Quotes – Page 14 – Lars Iyer's Blog

I am not a woman trapped in a man’s body. This body is no man’s; it is mine, it is me, and there is no man in that equation. And I am not trapped in it. There are a million and one ways out of this body, and I have clung to it, tooth and claw, despite an endless line of people and institutions who would rather I vacate the premises, and have sometimes been willing to make me bleed to convince me they’re right.

This body is mine, and I claim it and its bruises, and it is not a man’s, and I am not trapped here. I have looked leaving my body in the eye and I have said, in the end, hell no. There is too much to do, too much to love, too many who need one more of us to say hell no and help them say the same.

little light, the seam of skin and scales (Taking Steps), via Standing in the Shower

Poseidon became bored with his sea. He let fall his trident. Silently he sat on the rocky coast and a gull, dazed by his presence, described wavering circles around his head.

Kafka, from 'Poseidon'

The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.

Franz Kafka, from 'The Coming of the Messiah'

A truly gifted human being does not recall the single incidents of his life as so many discrete images of situations which come to his mind. He understands them together, in some way. And this continuity in them is the only thing that can assure him that he is living, that he is in the world.

Wittgenstein, Notebooks

All human beings may in truth perhaps be genuinely religious, because hidden religiousness is true religiousness, the hidden inwardness in one who is religious, who even uses all his skill just so that no one will notice anything special about him.

Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Since an existing humourist is the closest approximation to the one who is religious, he too has an essential conception of the suffering that he is in, in that he does not grasp existence as one thing and fortune and misfortune as something that happens to the one existing, but exists in a way in which suffering stands in relation to existence.

Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript

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

… 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

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

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

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

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

– We drink because there is nothing to do.

– You lie! – It's because there is no morality.

– Yes, and there is no mortality – because for a long time (150 years) there has been nothing to do.

Lines in a notebook for Dostoevsky's proposed, but never written, novel, The Drunkards.

I think the novel both celebrates and savages poetry—or you might say that the novel celebrates poetry but savages poems. Early on Adam says something about poetry quoted in prose. Let me find the passage:

I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility.

I don’t think this is just an admission that he’s not interested in poetry, or a confession of fraudulence. He does find lines of poetry beautiful, but what he tends to find beautiful is an abstract potential that’s betrayed by actual poems. I can sympathize with this kind of negativity. It captures something about why poetry retains its power in the face of so many failed poems. You’re a poet; don’t you hate most poems?

Ben Lerner, interviewed

The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.

[…]

To pray is to think about the meaning of life.

[…]

To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.

To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.

To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.

Wittgenstein, notebooks

The idea of a God in the sense of the Bible, the image of God as the creator of the world, hardly ever engaged Wittgenstein's attention …, but the notion of a last judgement was of profound concern to him. 'When we meet again at the last judgement' was a recurrent phrase with him, which he used in many a conversation at a particularly momentous point. He would pronounce the words with an indescribably inward-gazing look in his eyes, his head bowed, the picture of a man stirred to his depths.

Engelmann on Wittgenstein

It will be necessary to travel through the eyes of idiots.

Lorca, 'Landscape of a Urinating Multitude'

I swear to refrain from creating a 'work', as I regard the instant more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of good taste and any aesthetic considerations.

The 'Vow of Chastity' of Dogme '95

For some reason everyone regards me as an idiot … and it is quite true that I was so ill at one time that I really was almost an idiot. But what sort of idiot am I now when I know myself that people take me for an idiot?

Prince Myshkin, in Dostoevsky's The Idiot

This creature reeling helplessly in an alien world, his gaze cumbered with sleep, his gestures curbed by fear, his noble brow enthroned above a somewhat wasted face, the peace and purity of heart that appear in that brow: to my mind they are incontestable signs. If my suspicions prove correct … I shall hold up a mirror of immaculate humanity to our dull insensitive world.

Wasserman, Caspar Hauser

If someone had walked into one of your studios at that time what sort of sight would have greeted them?

They would have seen huge canvases all around the walls. Many people did visit; they were bad paintings, but they were very impressive to look at. There would have been fifty or so people dossing in the studio, most of them crazy, disturbed people.

Were you becoming interested in these people as character studies or were they just available as sitters?

It was a combination of many things, but there was truly a belief that it was possible to be an ‘artist-saint’. I was interested in ethics, in a certain way of behaving, and of being a painter at the same time. It was a daft notion but a very powerful one; hence the Schweitzer thing and all that. I thought it was a right and honourable thing to do: that if I was going to be painting about people and in some way about the human condition then I should live in it—even if I created it somewhat theatrically around me, which is what I did.

One of them hanged himself in my studio—I remember cutting him down. He had lost an eye a few months before diving through a chemist’s window to fix himself on a bottle of aspirin because he was so desperate. I painted a lot of them.

Robert Lenkiewicz

Could you be with a woman who did yoga?

Of course not. Of course not. I think there should be holy war against yoga classes. It detours us from real thinking. It's just this kind of…feeling and floating and meditation and whatever. It's as tourism in religions. People all of a sudden becoming Buddhist here in Los Angeles.

Herzog, interviewed

Discussion is the basis of human existence. If that is taken away, we die. This is exactly what is happening in the Arab and Islamic world. It is a slow death when you can’t talk about anything, you can’t exchange thoughts with others, can’t discuss your conflicts. People rebel when they realise that they are dying.

[…] The young people see what is happening out there in the world on the Internet and on satellite TV. They witness how young Europeans and Americans live. They see their contemporaries talking, trying things out, living their own lives. And then they look around in their own countries and realise they can’t talk about anything. This is not only true for politics and discussions about the political regime or democracy, but also for everyday life. Even at home they can’t talk about anything. It’s all about respecting their parents, religion, traditions, they can’t talk to boys or girls, or even their teachers … The youth have been left completely on their own.

Boualem Sansal, interviewed