To write is to lose myself, yes, but everyone loses himself, because everything is lost. I, however, lose myself without any joy – not like the river going into the sea for which it was secretly born, but like the puddle left on the beach by the high tide, its stranded water never returning to the ocean but merely sinking in the sand.
Pessoa, The Book of Disquietude
I must get hold of my melancholy. Up to now it has been deeply submerged and my enormous intellectual activity has helped to keep it there.
[…]
For many years my melancholy has prevented me from being on terms of real intimacy with myself. In between my melancholy and myself lay a whole world of the imagination. That is, in part, what I rid myself of in the pseudonyms.
Kierkegaard, Journals
The later an author starts writing, the better. We have been writing for more than 5,000 years now. Many, many things have already been written. If you don’t have enough reading experience, you would probably end up with the illusion that you are writing something original, while it is actually very old. I simply don’t believe in literary wunderkinds. Every trade has its optimal age. With the serious fiction writing it is, I believe, one’s fifties.
Zoran Zivkovic, interviewed
Intrusive thoughts of a violent nature haunted me, made me pretty sick, actually, for a few years. I couldn’t get them out of my head.
Q. Images from […] films?
I believe they had to have been, or the movies had to have influenced something. They were unwanted images. They weren’t fantasies but constant terrifyingly violent images or ideas piercing into my everyday life. I’d be watching TV and the next thing you know the newscaster . . . I would imagine, without warning, something bad happening to the people on TV or to somebody I knew. I couldn’t really look at someone without them immediately becoming dismembered or in some way murdered in my head.
Q. Does that still happen?
No, not anymore. But it happened for a good three-year period, about three or four years ago, where I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t work on anything. I almost couldn’t function properly in everyday life. I never knew when it would happen. Not only were they scary images, but there was a spiritual quality to it that made me feel like something was in jeopardy, something wasn’t right with me.
Q. And they seemed real?
Yeah, it was very scary.
Q. Did it just stop one day, or gradually?
Gradually, with lots of visits to psych wards and hospitals and the like. I began to hallucinate, too, which is a weird thing because you always imagine it’s going to be something you’ll recognize as not being real. But for me, these things looked real and seemed normal. It made sense that they would be there. And other people would tell me they weren’t there. It’s the strangest thing: They look real, they sound real, but they’re not there. Over the last three or four years, I’ve been going in and out of hospitals trying to figure it out.
Q. Have you come to some kind of understanding of what’s there and what isn’t?
I never know. I wouldn’t know. It’s not as intense now. It really was like living in a different world, a different place for a little while. It seems like it’s back to normal. I haven’t seen anything that alarms me, but for all I know I’ve seen some things that aren’t there. I don’t know.
Q. Did drawing help in getting through those periods, in making sense of what was going on?
No, I think it actually induced those periods. I think that, at this point, drawing will make me sick. I don’t draw much anymore, because I start to get those feelings again.
Al Columbia, interviewed
I have become so depressed by the fact of my mortality that I have decided to commit suicide.
– 'Have you made any plans?' – 'Take an overdose, slash my wrists then hang myself'. – 'All those things together?' – 'It couldn't possibly be misconstrued as a cry for help'.
A dotted line on the throat/ CUT HERE
excerpts from Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis
Abba Lot went to Abba Joseph and said: 'Abba, as far as I can, I keep a moderate rule, with a little fasting, and prayer, and meditation, and quiet: and as far as I can I try to cleanse my heart of evil thoughts. What else should I do?' Then the old man rose, and spread out his hands to heaven, and his fingers shone like ten candles, and he said: 'if you will, you could become a living flame'.
from Chadwick's Western Asceticism, cited here.
Suffering is a sign of one's wish for the eternal, but in another sense to wish for the eternal means to wish to be cured from suffering.
