Category: Quotes

There are problems I never get anywhere near, which do not lie in my path or are not part of my world. Problems of the intellectual word of the West that Beethoven (and perhaps Goethe to a certain extent) tackled and wrestled with, but no philosophy has ever confronted (perhaps Nietzsche passed by them).

Wittgenstein, remark in Culture and Value

As to religious thoughts I do not think the craving for placidity is religious. I think a religious person regards placidity or peace as a gift from heaven, not as something one ought to hunt after. Look at your patients more closely as human beings in trouble and enjoy more the opportunity you to say ‘good night’ to so many people. This alone is a gift from heaven which many people would envy you. And this sort of thing ought to heal your frayed soul, I believe. It won’t rest it; but when you are healthily tired you can just take a rest. I think in some sense you don’t look at people’s faces closely enough.

Wittgenstein, writing to Drury, a trainee psychiatrist

Apelles, the famous painter, wished to reproduce the foam from a horse's mouth in a painting. He was not able to get it right, and decided to give up. So, he threw the sponge he used to wipe his brushes against the painting. When the sponge hit the painting, it produced nothing other than an imitation of the horse's foam. In the same way, the Skeptics start off like other philosophers, seeking peace of mind in firmness and confidence in their judgements. When they do not achieve it, they suspend their judgement. No sooner than they do this than, by pure chance, peace of mind accompanies the suspension of judgement, like a shadow follows a body.

Sextus Empiricus

Have you seen the gigantic Tintoretto in Venice in which the earth and the sea, the terraqueous globe, are hanging above people's heads? The horizon is moving off into the distance; the depth, the ocean distances, and bodies are taking flight, an immense rotundity, a mappamundi; the planet is hurled, falling and rolling in mid-ether! … He was prophesysing for us. He already had the same cosmic obsession which is consuming us now…. As for me, I want to lose myself in nature, to grow again with her, like her…. In a patch of green, my whole brain will flow along with the flowing sap of the trees…. The immensity, the torrent of the world, in a tiny thumb's worth of matter.

Paul Cezanne

The dialogue with nature remains for the artist the condition sine qua non. The artist is a man. He is himself nature, a part of nature within the domain of nature. […]

Today, the artist is better and more subtle than a camera… he is a creature upon earth and a creature within the universe; a creature on one star among other stars. […]

[The artist's] progress in the observation and vision of nature gradually let him accede to a philosophical vision of the universe which allows him freely to create abstract forms… Thus, the artist creates works of art, or participates in the creation of works, which are an image of the creative work of God… Just as children imitate us while playing, so we, in the game of art, imitate the forces which created, and continue to create, the world… Natura naturans is more important to the painter than natura naturara.

Paul Klee

– The first man on the moon! There always has to be a first man. A discovery presupposes a first man and some surprises.

– Ah,

– In discovering other worlds, man will learn that all stars are empty and that he is alone. I say he is unique. I say he is alone.

– With a lot of sky around him.

– Too much sky. And a sky without colour.

– Without angels.

– Angels are in the mind and in books. And only man prints those.

– You imagine the universe made of empty closets turned into satellites by other closets.

– Empty closets, but occupied by a few clotheshangers swinging ceaselessly…

– Yes… hangers and trembling…

[…]

[…] Our most daily gestures, our simplest, most normal gestures are charged with our memory of the Bible without us really being aware of it. We come out of the Bible, we are the Bible. […]

After a long silence, then he continues:

– The forests are very old. The forests are older than man.  They have seen the gods die. And man is naked in a forest of dust, dry leaves and roads covered with leaves and dust.

from Jean Daive, Under the Dome: Walks with Celan

He thinks: I am a scream of God. A searching growl. Vacillation. Slowness. Perplexity. Different reading.

– But a scream can burrow into wound and scar. A kind of saliva, basically, that attenuates the pain.

– I believe the scream is the chosen stance of a voice evicted from itself, mortally wounded, silent, terribly, become non-instrumental from being dispossessed, blank. A drunken voice, crouching. That regards no one…

– A geometric scream.

He watches the goat tied to the biboquet. He watches it climb down the step-ladder to the roll of the drum. He smiles. There is applause. A crowd in purplish light. I ask him:

– How do you, Paul Celan, get from stammer to stutter?

