To lead a really spiritual life while physically and psychologically healthy is altogether impossible. One's sense of well-being runs away with one. If one suffers every day, if one is so frail that the thought of death is quite naturally and immediately to hand, then it is just possible to succeed a little; to be conscious that one needs God.
Kierkegaard, journals
Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.
Wittgenstein, Tractatus
May I die a good death, attending myself. May I never lose myself.
Perhaps the nearness of death will bring light into life. God enlighten me.
In constant danger of my life. By the grace of God the night went well. From time to time I despair. This is the fault of a wrong view of life.
I've had the time and quiet enough for working. But nothing stirs me. My material is far away from me. It is only death that gives life it meaning.
Understand people. Whenever you feel like hating them, try instead to understand them. Be at peace within yourself. But how do you find this peace in yourself? Only if I live in a way pleasing to God. Only so can one bear life.
Wittgenstein, Journals
I have always tried, in my own works, to mark my respect for those writers with whom I felt an affinity, to raise my hat to them, so to speak, by borrowing an attractive image or a few expressions …
Walser must at the time have hoped, through writing, to be able to escape the shadows which lay over his life from the beginning, and whose lengthening he anticipates at an early age …
… if Walser had any literary relative or predecessor, then it is Gogol. Both of them gradually lost the ability to keep their eye on the centre of the plot, losing themselves instead in the almost compulsive contemplation of strangely unreal creations appearing on the periphery of their vision, and about whose previous and future fate we never learn even the slightest thing.
In the 'microscripts' […]can be seen – as an ingenious method of continuing to write – coded messages of one forced into illegality and documents of a genuine 'inner emigration'.
… it is equally certain that unconsciously […] [Walser] was seeking to hide, behind the indecipherable characters, 'from both public and internalised instances of evaluation', to duck down from the level of language and to obliterate himself.
The exact definition of his illness is of little relevance. It is enough for us to understand that, in the end, Walser simply could not go on, and, like Hoelderlin, had to resort to keeping people at arm's length with a sort of anarchic politeness, becoming refractory and abusive, making scenes in public and believing that the bourgeois city of Berne, of all places, was a city of ghostly gesticulators, executing rapid hand movements directly in front of his face expressly in order to discombobulate him and to dismiss him out of hand as one who simply does not count.
It was enough for [Walser] to call himself – with bitterly resigned irony – at least the ninth-best writer in the Helvetic Federation.
Sebald, from his essay on Walser reprinted as the introduction to the translation of The Tanners
Spurious second in the Not the Booker award, with 108 votes to Michael Stewart's 114. Thanks to those of you who voted.
… under the influence of situationist ideas […] I began to walk around the neighbourhood converted into the prototype of the secretly revolutionary, poetic intellectual. But in fact, being a situationist without having read a single line of Guy Debord, I was on the most radical extreme left, but only through hearsay. And, as I've said, I didn't practice, I devoted myself to feeling extremely left-wing and that was it.
The narrator of Vila-Matas's Never Any End to Paris
… the true writer, as we see him, is the thrall of his time, its serf and bondsman, its lower salve. He is fettered t it on a short, unbreakable chain, shackled to it as tight as can be. His lack of freedom must be so great that he could not be transplanted anywhere else. In fact, if it did not sound ludicrous, I would simply say: he is the dog of his time.
Elias Canetti, The Conscience of Words
… the true writer, as we see him, is the thrall of his time, its serf and bondsman, its lower salve. He is fettered t it on a short, unbreakable chain, shackled to it as tight as can be. His lack of freedom must be so great that he could not be transplanted anywhere else. In fact, if it did not sound ludicrous, I would simply say: he is the dog of his time.
Elias Canetti, The Conscience of Words
For the incomprehensible and unforgettable thing was that this law glowed: it radiated, it scorched and destroyed.
Elias Canetti, The Conscience of Words
I am more and more unable to think, to observe, the determine the truth of things, to remember, to speak, to share an experience. I am turning to stone – this is the truth…. If I can't take refuge in some sort of work, I am lost.