Sylvia Walsh on Kierkegaard's Gospel of Sufferings
English readers may view Vila-Matas as too self-absorbed, too self-referential in his choice of the pursuit of literature as the exclusive subject of his fiction. Modernism in fiction may be acceptable, but such postmodern games still seem too much of a Continental fashion. Yet Vila-Matas's obsession shows that the quest to create literature is a metonym for the ability to live a life that has some meaning, rather than being entirely absurd.
from a review of Enrique Vila-Matas's Dublinesca in the TLS, by Nick Caistor (thanks Steve)
It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger … It’s the only land where creation is unfinished yet … Taking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It’s the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only look like badly pronounced and half finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel … There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get used to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But, when I say this, I say this in all admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it. I love it, I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgement.
Werner Herzog, speaking in The Burden of Dreams (via)
In the times of bigness, spectaculars, one hundred million dollar movie productions, I want to speak for the small, invisible acts of human spirit: so subtle, so small, that they die when brought out under the clean lights. I want to celebrate the small forms of cinema: the lyrical form, the poem, the watercolor, etude, sketch, portrait, arabesque, and bagatelle, and little 8mm songs. In the times when everybody wants to succeed and sell, I want to celebrate those who embrace social and daily tailor to pursue the invisible, the personal things that bring no money and no bread and make no contemporary history, art history or any other history. I am for art which we do for each other, as friends.
I am standing in the middle of the information highway and laughing, because a butterfly on a little flower somewhere in China just fluttered its wings, and I know that the entire history, culture will drastically change because of that fluttering. A Super 8mm camera just made a little soft buzz somewhere, somewhere on the lower east side of New York, and the world will never be the same.
The real history of cinema is invisible history: history of friends getting together, doing the thing they love. For us, the cinema is beginning with every new buzz of the projector, with every new buzz of our cameras. With every new buzz of our cameras, our hearts jump forward my friends.
Jonas Mekas (via the exquisite Landscape Suicide)
I remember a conversation with Kafka which began with present-day Europe and the decline of the human race.
'We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts, that come into God's head', Kafka said. This reminded me at first of the Gnostic view of life: God as the evil demiurge, the world as his Fall.
'Oh no', said Kafka, 'our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his'.
'Then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know'.
He smiled. 'Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope – but not for us'.
Max Brod
To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity 'labour power' cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of man's labour power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, physiological, and moral entity 'man' attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighbourhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeapordised, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprises, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society.
from Karl Polyani's The Great Transformation
In 2007 a research project published by the social-policy research and development charity, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, used 46 observers to look at how people actually use public spaces, finding that one of the most important functions of public space is to allow people 'to do nothing'. This was described by the authors as 'an essential role which shouldn't be eradicated', in contrast to the growing micro-management of acivities which threatens to design out lingering and wandering around.
from Anna Minton's Ground Control
In the Sufi religion […] a true Sufi follower is suffused with huenzuen because 'he suffers from grief, emptiness and inadequacy because he can never be close enough to Allah, because his apprehension of Allah is not deep enough. (via)
Such inertia and void as never before. I remember an entry in Kafka’s diary. ‘Gardening. No hope for the future.’ At least he could garden. There must be words for it. I don’t expect ever to find them.
Beckett, from a letter, via
The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the cafe, I am the one who is within it.
Sartre, Nausea
Q.: Is writing and playing music a part of your daily routine?
A.: No, it isn't[….] The work has to NEED to be created.
David Sylvian, interviewed
It's an autobiography written as it's happening. The theme is about staying alive. Getting a job, finding a mate, having a place to live, finding a creative outlet. Life is a war of attrition. You have to stay active on all fronts. It's one thing after another. I've tried to control a chaotic universe. And it's a losing battle. But I can't let go. I've tried, but I can't.
the late Harvey Pekar (the best of the obituaries), on American Splendour
We also talked about literary criticism. I found myself saying, in the flat tone of a sullen child, "I don’t like philology." He protested, said I must read Maurice Blanchot and Vladimir Markov.
It was at some point during this conversation in his office – I do not remember the exact order in which things were said – that he told me, "Every poem is the anti-computer, even the one the computer writes." I looked up, puzzled; he repeated, "Every poem is the anti-computer, even the one the computer writes." I wrote it down.
