Category: Quotes

Here is the complete text of ‘Affinity’ by Lydia Davies, collected here.

We feel an affinity with a certain thinker because we agree with him; or because he shows us what we were already thinking; or because he shows us in a more articulate form what we were already thinking; or because he shows us what we were on the point of thinking; or what we would sooner or later have thought; or what we would have thought much later if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have been likely to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have liked to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now.

There is one reason that keeps me writing: hope. The hope that I might be able to write what I need to say because it could not be said in any other way.

That said, I am not writing.

There is also the hope of reading, which is much the same: to find, at last, the narrative that allows me to breathe and to step forward actually; not vicariously through a character or the author’s experience, but actually to step forward. The metaphor is the only means.

That said, I am not reading either.

– from This Space

Bataille’s The Impossible:

Day is falling, the fire is dying, and I’ll soon have to stop writing, obliged by the cold to retract my hands. With the curtains drawn aside, I can make out the silence and the snow through the window panes. Under a low sky, this infinite silence weighs on me and frightens me. It lies heavy like the intangible presence of bodies laid out in death.

after my own disaster:

… on the last day of August 1953 Beckett sighed with despair as he read his copy [of Watt], just as he blanched at the sight of the ‘awful magenta cover from the Merlin press’ with its frame of busy asterisks. His own copy (number 85 of the ordinary edition) shows that he found over eighty spelling and typographical errors, and that, on page nineteen, an entire sentence had been omitted.

Interesting tidbit on Heidegger. Gadamer reports in a Century of Philosophy Heidegger said over and over again in his later years: ‘Nietzsche hat mich kaputtgemacht’ – ‘Nietzsche has broken me’.

Here’s another one. Gadamer is speaking.

… I asked him once, ‘Why did you leave your posthumous papers to that national archive in Marbach? After all, one can’t work properly with your things there at all – they don’t have a philosophical library’. ‘Yes, yes’, he said, ‘I know that, of course. I could have left it all to the Freiburg library where I was a professor. But ultimately I found out from my son that they have very deep treasure troves in Marbach where many treasures are buried’. Did there have to be?’ I asked. ‘No’, he replied, ‘but my writings aren’t all that important now’. ‘Apparently not’ I said. ‘No’, he answered, ‘what’s important to me is that we now arrive at a new direction – that humanity achieve a new kind of solidarity’.

A favourite Giacometti story repeated by Michael Kimmerman, via Cahiers du Doute.

In 1939, Giacometti chose, for a while, to make figures from memory rather than from life, but no matter how hard he tried, the figures kept turning out smaller than he wanted. The problem persisted two years later when he decided to visit his mother, who was then in Geneva, promising friends and also his brother Diego that he would return to Paris with works of a less absurd size.

But with one exception, the figures he made in Switzerland came out tiny, too. He would start over and over again on the same one. It was a sculpture of his friend Isabel standing one evening on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. The memory stuck in his head. “It isn’t the lack of a visa that’s stopping me coming back,” he wrote to her. “I can come back when I like. It’s my sculpture that’s keeping me.”

It kept him in Geneva from 1941 through 1945. When he finally boarded the train back to France, he took with him three and a half years’ worth of work in six matchboxes.

Levinas wavers on the ethical significance of May 1968, but here is what he writes in ‘Without Identity’, newly translated by Nidra Poller in her edition of Levinas’s Humanism of the Other:

It is interesting to note the dominance, among the most imperative ‘sentiments’ of May 1968, of the refusal of a humanity defined by its satisfaction, by its receipts and expenditures, and not by its vulnerability more passive than all passivity, its debt to the other. What was contested, beyond capitalism and exploitation, was their conditions: the individual taken as accumulation in being, by honours, titles, professional competence – ontological tumefaction weighing so heavily on others as to crush them, instituting a hierarchical society that maintains itself beyond the necessities of consumption and that no religious breath could make more egalitarian. Behind the capital in having weighed a capital in being.

From an interview Beckett granted to a French newspaper:

– I never read philosophy.
– Why not?
– I don’t understand it.
[…]
– Why did you write your books?
– I don’t know. I’m not an intellectual. I just feel things. I invented Molloy and the rest on the day I understood how stupid I’d been. I began then to write down the things I feel.

Another splendid footnote from Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation:

In this sense where there is an ‘I’, the identity of a self, ‘God is not dead’. This is also why Nietzsche’s decisive contestation has to do with ‘consciousness’ or the identity of the ‘I’. Consider this text drawn from Nietzsche’s unpublished writings, cited by G. Colli and M. Moniari in the Cahiers de Royamont no. 6 (Paris: Minuit, 1967), devoted to Nietzsche: ‘I rather take the I itself as a construct of thought, of the same order as ‘matter’, ‘thing’, ‘substance’, ‘individual’, ‘goal’, ‘number’, thus as a regulative fiction thanks to which one introduces a sort of constancy, and therefore a sort of ‘intelligibility’ into a world of becoming. Faith in grammar, in the linguistic subject and in the object, has up to the present held metaphyics under its yoke: I teach that one must renounce this faith’.