Kafka, Diaries, July 28 1914
When did you know?, W. says with great insistence. When did you know you weren't going to amount to anything? Did I know?, he asks, because sometimes he suspects I never did. Well he knows at any rate for both of us. Neither of us are going to amount to anything!, he says with finality. Neither of us! Anything!, he says imperiously.
We might carry on as if we're going to amount to anything, W. says, but that does not alter the fact that we're not going to amount to anything. We haven't had a single thought of our own, for one thing, W. says. Not one!
Most thought provoking is that we are still not thinking, I say to W., remembering Heidegger. Most thought provoking is that you think you are thinking, says W. Because you do, don't you?
The kernel is in Poland, W. often says. The secret is in Poland. But what does he mean? we run through our memories. Our Polish adventure! When were we happier? It all came together there. In a real sense, it all began.
There we were, ambassadors for our country, in our teeshirts and jungle-print shorts. There we were, intellectual delegates, who had a civic reception. Wasn't it the mayor of Wroclaw who greeted us? Of course, the welcoming committee in Wroclaw looked at us in bemusement: was this the best Britain had to offer? – 'And that was before they heard you go on about blowholes over dinner', W. says. That was before the real fiasco began, he says, when we re-enacted the primal scene for them on the dancefloor. It's a British dance move, we told them. It's what we do on British dancefloors, but they looked away from us appalled.
But they treated us with European grace. We attended a grill party in the sun – that's what they called it, a grill party. There were sausages and beer. We're a loutish people, we told them. Don't expect anything from us. We told them we'd disappoint them, we warned them in advance, but after a while, they seemed to find us charming.
I think we won them over, in some sense, W. says. They came to like our inanities. To them, we were like a race apart, like elves or something. A lower branch on the human tree. Once they knew they could expect very little, it was okay. We were free from any expectations.
Yes, that's where it all began, W. and I agree. Free from our hosts' expectations, we also became freer from our own. It was then, in our jungle-print shorts, that we accepted what we were.
He plays rhythm. He plays off the beat. He plays on the upbeats. He'll play a rhythmic phrase in order to get the attention going. He's not just thinking harmonically and melodically. He's thinking rhythm. It's like a drummer. He would constantly talk about rhythm…. Coltrane was straight ahead, it wasn't about rhythm, it was about lines and motion. With Miles this thing was about up and down, get in between the beats, in between – like boxing…. When you think about Miles' playing…. it's a ballet. It's a dance. It's a ball bouncing. It's not like some stream of air or stream of water.
Dave Liebman, recalling playing with Miles Davis in the early '70s.
In the beginning we knew whether something we played was good or not. Even though we were trying out new things, our approach was still pretty much tied in with a more traditional way of playing. But the more the stuff developed, the harder it became to tell if what we were doing was working or not. For one thing, Miles more and more recorded things in bits and pieces, just little ideas here and there that were later on strung together. It was fascinating to work like that, but during the recording sessions we couldn't tell if the stuff was good or bad, or what it was at all. We'd play and then we'd wonder, "What was that? What did we do?"'
Herbie Hancock, on working with Miles Davis in the late '60s.
I think that the content of that work at the moment of arrival at the page is exactly the strategy that allows you to get there. Because getting there is the trick, getting there is the trouble. But once you get there, once your life is organised so beautifully so that there is a table, a chair, a typwewriter, that is an incredible triumph.
Most people give up […] My mind is not particularly fertile. My only success is the fact that I've been able to get to the desk. My whole life has been trying to arrange those moments when I take care of everything that is not in the room, and have the moment to arrive. And usually what I am writing about is everything I've had to do to get to the moment of writing at the desk.