On the way out he said another thing to me, a propos of nothing: "There’s no cheating in poetry (In der Dichtung wird nicht gemogelt)" He repeated: "There’s no cheating in poetry."
from Esther Cameron's recollections of a walk with Paul Celan.
Recollection: Paul [Celan] coming back from London. – 'I have seen God, I have heard God: a ray of light under the door of my hotel room'. And later Paul recalls Kafka's formulation, 'Sometimes God, sometimes nothing'.
Cosmic dust covers us. The wind lifts the air. – 'I'm writing like never before', he says.
The poem he writes in the street and then telephones to her from a public phonebooth.
Why? I don't want to look anymore. I don't get the tone. The word no longer has tone. How would you say? How would you understand? – 'The secret is in these leaves. The secret is perhaps within us', he says to me. 'But we cannot understand at all. The world is empty. The sky is empty'.
'I have hidden the blood. My poems hide the blood. What do you think? I have paid … I have paid', he says.
stray paragraphs from Jean Daive's Under the Dome
We look at the walls. We read the walls. A May of blossoming trees. A May of goldfish. Paul [Celan] watches, fascinated, a bill sticker. We read Artaud on the walls. We read: The One Alone exists. And his voice reads to me what's written on the walls. He says: 'Our mirrors of today are the walls'.
A word while walking. At the crossing of Boulevard Saint-Germain and Boulevard Saint-Michel, going North. The crowd of May 68. Paul looks at faces he's never seen before. As if – this is implied – the crowd should be familiar, always the same. – 'They've come out of their holes and don't know they can never go back'. – 'After the events?' – 'Yes, after'.
stray paragraphs from Jean Daive's Under the Dome
In his conception of the classless society, Marx secularised the conception of messianic time. And he did well to.
Additional Thesis to Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History, found in a handwritten draft, and originally forming the eighteenth thesis.
The Theses were written following news of the Hitler-Stalin pact in August 1939. Benjamin read them aloud to his friend Soma Morgenstern. Morgenstern recounted her recollections of this event later in a letter to Scholem, recording that she asked Benjamin whether his faith – now betrayed – in the Soviet project 'was related to the Jewish belief in the redemption of the world through a Messiah'. She records Benjamin as replying, she says, 'not without irony': 'you might go farther and say that Karl Marx and all that nineteenth century socialism is but a different form of messianic faith'. (via)
Only for the sake of the hopeless are we given hope.
Benjamin, study of Goethe's Elective Affinities
Writing isn't a young man's game. It's for the mature, the suffering, the wounded – for people who need elucidation.
For many years I have sent myself to sleep with the idea of death – which is an aspect of this feeling that life is an illusion. Very violent pictures of death, I must say. I used to think of my head being cut off, with two strokes of an axe, rather than one … Nowadays I sleep with the idea of a bullet being put in the back of my head … it comforts me.
A lot of my work until, I would say, my second Indian book, was really snatched out of panic by a man who was really doubting his ability to go on. It's very hard to make novels out of experience so fractured and muddled. Novels, a body of work, come best out of whole and single societies.
I've stretched myself. Right from the start I've gone on doing difficult things, not out of poverty but out of experience. And because I've taken it to the limit of my talent, I've come to know myself. It has completely taken me over. I am nothing but my vocation really.
You know, I feel I'm a bad advertisement for my work. That is one reason why I'm slightly ashamed of meeting people who've read it. I feel I might let the work down.
… I began [writing] at a time when the world was beginning to change. Empires were withdrawing, and I had a kind of childish faith that there was going to be a reorganisation of the world. That it was going to be all right. The discovery is that it isn't going to be alright.
V.S. Naipaul, from various interviews.
A rabbi, a real cabalist, once said that in order to establish the reign of peace it is not necessary to destroy everything nor to begin a completely new world. It is sufficient to displace this cup or this brush or this stone just a little, and thereby everything. But this small displacement is so difficult to achieve and its measure is so difficult to find that, with regard to the world, humans are incapable of it and it is necessary that the Messiah come.
