Author: Lars Iyer

Moving Ivan Brunetti interview.

Near unique Jandek interview.

To have a sense of the perpetual only in the negative, in what does harm, in what thwarts being. Perpetuity of threat, of frustration, of longed-for and failed ecstasy, of an absolute glimpsed and rarely achieved; yet sometimes transcended, skipped over, as when you escape God …

The superior saints did not insist on working miracles; they acknowledged them reluctantly, as if someone had forced their hand. Every time we come upon something existing, real, full, we want to have the bells rung, as on the occasion of great victgories or great calamities.

You have dared call Time your 'brother', take as your ally the worst of torturers. On this point, our differences explode: you walk in step with Time, while I precede or drag after it, never adopting its manners, unable to think of it without experiencing something like a speculative sorrow.

The basis of society, of any society, is a certain pride in obedience. When this pride no longer exists, the society collapses.

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

I do not struggle against the world, I struggle against a greater force, against my weariness of the world.

My mission is to kill time, and time's is to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

The obession of lastness apropos of everything, the last as category, as constitutive form of the mind, the last as category, as constitutive form of the mind, as original deformity, even as revelation …

I long ago used up whatever religious resources I had. Deisscation or purification? I am the last to say. No god lingers in my blood …

At the bird market. What power, what determination in these tiny frantic bodies! Life resides in this bit of nothing which animates a tuft of matter, and which nonetheless emerges from matter itself and perishes with it. But the perplexity remains: impossible to explain this fever, this perpetual dance, this representation, this spectacle which life affords itself., What a theatre, breath!

All these people in the street make me think of exhausted gorillas, every one of them tired of imitating man!

Hesiod: 'The gods have hidden from men the sources of life'. Have they done well, or ill? One thing is certain: mortals would have not have had the courage to continue after such a revelation.

[…] Deliverance? One does not attain it, one is engulfed by it, smothered in it. Nirvana itself -an asphyxia! Though the gentlest of all.

As soon as we consult a specialist, we realize we are the lowest of the low, the reject of Creation, a crud. We should not know what ails us, still less what we die of. Any specification in this realim is impious, for by a word it does away with that minimum of mystery which death and even life are meant to conceal.

Fever inspires a man's work – for how long? Often passion causes certain works to date, whereas others, produced by exhaustion, survive age after age. Timeless lassitude, eternity of cold disgust!

The proof that man loathes man? Enough to be in a crowd, in order to feel that you side with all the dead planets.

The only profitable conversations are with enthusaisms who have ceased being so – with the ex-naive… Calmed down at last, they have taken, willy-nilly, the decisive step toward Knowledge – that impersonal version of disappointment.

He who, having frequented men, retains the slightest illusion about them, should be condemned to reincarnation, in order to learn how to observe, to see, to catch up …

In order to mold man, it was not with water but with tears that Prometheus mixed his clay […]

Man is unacceptable.

The crucial moment of the historical drama is out of our reach. We are merely its harbingers, its heralds – the trumpets of a Judgement without a Judge.

At this moment, I am alone. What more can I want? A more intense happiness does not exist. Yes: that of hearing, by dint of silence, my solitude enlarge.

'To make an attempt upon one's days' – how accurate this French expression for suicide. What we possess is just that: days, days, and that is all we can attack.

Desolation is so linked to what I feel that it acquires the facility of a reflex.

It is not normal to be alive, since the living being as such exists and is real only when threatened. Death in short is no more than the cessation of an anomaly.

A curious dream over which I prefer not to linger. Someone or other would have dissected it. What a mistake! Le the nights bury the nights.

Hope is the normal form of delirium.

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

The originality of a being is identified with his particular way of losing his footing […]

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?

To torment oneself in the middle of the night, to perform every known sort of exercise, to swallow pills, tablets, capsules – why? In hopes of eclipsing that phenomenon, that deadly apparition known as consciousness. Only a conscious being, only a weakling, could have invented such an expression as to be engulfed in sleep, a gulf indeed but a rare, inaccesible one, a forbidden, sealed gulf, into which we would so like to vanish!

If the waves began to reflect, they would suppose that they were advancing, that they had a goal, that they were making progress, that they were working for the Sea's good, and they would not fail to elaborate a philosophy as stupid as their zeal.

In hell, the least populous but severest circle of all must be the one where you cannot forget Time for a single moment.

At the Jardin des Plantes, I stood for a long time meeting the immemorial gaze of an alligator's eyes.What enchants me in these reptiles is their impenetrable hebetude, which allies them to stones: as if they came before life, preceded without heralding it, as if they even fled from it …

To die at sixty or at eighty is harder than at ten or thirty. Habituation to life, there's the rub. For life is a vice – the greatest one of all. Which explains why we have so much difficulty ridding ourselves of it.