Leonard Cohen, speaking to Michael Silverblatt
The university of the outside … The truly open university …
W. wants to discover the opposite of Britain within Britain, he says.
He thinks of Rosenzweig’s Lehrhaus, and Rosenstock’s Camp William James. He dreams of Arendt, Strauss and the University in Exile …
They didn’t go far enough, W. says. Mind you, none of them were British. They didn’t understand how far they had to go … And isn’t it of that that W. dreams of now: of a university set up by those who knew how far they would have to go? How far from Britain they would have to go, W. says. How far from Oxford, from the old order, W. says. And how far from the Beast, from the new order, W. says.
The university of the streets … The university of perpetual protest …
We remember the activities of the Committee of Writers and Intellectuals during the Events of May 1968. Blanchot, ‘pale but real’, Duras beside him. Mascolo. And students, hordes of students. And workers!
They wrote handbills and bulletins. They collectively authored the now famous slogans. Tomorrow it was May: that was the title of one of their tracts. Tomorrow it was May …
The university of unconditional welcome … The university of hospitality …
W. reminds me of Deleuze’s seminars. Anyone could come to them! You could just wander off the streets. Vagrants twitching in the audience … Alcoholics shouting abuse …
You have to trust the author you’re studying, Deleuze used to tell his audience. You must silence the voices of objection within you. You must let the author speak for himself, analyse the frequency of his words, the style of his own obsessions. His thought invents coordinates and develops along its own axes …
Deleuze would speak for hours, lost in his cloud of cigarette smoke. Sometimes, he’d pause to take questions from the floor – mad questions, vagrants’ questions … Sometimes, Deleuze would pause in his analysis of Spinoza to let the hubbub die down. He’d look up, with his tender eyes, surveying his audience, half-amusedly, half-lovingly. And then he would begin again, as though he hadn’t been interrupted.
It’s like Jandek, W. says … Didn’t I teach him everything he knows about Jandek? Didn’t I instruct him? Didn’t I take him through the later albums one by one? I Threw You Away. The Gone Wait. The Ruins of Adventure. Raining Down Diamonds … What titles! What album sleeves!
Jandek only sings about suffering, I told W. Only despair, suffering and pain, and their variations. Jandek begins at the end, at the very end. And he somehow goes on from the very end. He somehow continues, beginning at the end and not relinquishing the end, a man alone in a room with a guitar, with a reel-to-reel tape recorder running. He goes on, plucking or strumming open strings, leaving them to rattle, crying and howling and moaning and gasping …
Jandek doesn’t teach us about the end of the world so much as the endlessness of the end, W. says.
I don’t know what to do except/ Sit in a chair/ Maybe walk around/ Once in a while/ But quick, back to that chair …
Let me tell you about my blues/ My blues have turned black/ Black, black, black, black, black …
The things Jandek’s known, W. says. The things he’s experienced. Jandek’s gone outside, W. says. Jandek’s stayed outside …
The university of fate … The university of hope … W. reminds me of how Tarr only cast his friends in his films. The same friends, every time. Ordinary people. Ugly people. Drunkards.
Tarr shot everything in one take’ W. says, in awe. One take – and these were non-actors. If the shot went wrong, the shot went wrong. Tarr would simply begin again, and over again. And some of these shots were fifty minutes long! There was the TV version of Macbeth that he made which comprised two takes. Just two takes … and one of the actors was a terrible alcoholic who kept fluffing his lines … Never mind, never mind, Tarr would simply start shooting again, once again from the top, once again …
The university of vagrancy … The university of prophecy …
W. recalls how Herzog cast Bruno S. in his films. Who else could play Kaspar Hauser other than a real outsider, a man who had never acted, a man who had no interest in acting, but was only himself in the two films he made with Herzog? Kaspar Hauser: himself. Bruno S: no one other than himself!
Bruno – the real Bruno – always spoke in the third person, which W. really admires. ‘Bruno is sad. Bruno is angry’. I should take it up: ‘Fat boy hungry. Fat boy want dinner’. Seriously, though, there was always that distance … as though he were also someone else, something else, something impersonal, like fate.
They are closing all the doors on Bruno, and oh, so, politely.