– The stammer is linked to childhood, the stutter to knowledge.

– If I understand you correctly, your idea of stammer and stutter is close to Hoelderlin's idea of ideal states…

– That is…

– Hoelderlin says there are two ideals: extreme simplicity, childhood for you, and extreme knowledge, i.e. your stutter.

– Yes, the stutter is literally dumbfounded. He is 'stupid', that is to say aphasic, and we can think of Hoelderlin.

– The monkey is aphasic, therefore…

– Therefore he dances… he has seen the lightning. He is silent and dances.

[…]

– I have hidden the blood. My poems hide the blood. What do you think? I have paid … I have paid, he says.

[…]

– I have hidden the madness… My poetry masks the madness.

from Jean Daive, Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan

It allowed me personally to advance where there is no longer any path, to separate myself from the world of psychology and analysis, and understand that feelings and existences can be felt deeply only in a place where, in the words of the Upanishads, there is neither water, light, air, spatial infinity or rational infinity, nor a total absence of all things, neither this world nor another.

Blanchot, on writing Thomas the Obscure. From a letter to Jean Paulhan dated 27 May 1940. (Via)

When speech becomes prophecy, it is not the future that is given, but the present that is withdrawn, alongside any possibility of firm, stable, durable presence. Even the Eternal City and the indestructable Temple are suddenly – unbelievably – destroyed. It is like the wilderness once again, and speech too is a wilderness, a voice needing the wilderness in order that it may cry out, and continually reviving in us dread, understanding, and the memory of wilderness.

from Blanchot, The Book to Come

Has the time come for me to face the questions of my books?

As if I should, at least as far as they are concerned, accept responsibility for writing them,

when it seems to me that I am not responsible at all, when on the contrary in my innermost thoughts I would accuse them for having swapped my life for another that I have difficulty in living

but perhaps they are calling me to account precisely for the existence I owe to them.

In which case, through me, it is my own books that question my books.

from Edmund Jabes, The Book of Questions, Aely

I feel the value of my work is determined very precisely by the audience. What does entertainment mean, anyway, and what's the difference between that and art? I would say the main difference is that art isn't necessarily funded by the consumer, but entertainment always is. In that way, entertaininment is a million times more important to me than art, and being an entertainer is more important to me than being an artist. The relationship with the audience is so direct, while the government or rich collectors are going to pay for something that is art rather than the person who is actually going to have a relationship with the piiece. That's what most important to me about what I do. I think of eterntainment as being very serious and impoirtant, from Laurel and Hardy upward. It has to do with emotions of release, giving up or extreme hilarity and absurdity.

Will Oldham, interviewed in Will Oldham on Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

According to Krasznahorkai, the deepest loss is the loss of a culture of poverty – the ability to "sing wonderful songs when we are poor". Now, he says, "… we only have people who don't have money … everybody wants to be rich, everybody has only one dream, but people, do we really have one dream – I ask – is this the only aim in this shit, to have much more money?"

There's nowhere left beyond the reach of the market, he continues, "… no empty spaces with possibilities, only stupid spaces, spaces in which you can't do anything other than wait to return from this space …" There are perhaps theorists who could explain why this has happened, he adds, but after these explanations "… everything goes on – why? I see you, and I ask you – why?"

Krasnahorkai, interviewed

So yeah, singing as a way of expressing or escaping or expelling unbearable events: if you have a thinking brain, which some of us are cursed with, you have to have something, and it could be singing and it could be alcohol, but it's progressive rather than regressive – you don't get better by drinking.

The idea of ending each day in song implies a kind of ritual too.

Yeah, a ritual and a connection, 'cause even if you sing by yourself you are using things that have been given to you. The idea of singing is that it's communication from the past into the present and right on through to the future.

Will Oldham, interviewed, in Will Oldham on Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

As Jon Savage points out in England's Dreaming, the London of punk was still a bombed-out city, full of chasms, caverns, spaces that could be temporarily occupied and squatted. Once these spaces are enclosed, practically all of the city's energy is put into paying the mortgage or the rent. There's no time to experiment, to journey without already knowing where you will end up. Your aims and objectives have to be stated up front. 'Free time' becomes convalescence. You turn to what reassures you, what will most refresh you for the working day: the old familiar tunes (or what sound like them). London becomes a city of pinched-faced drones plugged into iPods.