He who has not suffered is not a being: at most, a creature.

[…] boredom evokes an evil without site or support, only that indefinable nothing that erodes you … A pure erosion, whose imperceptible effect slowly transforms you into a ruin unnoticed by others and almost unnoticed by yourself.

We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. they alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. […]

Time corrodes not only everything that lives, but even itself, as if, weary of continuing and exasperated by the Possible, its best part, it aspired to extirpate that as well.

To publish groans, exclamantions, fragments … makes everyone comfortable. The author thereby puts himself in a position of inferiority in relation to the reader, and the reader is grateful to him for it.

Looking at someone's photographs taken at different ages, you glimpse why Time has been called a magician. The operations it accomplishes are incredible, stupefying – miracles, but miracles in reverse. This magician is actually a demolisher, a sadistic angel with the human face in his keeping.

What you write gives only an incomplete image of what you are, because the words loom up and come to life only when you are at the highest or the lowest point of yourself.

from E.M Cioran's, Drawn and Quartered

In a traditional system, culture exists only in the act of its transmission, that is, in the living act of its tradition. There is no discontinuity between past and present, between old and new, because every object transmits at every moment, without residue, the system of beliefs and notions that has found expression in it. To be more precise, in a system of this type it is not possible to speak of a culture independently of its transmission, because there is no accumulated treasure of ideas and precepts that constitute the separate object of transmssion and whose reality is in itself a value. In a mythical-traditional system, an absolute identity exists between the act of transmission and the thing transmitted, in the sense that there is no other ethical, religious, or aesthetic value outside the act itself of transmission.

An inadequation, a gap between the act of transmission and the thing to be transmitted, and a valuing of the latter independently of the former only when tradition loses its vital force, and constitute the foundation of a characteristic phenomenon of non-traditional societies: the accumulation of culture. For, contrary to what one might think at first sight, the breaking of tradition does not al all mean the loss or devaluation of the past: it is, rather, likely that only now the past can reveal itself with a weight and an influence that it never had before. Loss of tradition means that the past has lost its transmissibility, and so long as no new way has been found to entire into relation with it, it can only be the object of accumulation from now on.

[…] it is the transmissibility of culture that, by endowing culture with an immediately perceptible meaning and value, allows man to move freely toward the future wihout being hindered by the burden of the past.

from Agamben's Man Without Content

[A]n oft-quoted passage from The Recognitions, spoken by the novel’s protagonist, Wyatt Gwyon:

This passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, shake hands with the latest novelist, get hold of the latest painter, devour . . . what is it? What is it they want from a man that they didn’t get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he’s done his work? What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology?

[…] Gaddis, who justified his decision to enter the public sphere later in life by saying that ‘the time of being the reclusive unapproachable writer is not only over but to press it on could very well appear as a coy plea for attention’.

From a review of Gaddis's letters by Emmet Stinson

… any revolution prevails only if it pits itself against an unreal order. The same is true of any advent, any historical turning point. The Goths did not conquer Rome, they conquered a corpse. The Barbarians' only merit was to have had a nose …

Despite everything, it would be sweet to know that twilight success in which we might escape the succession of generations and the parade of tomorrows, and when, on the ruins of historical time, existence, at last identical with itself, will again become what it was before turning into history.

As long as history follows a more or less normal course, every event appears as a whim, a faux pas of Time; once it changes cadence, the slightest incident assumes the scope of a sign.

If we insist that history must have a meaning let us seek it in the curse that weighs upon it, and nowhere else.

After so many defeats and conquests, man is beginning to put himself out of date. He still deserves some interest only insofar as he is tracked and cornered, sinking ever deeper. If he continues, it is because he hasn't the strength to capitulate, to suspend his desertion forward (the very definition of history).

What ruins us, no, what has ruined us, is the thirst for a destiny, for any destiny whatever …

The charm of a life without reflexion, of existence as such being forbidden to us, we cannot bear that others should delight in it. Deserters of innocence, we turn against whoever still resides within it, against all the beings that, indifferent to our adventure, loll in their blessed torpor. And the gods – have we not turned against them as well, outraged to see that they were conscious without suffering from the fact, while for us consciousness and shipwreck are one and the same thing.

No more schools; on the other hand, courses in oblivion and unlearning to celebrate the virtues of inattention and the delights of amnesisa.

What cannot be translated into mystical language does not deserve to be experienced.