Bruno’s getting pushed aside as if he didn’t exist. …
Bruno was a kind of prophet, W. says. An anti-prophet, who only sees doom, only ruination. He knows in advance that it's all going to fail. We're going down: he knows that. The end times have begun: that’s all he knows.
Bruno knows it will end, that it's all coming to an end, but he hopes nonetheless. He hopes nevertheless, against himself and against fate. He hopes: and that’s what you can see in him, too, W. says … That’s what Herzog must have seen in him. It’s pathetic. It’s nothing, nothing. The faith of a child, the hope of a child …
W. dreams of leaving the university behind. He dreams of ending our captivity.
We need to discover the university in the university, W. says. We have to turn the university inside out like a glove, exposing it to everything it excludes …
To the working class, barred from the university by the cost of studying. To the insane, barred from the university because of their wayward reasoning. To the melancholics, barred from the university because of the misery of their lives. To the alcoholics, barred for shouting, barred for fighting. To the homeless, the vagrants …
W. reminds of how Robert Lenkiewicz, the Plymouth Rembrandt, used to let vagrants live in his studio. There were about fifty of them, in and around the huge canvasses he liked to paint, most of them crazy, most of them disturbed, screaming and shouting …
Lenkiewicz believed it was possible to become an ‘artist-saint’, he said. He was interested in ethics, he said, in a certain way of behaving, that was at one with painting. That was part of his calling.
One of the vagrants hanged himself in the studio. Lenkiewicz remembers cutting him down. The vagrant had lost an eye a few months ago, crashing through a chemist’s window, looking for a fix …
And he embalmed another vagrant, keeping his corpse beside him in the studio, to remind him not of his own mortality – that would be banal, W. says, but of the mortality and vulnerability of others.
Lenkiewicz used to keep a record of what they said, his vagrants, W. says. 'Without suffering, I'm lost: I wouldn't know what to do without suffering'. That's attributed to the Singer, he says, reading from his notebook. And there’s Black Sam, who speaks like a voiceover from a Malick film:
We're all strange people; we're all escapin'; we're all fanatics.
You searchin' for somethin', but what? If I could have one spark, just one spark.
There's some force that governs. Some gigantic force, but what does it govern?
Danny Byrne reviews Spurious.
W. himself comments on Spurious.
There is only one person who has the right to criticize me, do you understand? And that is Picasso. Said Matisse late in life.
Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of all virtue, said Flaubert.
Paul Celan's body was not found for eleven days after he stepped off the Pont Mirabeau. Nelly Sachs died on the day of his funeral.
Only when Euripides was being performed would Socrates go to the theare.
Before the Normans brought despair, the Anglo-Saxon word was wanhope.
Henry James once hid behind a tree to avoid having to spend time with Ford Madox Ford.
The legend that Tycho Brahe died when his bladder burst after an interminable evening of drinking beer.
Djuna Barnes wrote in bed. Wearing makeup and with her hair done.
Edith Wharton wrote in bed. Scattering pages on the floor for a secretary to retrieve before typing.
Ingres spent fifteen years doing pencil portraits of tourists in Rome.
Roman Jakobson, when Mayakovsky once read him his newest poems: Very good. But not as good as Mayakovsky.
Schopenhauer was found dead sitting at his breakfast.
And Sir Launcelot awoke, and went and took his horse, and rode all that day and all night in a forest, weeping.
Pope offended so many people with Dunciad that he subsequently never left home without pistols.
Nietzsche, on George Sand: A writing cow.
Among Wittgenstein's spellings, when using English. Anoied. Realy. Excelentely. Expences. Affraid. Cann't.
David Hume was grossly fat, reported even to crack chairs. Edward Gibbon became equally so. Amy Lowell as well.
The height of absuridty in serving up pure nonsense, or in stringing together senselesss and extravagant masses of words, previously seen only in madhouses, was reached in Hegel. Said Schopenhauer.
Fra Angelico was said not to be able to paint a Christ without weeping.