Mark Fisher, introduction to Laura Oldfield Ford's Savage Messiah

Inside the heavily secured complex outside Shenzen, China, known as the Foxconn City, we find the home of about 420,000 workers[…] Foxconn is perhaps most famous for the recent string of suicides[…] On the surface, Foxconn does not look like a labour camp. A guided tour through the premises yields a picture quite unlike the factories of the industrial dark ages. Here we find swimming pools, tennis courts and gyms as well as numerous clubs for employees, in chess, calligraphy and fishing, to name a few. The only catch is that none of these facilities are to be used. Apart from short breaks for lunch and sleep, the workers have no free time[…]

To investigate the working conditions at Foxconn, the Chinese newspaper Southern Quarterly sent a team of undercoer reporters. After 28 days of immense suffering they came back to report about a life completely overtaken by work. As they reported: 'The workers we have spoken to say that their hands continue to twitch at night, or that when they are walking down the street they cannot help but mimic the motion. They are never able to relax their minds. As one of the reporters surmised, 'for many workers, the only escape from this cycle was to end their lives'. In the attempt to curb the suicide epidemic, Foxconn management have gone to great lengths. They have put safety nets between buildings to catch falling workers. They have opened a stress room, where employees can beat up life-sized dolls with baseball bats. Only a hundred counsellors have been called in. And thirty Buddhist monks have been summoned 'to release the suicide souls from purgatory'. Foxconn are now leading innovations in a new field of management … suicide management.

from Carl Cederstrom and Peter Fleming, Dead Man Working

The power of committing suicide is regarded by Pliny as an advantage which men possess even above the Deity himself.

David Hume

There are many things in place Saint-Sulpice […] A great number, if not the majority of these things have been described, inventoried, photographed, talked about, or registered. My intention in the pages that follow was to describe the rest instead: that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.

Perec, introduction to An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris

Attempt was one of Perec's clearer efforts to grapple with what he termed the 'infraordinary': the markings and manifestations of the everyday that consistently escape our attention as they compose the essence of our lives – 'what happens', as he puts it here, 'when nothing happens'.

Translator's afterword to Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris

[…]

As Kierkegaard writes, the size of one’s faith can be measured by one’s lack of faith. I agree. […]

Once you have awakened to the question of faith, you cannot simply return to your everyday agenda like a committed atheist could. You cannot retreat to the comforts of atheism. Behind us are two thousand years that have been marked by questions about God. Today’s atheistic calm, even from intellectuals, is equal to the eradication of our intellectual history.

Why?
Walser: Because we would have to admit that we were crazy. You cannot spend two thousand years trying to understand God and then simply abandon the question and declare that we’re not interested in it anymore.

Skepticism, atheism, existentialism – all those intellectual traditions have their own long histories that have co-existed with theology.
Walser: I believe that the most important condition for faith is sensitivity to beauty. We have the capacity to find something beautiful. Take Bach or Schubert: Their music was dedicated to God but filled and shaped their worldly lives. If you are a committed atheist, you lean back and miss all the richness of that history. As an atheist, you cannot fully make sense of the music, you have no explanation for their perennial motion and rhythm. I have been touched by that history and I am still moved by it. So I cannot simply abandon questions about the existence of God. I am touched by the works of beauty that have been brought into the world through religion, and I cannot simply embrace the everyday experience of atheism.

What remains of [Nietzsche]?
Walser: In the end, Nietzsche almost calls to God. That is what I implied when I talked about the two millennia of Christian history that built up towards God. Shouldn’t we be allowed to rest at this point? I seek for my own imaginative world to be connected to those last years of Nietzsche. You cannot simply discard God like a box that has been emptied. It’s easy to say, but Nietzsche does it with an incredible linguistic passion. He is one incredible example, Karl Barth is another.

From an interview with Martin Walser

LOUISE: […] So what 'appened? Were you bored in Manchester?