A fascinating note from Blanchot’s essay ‘The Wooden Bridge’ of Kafka’s The Castle (you can find it in The Infinite Conversation):

Incidentally, I would note that for Kafka bureaucracy is not simply a later development (as though the gods, the first forces, were pitifully ending their reign by becoming functionaries) nor simply a negative phenomenon, any more than is exegesis in relation to speech. To his friend Oskar Baum he writes the following, which demands reflection: ‘Bureaucracy, if I judge it from my own perspective, is closer to original human nature than any other social institution’. (This is in a letter of June 1922, the period of The Castle.)

A few passages from Ann Smock’s translation of Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster:

The writer, his biography: he died; lived and died.

The mortal leap of the writer without which he would not write is necessarily an illusion to the extent that, in order really to be accomplished, it must not take place.

Whoever writes is exiled from writing, which is the country – his own – where he is not a prophet.

‘Optimists write badly’ (Valéry). But pessimists do not write.

The writer, daytime insomniac.

Granted, to write is to renounce being in command of oneself, or having any proper name, and at the same time it is not to renounce, but to announce, welcoming without recognition the absent. Or it is to be in relation, through words in their absence, with what one cannot remember – a witness to the unencountered, answerable not only for the void in the subject, but for the subject as a void, its disappearance in the imminence of a death which has already taken place, out of place, any place at all.

To keep still, preserving silence: that is what, all unknowing, we all want to do, writing.

To live without a lifetime – likewise, to die forsaken by death…. To write elicits such enigmatic propositions.

How absurd it would be to address this question to the writer: are you a writer through and through? In everything you are, have yourself become writing – vital and activating? This would be to condemn the writer to death or foolishly to deliver his funeral eulogy.

What happens through writing is not of the order of things that happen. But in that case, who permits you to claim that anything like writing ever does happen? Or is it that writing is not such that it need ever happen?

This is from an interview with Giacometti by Sylvester, where the artist is discussing his practice of painting his sculptures:

… I have to sacrifice the painting and try and do the form. In the same way as I have to sacrifice the whole figure to try and do the head. And as I have the sacrifice the whole landscape to try and do one leaf. And as I have to sacrifice all objects to do a glass. You can only get to do anything by limiting yourself to an extremely small field.

Up until only a year ago I believed it was much easier to draw a tablecloth than a head. I still think so, in theory. But a few months ago I spent three or four days simply trying to draw the cloth on a round table, and it seemed to me totally impossible to draw it as I saw it. I should really not have given up on the tablecloth until I had got a better idea of whether I could do it or not.

But in that case I would have had to sacrifice painting, sculpture, heads and everything else, confine myself to a single room and reduce my entire activity to sitting in front of the same table, the same cloth and the same chair. And it’s easy to foresee that the more I tried, the more difficult it would become. So I’d be reducing my life to practically nothing. That would be a bit worrying, though, because one doesn’t want to sacrifice everything! Yet it’s the only thing one ought to do. Perhaps. I don’t know.

At any rate, since I’ve become much more responsive to the distance between a table and a chair – fifty centimetres – a room, any room, has become infinitely larger than before. In a way it’s become as vast as the world. So it’s all I need to live in. So that has gradually put an end to going for walks. That’s why I don’t go for walks any more. When I go out, it’s to go to the café, which is necessary, and then I prefer to go by car rather than on foot, since it’s no longer for the pleasure of taking a walk. The pleasure of an outing to the forest has completely disappeared for me, because one tree on a Paris pavement is already enough. One tree is enough for me, the thought of seeing two is frightening. While I used to want to travel, these days it makes no difference to me whether I do or not. I am less interested in seeing things because a glass on a table astounds me much more than it used to.

Van Veldt on Beckett, from Juliet’s book.

He sees himself as dead as he is more alive than anyone else.

He is dispossessed and he has this frightening strength. Both are necessary.

That’s right, he has managed to live without his head.

[On Artaud] He has fallen apart. And you can understand how that can happen to a person. He is so fragile. Beckett’s different: he has managed to contain his drive towards madness.

Van Velde was happy with what he has painted. Beckett visits him. He told Beckett he was almost satisfied. Beckett, expressionlessly: ‘There’s really no reason to be’.

Beckett to Nadeau: I can’t write. I’m not low enough. Van Velde comments: ‘You have to keep as low as you can’.

Painting is an eye, a blinded eye that continues to see, and sees what blinds it.

All the paintings I have made, I was compelled top make. You must never force yourself.
They make you and you have no say in it.

Yes, I abandoned everything. Painting required it. It was all or nothing.

Painting is being alive. Through my painting. I beat back this world that stops us living and where we are in constant danger of being destroyed.

I paint the impossibility of painting.

In this world that destroys me, the only thing I can do is to live my weakness. That weakness is my only strength.

No country, no family, no ties. I didn’t exist anymore. I just had to press on.

All these exhibitions…. People put out their hands to you, and when you try to take them, there’s nobody there.

I do not see this world. But my hands are tied, and that’s why it frightens me.