The Hebrew in Exodus 34:29-30 translates literally to say that after Moses came down from Sinai for the second time, the skin on his face sent forth beams, meaning it shone – A mistranslation in the Latin Vulgate said he was horned. Ergo Michaelangelo. And cetera.
Fray Luis de Leon, returning to his Salamanca classroom after five years of imprisonment by the Inquisition: As I was saying …
According to Herodotus, Xerxes literally ordered that the Hellespont be given three hundred lashes when a storm washed away a bridge he had only then constructed for his invasion of the West. And as an incidental afterthought also ordered his chief engineers beheaded.
Splenddid rooms and elegant furnishings are for people who have no thoughts, Goethe said.
Brainsick. Trolius's word for Cassandra in Trolius and Cressida.
In one of his reincarnations, Pythagoras was a fish. And in another a bird. He said.
The Reader. Being Aristotle's nickname at Plato's Academy.
A colt that kicks its mother. Being what Plato personally called him after an early disagreement.
An anthology of extraordinary suicide notes. Or of any suicide notes. Is there such?
Kant was never in his life in the vicinity of a mountain. It appears probably that he never saw the ocean either.
The long martyrdom of being trampled to death by geese. Kierkegaard called reading one's reviews.
The editor of Novy Mir began to read a prepublication copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in bed. And then found himself so impressed that he not only got up but put on a suit and a necktie to finish with what he felt to be the requisite respect.
A pansy with hair on his chest, Zelda Fitzgerald called Hemingway. Ninety prcent Rotarian, supplied Gertrude Stein.
Branwell – Emily – Anne – are gone like dreams – gone as Maria and Elizabeth went twenty years ago. One by one I have watched them fall asleep on my arm. Said Charlotte, late along.
Plutarch says that to force himself to study oratory, Demosthenes once shaved half his head – so that he would be too embarassed to leave his house.
Roman Jakobson, in opposition to a novelist, namely Nabokov, teaching literature at Hervard: Should an elephant teach zoology?
For centuries, in England: The burial of a suicide under a high road, ideally at a crossroads. And with a wooden stake driven into his/her heart.
No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide. Said Cesare Pavese.
I am real!, said Alice, and began to cry.
The legend that Pythagoras starved himself to death.
the legend that Diogenes committed suicide simply by holding his breath.
Only one person, his secretary, attended Leibniz's funeral.
Tell me, pray thee, how fares the human race? If new roofs be risen in the ancient cities? Whose empire is that now sways the world? – Asked one of the fourth-century desert monks, the names of most forever unrecorded.
The time is close when you will have forgotten all things; and when all things will have forgotten you. Said Marcus Aurelius.
Then I go out at night to paint the stars. Says a Van Gogh letter.
From David Markson's This Is Not A Novel
Catskill Review of Books radio interview downloadable here.
Special offer: the eBook of Spurious is onsale for £2 ($3.19) from the Melville House site.
The first hundred sales of the print copy of Spurious from the website will also receive an exclusive excerpt from Dogma.
Advance reading copies of Dogma will be available soon to reviewers.
Dogma will be officially published sometime around February 2012, and is available for pre-order at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.
I will be interviewed on a New York State radio station on a show called The Catskill Review of Books, hosted by Ian Williams. The show will be aired from 7.00 to 7.30PM this Saturday local time (12.00 to 12.30 AM Sunday morning British time). It will stream on http://wjffradio.org
Hasn't he been shot by philosophy, garrotted by it?, W. says. Hasn't he been hung on the philosophical gallows?
Philosophy cut his carotid artery. Philosophy cut his radial artery. Philosophy cut his ulnar artery. Philosophy cut his femoral artery.
He's thrown himself in front of the philosophical train, W. says. He's lain out on the road, ready to be crushed by the philosophical juggernaut, W. says.
Philosophy placed a pillow over his head and suffocated him, W. says. Philosophy poured hemlock into his morning tea.
Philosophy's put the barrel of a shotgun to the roof of his mouth. Philosophy's pulled the trigger.