It is my elocutionary defects, my stammerings, my jerky delivery, my art of mumbling – it is my voice, my transeuropean r's, that have impelled me by reaction to take some care with what I write and to make myself more or less worthy of an idiom I mistreat each time I open my mouth.

One does not write because one has something to say but because one wants to say something.

Existing is plagiarism.

True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.

To exist is a colossal phenomenon – which has no meaning. This is how I should define the stupefaction in which I live day after day.

We must censure the later Nietzsche for a panting excess in the writing, the absence of rests.

At the Zoo. – All these creatures have a decent bearing, except the monkeys. One feels that man is not far off.

Musical Offering, Art of the Fugue, Goldberg Variations: I love in music, as in philosophy and everything, what pains by insistence, by recurrence, by that interminable return which reaches the ultimate depths of being and provokes there a barely endurable delectation.

To send someone a book is to commit a burglary – a case of breaking and entering. It is to trample down his solitude, what he holds most sacred, for it is to oblige him to desist from himself in order to think about your thoughts.

To be is to be cornered.

E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

Since I crossed the Rhine, I seem to be dead inside, not a single feeling comes the surface. I'm an auomaton; my soul has been removed…. There are no mountains here with an open view. Hill after hill and broad valleys, everywhere a hollow mediocrity; I can't get used to this landscape, and the city is abominable…. Incessant headaches and fever, barely a few hours of inadequate rest. I don't go to bed before two A.M. and then constant sudden awakenings, a sea of thoughts that consume my senses… My mental faculties are completely worn out. Work is impossible…. I'm afraid of my own voice – and of my mirror…. I'm alone, as in a grave; when will your hand awaken me?

Buechner, letter, anticipating the prose style of Lenz.

The last, laconic sentence of the novella merely informs us: 'So lebte er hin' ('And so he lived on'). Not happily ever after, as in a fairy-tale, but numbed out, resigned to fate, condemned (like Beckett's characters) simple to endure that 'living on' (or Fortleben) which, according to Walter Benjamin, characterizes the afterlife of originals in translation.

Goethe observes in a letter: 'Lenz is among us like a sick child, and we rock and dandle him and give him whatever toy he wants to play with'. Realizing that his role at Weimar, as he puts it in his play Tantalus, is 'to serve as a farce for the gods', he retires to the rural hamlet of Berka for the summer …

Buechner's reading of Lenz's innovative Sturm and Drang prose dramas is evident in many of the formal features of his play […] in the utterly un-Aristotelian distribution of the dramatic action into a series of fragmentary episodes or tableaux whose rapid-fire scene and mood changes acquire an almost stroboscopic or hallucinatory intensity.

No wonder Gutzkow wrote him upon hearing that he had written his masterpiece, Danton's Death, 'in five weeks at most'; 'You seem to be in a great hurry. Where do you want to get to? Is the ground really burning under your feet?' Or as Camille Desmoulins remarks in Danton's Death: 'We have no time to waste'. To which the world-weary Danton retorts, quoting Shakespeare's Richard II: 'But it is time that wastes us'. This state of urgency (or emergency) is the hallmark of Buechner's finest writing. Danton's Death is the fastest moving historical drama in the entire modern repertory and the precipitous paratactic pace of Lenz is unmatched by anything in nineteenth century prose until Rimbaud's Illuminations.

Richard's Sieburth's afterword to his translation of Buechner's Lenz

He raced this way and that. A song of hell triumphant was in his breast.

[…] [H]e was now standing at the abyss, driven by an insane desire to peer into it over and over, and to repeat this torture.

At times he walked slowly and complained his limbs had grown very weak, then he would pick up astonishing speed, the landscape was making him anxious, it was so narrow he was afraid he would bump into everything.

… the world he has wanted to benefit from had a gaping rip in it, he had no hate, no love, no hope, a horrible emptiness, and yet a tormented desire to fill it. He had nothing. Whatever he did, he did in full self-awareness, and yet some inner instinct drove him onward. When he was alone he felt so terribly lonely he constantly spoke to himself aloud, called out, grew afraid again, it seemed to him as if the voice of a stranger had spoken to him. […]

… The incidents during the night reached a horrific pitch. Only with the greatest effort did he fall asleep, having tried at length to fill the horrible void. Then he fell into a dreadful state between sleeping and waking; he bumped into something ghastly, hideous, madness took hold of him, he say up, screaming violently, bathed in sweat, and only gradually found himself again. He had to begin with the simplest things in order to come back to himself. in fact he was not the one doing this but rather a powerful instinct for self-preservation, it was as if he were double, the one half attempting to save the other, calling out to itself; he told stories, he recited poems out loud, wracked with anxiety, until he came to his senses. […]

…. [I]t was the abyss of irreparable madness, an eternity of madness. […]