JOHNNY: Was I bored? No, I wasn't fuckin' bored. I'm never bored. That's the trouble with everybody – you are all so bored. You've 'ad nature explained to you and you're bored with it. You've 'ad the living body explained to you and you're bored with it. You've 'ad the universe explained to you and you're bored with it. So now you just want cheap thrills and like plenty of 'em, and it dun't matter 'ow tawdry or vacuous they are so long as it's new, as long as it's new, so long as it flashes and fuckin' beeps in forty fuckin' different colours. Well, whatever else you can say about me, I'm not fuckin' bored!

from Mike Leigh's film, Naked

Our brains are so powerful and so is language, but language is like the bricks, and religion and philosophy end up becoming like the mortar that hold those bricks together. There are so many gaps in the logic of this language and how it can explain our plight, our existence, our successes, and that's where religion seems to fit in. Language is too incomplete and religion fills in. Why do I feel bad when this happens? Well, religion comes in and says you don't have to think about it. You can go to work the next day or do whatever, you don't have to think about it. It fills in the cracks of what we can't speak about, what we can't say.

What is normally called religion is what I would tend to call music – participating in music, listening to music, making records and singing. I think records and music are more appropriate and more respectful of the human soul than the churches are. And more respectful of the needs of humans to communicate with the aspects of themselves that are neglected by language. I don't think people think about God so much as they think about themselves and how they're going to get through life.

Will Oldham, from Will Oldham on Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

This is what exists, the grass growing in the houses, the dandelions in the churches, and suddenly one can imagine how it might all continue to grow, how a forest might creep over our cities, slowly, inexorably, thriving unaided by human hands, a silence of thistles and moss, an earth without history, only the twittering of birds, spring, summer and autumn, the breathing of which there is no one to count any more.

Max Frisch, on the devastation of postwar Europe

There's a poignant moment in an interview with the terminally ill production designer Rashit Satiullin, who, when asked about the Zone, recalls the time he spent living, working and talking with Tarkovsky: 'Here you live being your inmost self … it's somwhere where you can talk with somebody, something unfathomable'. The interviewer asks him to clarify. Does he mean …? 'Yes speaking with god. When Andrei was no more I was bereaved of a person with whom I could talk about the most important things. That room vanished'. 'So he was the Room to you?', asks the interviewer. 'Yes'.

Geoff Dyer, Zona

Professor sums up Stalker's little sermon: so the Zone lets the good ones pass and the bad ones die? […] Stalker doesn't know. It lets pass those who have lost all hope, the wretched, he says in an agony of wretchedness, never once realising that he might (by definition) be among their number. Does wretchedness ever have this capacity to transcend itself? Or is it simply a path to further wretchedness?

[…] Again the impossible paradox of Stalker's relationship to the Zone makes itself felt. The keynote of his life is hope, but the Zone will let through only those who have lost all hope. Stalkers, we learn later, are forbidden entry to the Room. Forbidden, perhaps, by virtue of their belief – their hope – in it.

from Geoff Dyer's Zona

Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers – in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certainty that everything outside this one thing has  no meaning. The complex and many-faceted only confuses me and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises – and everything that is unimportant falls away. Tintinnabulation is like this. Here I am alone with silence. I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements – with one voice, with two voices. I build with the most primitve materials – with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells. And that is why I called it tintinnabulation.

Arvo Pärt, liner notes

Time and timelessness are connected. This instant and eternity are struggling within us. And this is the cause of all our contradictions, our obstinacy, our narrowmindedness, our faith and our grief.

If people simply hear the word 'God' they become sad; it is sad when it has that effect. But wonders are forever occurring and people who think like that today will think differently tomorrow.

[Asked why he composes:] For me it's like breathing in and out. It's my life. What does a child do when he plays on his own? He sings. Why does he sing? Well, he is happy about something pretty, inspired by something. That is something quite healthy, quite natural. For adults this state is considerably more complex, for this harmony is smashed into pieces, it's lost. But can I exist without composing, my soul and my spirit? Music is already my language. My music can be an inner secret, even my confession. But what is my confession? I don't confess in the concert hall, in front of an audience. It is directed toward higher instances. The necessity for composing has many layers. They are like bridges, put on top of each other. And you never know which one you are just passing. Some are dangerous and you fall. Most important for me: that I cannot say in a few thousand sentences what I can say in a few notes.

In the Soviet Union, I once spoke with a monk and asked him how, as a composer, one can improve oneself. He answered me by saying that he knew of no solution. I told him that I also wrote prayers, and set prayers and the text of psalms to music, and that perhaps this would be of help to me as a composer. To this he said, 'No, you are wrong. All the prayers have already been written. You don't need to write any more. Everything has been prepared. Now you have to prepare yourself'. I believe that there's a truth in that.

