance…. One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth.
Virginia Woolf
The more I am spent, ill, a broken pitcher, by so much more am I an artist – a creative artist… this green shoot springing from the roots of an old felled trunk, these are such abstract things that a kind of melancholy remains within us when we think that one could have created life at less cost than creating art
Van Gogh
I am so ill – so terribly, hopelessly ILL in body and mind, that I feel I CANNOT live … until I subdue this fearful agitation, which if continued, will either destroy my life, or, drive me hopelessly mad.
I roll on like a ball, with this exception, that contrary to the usual laws of motion I have no friction to content with in my mind, and of course have some difficulty in stopping myself when there is nothing else to stop me…. I am almost sick and giddy with the quantity of things in my head – trains of thought beginning and branching to infinity, crossing each other, and all tempting and wanting to be worked out.
John Ruskin
She talked almost without stopping for two or three days, paying no attention to anyone in the room or anything said to her. For about a day what she said was coherent; the sentences meant something, though it was nearly all wildly insane. Then gradually it became completely incoherent, a mere jumble of dissociated words.
Leonard Woolf on Virginia
Karl McDonald reviews Wittgenstein Jr for the Independent.
Wittgenstein Jr featured is one of the books to look out for in September, according to Flavorwire and Ask Men.
M. A. Orthofer on Wittgenstein Jr at the Complete Review.
Dogma now out in Turkish translation.
New interview with me by David Lea at the London Review of Books blog.
Wittgenstein Jr is not out until 4th September, but it's available now from Melville House.
Starred review for Wittgenstein Jr at Publishers Weekly.
First review of Wittgenstein Jr, at Kirkus Reviews.
London launch for Wittgenstein Jr, with Ray Monk, London Review Bookshop, 28th August, 7PM. Book tickets and more details here.
Wittgenstein Jr on The Millions' Most Anticipated list.
New interview with me at The Honest Ulsterman.
… despite antennae exceedingly alert to the changing 'spirit of the age', I apprehended too late certain key shifts. Aware, early on, of the widening authority of the mathematical and experimental sciences, intensely involved in the 'language-revolution' and the coming of the new media of meaning, I none the less did not identify rigorously the underlying tectonic drift. Educated in a hypertrophied reverence for the classics, in that near-worship of the 'titans' of thought, music, literature and the arts, so characteristic of emancipated central European Judaism, I felt committed to the canonic, the confirmed and the 'immortal' (those immortels mummified in the French Academy!). It took too long before I understood that the ephemeral, the fragmentary, the derisive, the self-ironising are the key modes of modernity; before I realised that the interactions between high and popular culture, notably via the film and television – now the commanding instruments of general sensibility and, it may be, of invention – had largely replaced the monumental pantheon. Influential as they are, deconstruction and postmodernism are themselves only symptoms, bright bubbles at the surface of a much deeper mutation. It is, as I have suggested, of the related classical impulse in art and poetry to endure, to achieve timelessness which are, today, in radical question. It is the transformation of these ontological-historical categories, in Kant's sense of the word, it is the ebbing of ideals and performative hierarchies instrumental since the pre-Socratics, which define what I have called 'the epilogue' but which others acclaim as 'the new age'. There is too much I have grasped too late in the day. Too often my activity as a writer and teacher, as a critic and scholar, has been, consciously or not, an in memoriam, a curatorship of remembrance. But could it be otherwise after the Shoah.
George Steiner, Errata
If I were to resume in a single phrase the difference between messianic time and apocalyptic time, I would say that the messianic is not the end of time but the time of the end. What is messianic is not the end of time but the relation of every moment, every kairos, to the end of time and to eternity.
[…] In the Judaic tradition there is a distinction between two times and two worlds: the olam hazzeh, the time stretching from the creation of the world to its end, and the olam habba, the time that begins after the end of time. Both terms are present, in their Greek translations, in Paul’s Letters. Messianic time, however – the time in which the apostle lives and the only one that interests him – is neither that of the olam hazzeh nor that of the olam habba. It is, instead, the time between those two times, when time is divided by the messianic event (which is for Paul the Resurrection).