The half-hearted attempts at suicide that he kept on making were not entirely serious, it was less the desire to die, death for him held no promise of peace or hope, than the attempt, at moments of excruciating anxiety or dull apathy bordering on non-existence, to snap back into himself through physical pain. […]

Can't you hear it, can't you hear that hideous voice screaming across the entire horizon, it's what's usually called silence and ever since I've been in this quiet valley I can't get it out of my ears, it keeps me up at night, oh dear Reverend, if I could only manage to sleep again. […]

He seemed quite rational, conversed with people; he acted like everybody else, but a terrible emptiness lay within him, he felt no more anxiety, no desire; he saw his existence as a necessary burden. – And so he lived on.

from Georg Buechner, Lenz

[With reference to Jabès's The Book of Questions] A host of imaginary rabbis. They have names ('names of listening'), but are not individualized, They are not characters. Not even the shadowy kind of character that Yukel is ('you are a shape moving in the fog…. You are the toneless utterance among anecdotal lies'). Most of them do not speak more than once, though a few are allowed to dispute for several pages. Even then they do not really become persons. What they say is not necessarily consistent. They do not represent a position. They are not authorities. Gabriel Bounoure calls them 'candidates for presence, but hesitant to quit their status of shadows'.

Voices, rather. A chorus. Of commentary and interpretation. Of exchange. a chorus that points to the phenomenon of voice as such or, rather, to the phenomenon of changing voice, changing pespective. In a rhythm of voice – absence of voice – voice. This is why, in his later books, the rabbis, privileged interpreters though they are, disappear. They become absorbed into the white space between paragraphs, between aphorisms.

Waldrop, Lavish Absence

Even when his time is his own, later, Edmond Jabès works in snatches, in fragments. No matter where, in cafés, in the métro, while walking, at dinner, on little bits of paper, on matchbooks, napkins, in his mind.

Waldrop, Lavish Absence

Three rhythms layer [Jabès's The Book of Questions]. On the micro-level, there is the rhythm of the individual line or sentence. A rhythm that, in te verse, comes out of the tension between sentence and line, and in the prose, out of the tension between speech and the more formal syntax of writing[….]

On the structural level, there is the rhythm of prose and verse and, more importantly, of question and answer, question and further question, question and commentary, commentary on commentary and, later, aphorism after aphorism.

Rhythm of midrash, of the rabbinical tradition. Not a dialectic aiming for synthesis, but an open-ended spiralling. A large rhythm, come out of the desert, a rhythm of sand shifting as if with time itself.

Then, there is a third rhythm. It is on the level of the book: a rhythm of text and blank space, of presence and absence.

Rosmarie Waldrop,  Lavish Absence

'How can I know if I write in verse or prose', Reb Elati remarked. 'I am rhythm'.

Jabès, The Book of Questions

The meandering word dies by the pen, the writer by the same weapon turned back against him.

'What murder are you accused of?' Reb Achor asked Zillieh, the writer.

'The murder of God', he replied. 'I will, however, add in my defence that I die along with Him'.

Jabès, The Book of Yukel

A young disciple asks his master, 'If you never give me an answer, how shall I know that you are the master and I the disciple?' And the master responds, 'By the order of the questions'.

Jabès, interviewed by Jason Weiss

Even in 'normative' Judaism, the opening of interpretation is extraordinary…. The rabbinical word remains ever open, unfulfilled, in process. Yet there is great risk here; this inner dynamic accounts for both the creativity of Judaism and its own inversions and undoing. Where is the line between interpretation and subversion? I have elsewhere called this a 'heretic hermeneutic', which is a complex of identification with the text and its displacement. Jabès's book is precisely this identification with the Sacred Book and its displacement. The Book is now opened to include even its own inversions.

Susan Handelman, The Sin of the Book

Mallarmé wanted to put all knowledge into a book…. But in my opinion this book would be very ephemeral, since knowledge in itself is ephemeral. The book that would have a chance to survive, I think, is the book that destroys itself, that destroys itself in favour of another book that will prolong it.

Edmond Jabès, interviewed by Paul Auster

I ask Edmund Jabès:

'You say you are an atheist. How can you constantly write of God?'

'It is a word my culture has given me'.

Then he expands:

'It is a metaphor for nothingness, the infinite, for silence, death, for all that calls us into questio. It is the ultimate otherness'. or, as he puts it later, in the conversations with Marcel Cohen: 'For me the words "Jew" and "God" are, it is true, metaphors. "God" is the metaphor for emptiness; "Jew" stands for the torment of God, of emptiness.

Rosmarie Waldrop, Lavish Absence