Arvo Pärt, from various interviews

Q. I got the impression that the film is not really about the horse but about Nietzsche's silence. It's almost a silent film.

A. Not only Nietzsche's silence – the silence of everybody. These people have a daily life. I wanted to show how it's difficult to be - how being is so hard, and so simple.

[…] Kundera talks about 'the unbearable lightness of being' – I wanted to talk about the heaviness of being.

Bela Tarr, interviewed in Sight and Sound

I am not preoccupied with the characteristics of my works or my person, insofar as it is related to my works; that is, I am not preoccupied with anything personal. If I can speak about anyone’s defencelessness, it is not mine, but that of those who are very far from being able to formulate this sense of defencelessness. If you feel that I am an outsider in any sense, this obviously comes from the fact that my heroes, or rather, the constant object of my train of thought, The One Who Is Always the Same Person, is indeed outside society, because my gaze works in such a way that I can see him and only him in a mass of people, it is only his eyes that meet mine, only his, whose glance betrays that no social force or fear or instinct can keep him inside—he is the expelled son, the one who was thrown away.

Someone who scolds the world constantly and with such volcanic force as Bernhard may easily deceive us, but it gradually turns out what it is all about. Bernhard appreciated greatness, genius, the power of thought and the creative triumphs of the human spirit. He appreciated and adored them. Bernhard was an enthusiast. That is why he hated whatever was not great, whatever was not a work of genius. 

My books are for those who read them. Therefore the fact that I intend them for anyone at all is not so important. However, those that I ‘intend’ my books for are all kinds of people, but they are definitely not aristocratic, definitely not part of the social elite, you can take my word for that. On the contrary, those I have been thinking of are far from being chosen ones, but exactly the opposite: they are those who will not be chosen but rather expelled, because they are injured, defenceless, oversensitive; they are those who drop out of the great Stirring Machine at the first turn. Perhaps you could reformulate this by saying that those we are talking about are the elite of the injured, the aristocracy of those who are helpless beyond recovery… This sounds different, doesn’t it? And as for me offering my works to them—I would rather say that they are The Ones Who Are Always the Same Person, the constant subjects of my thinking. I am immensely grateful to them. Without them, readers would not even understand what I am doing. Without them, it would not occur to me to write anything. They are there partly, at least in a tiny fragment, in all of my readers. 

Krasznahorkai, interviewed

I’m personally involved in the apocalypse… It’s interesting how your relationship to that changes in the course of your life. You think about it most when you’re young, particularly in connection with death, because you still have a certain courage that you’re going to lose when your own death is getting closer. Later you’re just afraid. When I was young, I didn’t feel the sanctity of birth. I tended to consider birth as the starting point of a journey toward failure, and I’d sadly look out the window for days on end into this grey light that was all that had been given to me. Anything that could arouse compassion had a great impact on me. I was particularly responsive to those aspects of reality and the arts that reflected sadness, the unbearable, the tragic. And I didn’t know what to do with anything positive or joyful. Happiness bothered me.

I generally spend my days alone, I don’t talk much; but when I do, then I talk a lot and continuously, never ending a sentence. Many people are like that. You may notice that the majority of people talk the way I write.

Perhaps young people are the hardest to influence; perhaps they like to be seen as free, and they like it even more if they see someone confronting anything and anyone for their sake. For them, nothing has been decided yet. I think we’re talking about those who haven’t yet decided how to deal with their forebodings, or where to hide their imagination, their desires and their dignity in this rotten world we live in. We’re talking about those for whom a book is not just a book; they know that while we hold on to the book forcefully, there is something before the book and something after the book, and that’s what the book is for.

[…] so-called high literature will disappear. I don’t trust such partial hopes that there will always be islands where literature will be important and survive. I would love to be able to say such pathos-filled things, but I don’t think they’re true.

You’re forgetting that human history is full of catastrophes, and it’s the catastrophes that force people to think. 

When did I laugh last? When I saw and heard you, I laughed for joy. Because of the way you ask questions. Because you care. And because I again have someone to talk to. Someone I can tell these things to.

Bits of an interview with Krasznahorkai