Before Sylvia Plath turned on her oven to commit suicide, she left bread and butter and milk in the bedroom where her two children were sleeping.
Boethius was executed by having a thong inexorably tightened about his temples.
According to medieval legend, his pupils stabbed John Scotus Erigena to death with their pens.
At twenty, Bach made a pilgrimage of more than two hundred miles, on foot, to hear Buxtehude play the organ.
Not one of Thomas Hardy's first three novels sold more than twenty copies.
Matisse, questioned about green flesh: I am not painting a woman. I am painting a picture.
Horace dictated that a writer should set aside a finished poem for nine years. And only then decide if it's worth publishing.
Catherine Blake: I have very little of Mr Blake's company. He's always in Paradise.
Bertrand Russell, re having contemplated suicide at sixteen: I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more about mathematics.
Legend says that Hesiod was murdered because of seducing a friend's dauhgter, who had then hanged herself. And that when his corpse was discarded at sea it was brought back by dolphins.
Seneca, Lucan and Petronius were all ordered to commit suicide by Nero. Each open a vein. Lcan was twenty-five. He recited his own verses as he bled to death.
I do not believe in God, though I believe in Picasso, said Diego Rivera.
From Rabelais's will: I have nothing. I owe much. The rest I leave to the poor.
Nietzsche lost his reason because he thought too much. I do not think and therefore cannot go bad. Said Nijinksy, mad.
October 7, 1849. At forty, in Baltimore. Filthy, starving, drunk and/or with delirium tremens, crying out at unseen creatures.
Tanaquil Le Clercq. Performing major roles for Balanchine at seventeen. And in a wheelchair from polio not ten years later.
In the decade before his death, Ad Reinhardt painted nothing but black canvasses.
Franz Marc was killed by a grenade at Verdun.
Though I never saw him, or had any personal communication with him, now that he is suddenly dead I realise that he was nearer, dearer, and more important to me than anyone else. Said Tolstoy of Dostoevsky.
Oscar Wilde said that Henry James composed novels as if it were a painful duty.
The poems of Catullus were lost for a millennium. Tradition has it that the single manuscript discovered in Verona in the fourteenth century had been used to stop a bunghole.
It is my general impression that the editors of the Partisan Review are capable, educated, intelligent, but have nothing to say. Said Leon Trotsky.
I couldn't read it. The human mind isn't that complex. Said Einstein, returning a Kafka to Thomas Mann.
According to legend, Li Po drowned when he fell out of a boat, drunk, leaning to kiss a reflection of the moon.
Nirvana means without wind, or blown out. In the sense that desire no longer exists.
Ancient rumour insisted, seemingly wrongly, that Euripdes was killed by dogs set at him by a rival playwright.
Avicenna studied Aristotle's Metaphysics so exhaustively and for so long that when he believed he finally understood it he handed out gifts to the poor in celebration.
Tertullian has it that Democritus deliberately blinded himself in old age by staring into the sun. So as not to suffer the sight of beautiful women he could no longer possess.
Thomas Mann's definition of a writer. Someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Is Noah's drunkenness the earliest anywhere taken note of?
A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so, Einstein said.
Dear Sir, – I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who you are. You must excuse me for I have nothing to comnunicate or tell you of & why I am shut up I don't know I have nothing to say so I conclude Yours respectfully John Clare.
I guess maybe there are two kinds of writers, writers who write stories and writers who write writing. Said Raymond Chandler.
Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to look at a painting. Said Barnett Newman.
Lucia Joyce, institutionalised, when told of her father's death: What's he doing underground, that idiot?
Matthew 27:3-5 says Judas hanged himself.
Was Peter Warlock the only serious composer who ever committed suicide? Tchaikovsky and Schumann and Hugo Wolf having tried, but unsuccessfully.
Van Gogh shot himself in the chest. And then walked home and took two days to die.
from David Markson's Reader's Block
Lars Iyer's Blog 