Bloch, repeating a parable related to him by Benjamin, who, in turn, heard it from Scholem (cited).
Benjamin's version of the parable runs:
The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too will it sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.
Whenever I am able to see how much I am agreement with your books, my response is one of happiness. It seems to me it is there, truly, I could meet you, such as you are, and in the space of a truth that is close to us both. But the truth is a painful one, and my response of happiness also belongs to this pain.
Blanchot, undated letter to Duras, cited.
Much later on, when I became acquainted with the difficulties and tragedies underlying proletarian life, when I met the women who came to my husband for help and so, incidentally, came to me, I was gripped by the full force of the proletarian's fate. Unsolved problems such as prostitution and unemployment grieved and tormented me, and contributed to my feeling that I must keep on with my studies of the lower classes. And portraying them again and again opened a safety-valve for me; it made life bearable.
Q. How does your day pass?
Until quite recently my day was as follows. I got up at 7.00 (I may not lie any longer, for then there is a banging on the walls and my bed burns). Boiled my coffee (for no one else but I can do that, just like Balzac and Swedenborg). Then I went out for a walk. If I had not drunk any spirits the night before, then to be alive and walk like this was a positive pleasure. The morning possesses something that makes one feel young at heart, reborn, which evaporates with the dew. By lunch time the day is beginning to be the worse for wear; and the afternoon (at its worst about 6.00) is debauched, unshaven, dirty. If they only knew, those who lie in of a morning, what they lost!
Anyway, after an hour or an hour and a half I am back home, and fully loaded. I have warned the servants in advance not to speak to me, for that can end in their misfortune. (After a short while they usually know to run and hide.) I am not wet with sweat, and loosen my clothes, all the way down to my belt. And so it begins: On yellow, uncut Lessebo Bikupa paper, with Sir Joshua Mason's 1001 nib and Antoine Fil's violette noire it breaks out, accompanied by continual cigarette smoking, until 12 o'clock.
Then it is over, and I am extinguished; I go and lie down to sleep …
Strindberg, interviewed
Q. How do you write?
A. Let him say who can! It begins with a fermentation or some sort of agreeable fever, which passes into ecstasy or intoxication. Sometimes it is like a seed, which grows, attracting all interest to itself, consuming all experiences, but still choosing and discarding. Sometimes I think I am some sort of medium, for it comes so easily, half unconsciously, hardly calculated at all! But it lasts at most 3 hours (from 9.00 to 12.00 usually). And when it is over, 'everything is as boring as ever!', until the next time. But it doesn't come to order, not when I please. It comes when it pleases. But best and most after some great catastrophe.
August Strindberg, interviewed
It is rarely assumed that not wanting to live might be part of wanting to live; or that finding one's life – or as it is usually generalised in such states of mind, finding life itself – unbearable may, in certain circumstances, be the sane option, the utterly realistic view.
[…] [A] capacity to be depressed means being able to recognise something that is true – that development involves loss and separation, that we hurt people we love and need – and have been prepared to bear the grief and guilt. In this sense depression makes us real. It deepens us.
[…] Seen through the prism of depression, sanity is always bound up with self-regard.
What I learned from having spent so many years in and out of the local psych ward, the seventh floor of the hospital in the town I live in, is that anyone can end up there. A lot of my life, the more I think about it, has been moments of “I can’t believe this is happening. Did I make this happen to me? This seems like I went off the rails, into another dimension, and I wish I were back over there.” Being in the hospital in one of these places is nightmarish, frightening, and weird; people aren’t supposed to be in places like that. And you’re in a lockup, so you can’t leave. I became one of these people you see in movies in the background, those extras just pacing back and forth. It’s not a healthy place to be, and they don’t help you very much. And many times I was there against my will. That’s the closest I’ve ever come to feeling like something was happening to me that wasn’t right and didn’t feel normal. At the same time, so many people there, you hear their stories, and it seems like it could happen to anyone.
Al Columbia, interviewed
Lars Iyer's Blog 