… what is at issue is a time that pulses and moves within chronological time, that transforms chronological time from within. On the one hand it is the time that time takes to end. But on the other hand it is the time that remains, the time which we need to end time, to confront our customary image of time and to liberate ourselves from it. In the one case, the time in which we believe we live separates us from what we are and transforms us into powerless spectators of our own lives. In the other case, however, the time of the messiah is the time that we ourselves are, the dynamic time where, for the first time, we grasp time, we grasp the time that is ours, grasp that we are nothing but that time. This time is not some other time located in an improbably present or future time. On the contrary, it is the only real time, the only time we will ever have.
Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom
Once, the poet knew how to account for his poetry (‘To open it through prose’, as Dante puts it), and the critic was also a poet. Now, the critic has lost access to the work of creation and thus gets revenge by presuming to judge it, while the poet no longer knows how to save his own work and thus discounts this incapacity by blindly consigning himself to the frivolity of an angel.
Agamben, Nudities
One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin's posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical.
Agamben, State of Exception
What had happened [with the appearance of consciousness – LI]? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged weapon cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn one edge toward himself.
Despite his new eyes, man was still rooted in matter, his soul spun into it and subordinated to its blind laws. And yet he could see matter as a stranger, compare himself to all phenomena, see through and locate his votal processes. He comes to nature as an unbidden guest, in vain extending his arms to beg conciliation with his maker: Nature answers no more; it performed a miracle with man, but later did not know him. He has lost his right of residence in the universe, has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and been expelled from Paradise. He is mighty in the near world, but curses his might as purchased with his harmony of soul, his innocence, his inner peace in life's embrace.
Peter Zappfe, from 'The Last Messiah'
Whether we are sovereign or enslaved in our being, what of it? Our species will still look to the future and see no need to abdicate its puppet dance of replication in a puppet universe where the strings pull themselves. What a laugh that we would do anything else, or could do anything else. That our lives might be a paradox and a horror would not really be a secret too terrible to know for minds that know only what they want to know. The hell of human consciousness is only a philosopher's bedtime story we can hear each night and forget each morning when we awake to go to school or to work or wherever we may go day after day after day. What do we care about the horror of being insufferably aware we are alive and will die … the horror of shadows without selves enshrouding the earth … ort he horror of puppet-heads bobbing in the wind and disappearing into a dark sky like lost balloons?
[…] Almost nobody declares that an ancestral curse contaminates us in utero and pollutes our very existence. Doctors do not weep in the delivery room, or not often. They do not lower their heads and say, 'The stopwatch has started'. The infant may cry, if things went right. But time will dry its eyes; time will take care of it. Time will take care of everyone until there are none of to take care of.
from Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
While consciousness brought us out of our coma in the antural, we still like to think that, however aloof we are from other living things, we are not in essence wholly alienated from them. We do try and fit in with the rest of creation, living and breeding like any other animal or vegetable. It is no fault of ours that we were made as we were made – experiments in a parallel being. This was not our choice. We did not volunteer to be as we are.
[…] No other life forms know they are alive, and neither do they know they will die. This is our curse alone. Without this hex upon our heads, we would never have withdrawn as far as we have from the natural […] Everywhere around us are natural habitats, but within us is the shiver of startling and dreadful things. Simply put: We are not from here. If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us. Nothing in nature needs us.
[…] We are aberrations – beings born undead, neither one thing nor another, or two things at once … uncanny things that poison the world by sowing our madness everywhere we go, glutting daylight and darkness with incorporeal obscenities. From across an immeasurable divide, we brought the supernatural into all that is manifest. Like a faint haze it floats around us. We keep company with ghosts.
from Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
Death – do we really believe it is part of the order of our lives? We say that we do. But when it becomes lucent to our imagination, how natural does it feel? W. A. Mozart's attributed last words are apropros here: 'The taste of death is on my tongue. I feel something which is not of this world'. Death is not like survival and procreation. it is more like a visitation from a foreign and engimatic sphere, one to which we are connected by our consciousness. No consciousness, no death. No death, no stories with a beginning, middle and an end.
from Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the mdist of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
H.P. Lovecraft, opening paragraph of 'Call of Cthulhu'
Fairly new interview with me at Biblioklept.
Lars Iyer's Blog 