Dead days are more numerous than live ones.

An artist’s life is all very fine and moving. But only in retrospect. In books.

I am on the side of weakness.

The artist has no role. He is absent.

Most people’s lives are governed by will-power. An artist is someone who has no will.

Painting doesn’t interest me.

What I paint is beyond painting.

I am powerless, helpless. Each time, it’s a leap in the dark. A deliberate encounter with the unknown.

When I look to try and see where seeing is no longer possible, where visibility is gone.

When I look back at a recent painting, I can hardly bear the suffering in it.

I never try to know.

Everything I’ve painted is the revelation of a truth. And therefore inexhaustible.

I never know where I’m going.

The hardest thing is to work blind.

In the normal way, nothing is possible. But the artist creates possibilities where almost none exist.

It’s because artists are defenceless that they have such power.

Yes, he agrees, he is tending to lose all individuality.

Painting lives only through the slide towards the unknown in oneself.

My pictures are also an annihilation.

I am a watered down being.

I am a walker. When I’m not working, I have to walk. I walk so I can go on working.

Van Gogh? … He was a beacon. Not like me. I just feel my way in the dark. But I am good at feeling my way.

What is so wonderful is that all that [painting, an oeuvre, the role of the artist …] is so pointless and yet so necessary.

[On Picasso] Admittedly he was exceptionally creative and inventive. But he was a stranger to doubt [….]

Painting has to struggle to beat back this world, which cannot but assassinate the invisible.

The painter is also blind, but he needs to see.

Discouragement is an integral part of the adventure.

I am a man without a tongue.

The amazing thing is that, by keeping low, I have been able to go my own way.

Always this poverty… But I never rebelled against it. I have always known that that was my place. And anyway, I had my work.

Even failure isn’t something you can seek.

[…] I never really liked French painting. It’s often too disciplined, too elegant. It is not genuine enough. It’s as of art has got the upper hand.

I did what I did in order to be able to breathe. There is no merit in that.

When life appears, it is the unknown. But to be able to welcome the unknown, you have to be unencumbered.

So many painters and writers never stop producing, because they are afraid of not-doing.

You have to let non-working do its work.

I am held prisoner by my eyes.

Source: Juliet.

From Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer:

I have dreamed of my film making itself as it goes along under my gaze, like a painter’s eternally fresh canvas.

It is from being constrained to a mechanical regularity, it is from a mechanism that emotion will be born. To understand this, think of certain great pianists.

A great non-virtuoso pianist, of the Lipatti kind, strikes notes that are rigorously equal: minims, each the same length, same intensity; quavers, semi-quavers, etc., likewise. He does not slap emotion on to the keys. He waits for it. It comes and fills his fingers, the piano, him, the audience.

Oscars to actors whose body, face and voice do not seem to be theirs, do not produce any certainty that they belong to them.

It is what I do not get to know of F and G (models) that makes them so interesting to me.

Bergman in his work diaries for Winter Light:

There are times when self-discipline, which is a good thing, becomes self-compulsion, which is totally harmful.

Peter, from Bergman’s film From the Life of the Marionettes, when he discovers his wife lying murdered: ‘The mirror is broken, but what do the fragments reflect?’

From the notebooks to Persona:

The only thing is, she refuses to speak. In fact, she doesn’t want to lie.

I am unable to grasp the large catastrophes. They leave my heart untouched. At most I can read about such atrocities with a kind of greed – a pornography of horror. But I shall never rid myself of those images. Images that turn my art into a bag of tricks, into something indifferent, meaningless. The question is whether art has any possibility of surviving except as an alternative to other leisure activities: these inflections, these circus tricks, all this nonsense, this puffed-up self-satisfaction.

From the notebooks to Cries and Whispers:

I believe that the film – or whatever it is – consists of this poem: a human being dies but, as in a nightmare, gets stuck halfway through and pleads for tenderness, mercy, deliverance, something.

From Images:

I love and admire the filmmaker Tarkovsky and believe him to be one of the greatest of all time. My admiration for Fellini is limitless. But I also feel that Tarkovsky began to make Tarkovsky films and that Fellini began to make Fellini films. Yet Kurosawa has never made a Kurosawa film.

[Of The Serpent’s Egg] The movie does not tire for a moment; rather the opposite. It is overstimulated, as if it had taken anabolic steroids. But its vitality is powerful on a superficial plane; the failure is hidden underneath.

From Bergman on Bergman:

The people in my films are exactly like myself – creatures of instinct, of rather poor intellectual capacity, who at best only think while they’re talking. Mostly they’re body, with a little hollow from the soul. My films draw on my own experience; however inadequately based logically and intellectually.

Sunlight gives me claustrophobia. My nightmares are always saturated in sunshine. I hate the south, where I’m exposed to incessant sunlight. It’s like a threat, something nightmarish, terrifying.

– In some way the sunlight goes right through your people and their actions
– Yes, they’re eaten out.

Beckett to Duthuit:

The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.

Blanchot:

The writer finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing to write, of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by the utter necessity of always writing it.

Quoted by Steve at In Writing.