Category: Quotes

I ask Edmund Jabès:

'You say you are an atheist. How can you constantly write of God?'

'It is a word my culture has given me'.

Then he expands:

'It is a metaphor for nothingness, the infinite, for silence, death, for all that calls us into questio. It is the ultimate otherness'. or, as he puts it later, in the conversations with Marcel Cohen: 'For me the words "Jew" and "God" are, it is true, metaphors. "God" is the metaphor for emptiness; "Jew" stands for the torment of God, of emptiness.

Rosmarie Waldrop, Lavish Absence

While the state in decline lets its empty shell survive everywhere as a pure structure of sovereignty and domination, society as a whole is instead irrevocably delivered to the form of consumer society, that is, a society in which the sole goal of production is comfortable living.

Agamben, Means Without End

[In his photographs] He was a mountain of a man, very big, dark and handsome, square-jawed, earnest for the camera, somewhat imperious. A seer, a prophet, frowning as though accusing the viewer of levity in the midst of the general catastrophe.

Since I was working on my dissertaion, we talked about academe; we agreed that the university was covered in dust.

Of his friend Camus, to whom the wartime journal Leaves of Hypnos was dedicated, Char said, Camus knew that words could demoralize. He realised after the war that The Stranger had had a demoralizing effect. That's why he wrote The Plague. We were friends because both of us recognized that writing imposes duties, it does not grant rights.

We talked about the brutality of the Luberon, the mountainous region where he was a Resistance fighter during the war. We talked about meteors, snakes, insomnia. When he couldn't sleep, he used his nights to illustrate, by candlelight, the book he was about to publish, The Talismanic Night that Shone in its Circle. […]

Yet even during that warmest of encounters, my friendship with Rene Char felt as fragile as a goldfinch. […]

And he had another bone to pick with critics. The trouble is, he said, that critics want to find a plot in poetry. But poetry has no plot, no continuous development like a novel. Poems are inscriptions made here and there, on scattered rocks (he was standing, miming this). […]

As Helen Vendler once remarked to me, 'One feels Char writes with absolute candour, but in a secret language'.

from Nancy Kline, Meeting Rene Char

Contemporary politics is a devastating experiment that disarticulates and empties institutions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities [only to reoffer them in] definitively nullified form.

Agamben, Means Without End

Appearances notwithstanding, the spectacular-democratic world organization now emerging runs the risk of being the worst tyranny human history has ever seen  and against which resistance and dissent will be ever more difficult – all the more so as, now more clearly than ever, this organisation will have as its task to see to the survival of humanity in an uninhabitable world.

Agamben, in his introduction to Debord's Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle

If people were once able to pursue their mode of living in an organic and unselfconscious manner, in today's cultural hegemony it takes a lot of persistence and resistance to hold one's ground. If for the frivolous life in postmodernity nothing really matters, for the form of life in the coming community everything always matters.

David Kishik

Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times – noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring – belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetry for rusty cars. 

Calvino

David Kishik, with a question for academics:

I have a question for you:

What is the proportion between the time you spend, on the one hand, reading and thinking and writing in your field, and the time you spend, on the other hand, selling yourself by writing proposals and applications, shmoozing with colleagues and professors, and so forth?

And I have another question:

Did you know that the most cold-blooded corporations spend on advertisement anywhere between about %1 of their revenues (in the retail business) and about %7 (for companies selling packaged goods)?

This is just an educated guess, but I have a feeling that, on average, successful academics spend a much bigger chunk of their intellectual resources on self-promotion than what good capitalists spend on marketing their wares.

For a man can never be in death in a worse sense than where death itself is without death.

Augustine, City of God (Cambridge, p.558)

Our age is not the epoch of faith and not even the epoch of incredulity. It is more than anything else the epoch of bad faith [in which] the first duty of the intellectual must consist in the nonparticipation in this lie. 

Agamben, untranslated article from the '70s, cited here.

We are so accustomed to the old opposition of reason versus passion, spirit versus life, that the idea of a passionate thinking, in which thinking and aliveness become one takes us somewhat aback.

Arendt, 'Martin Heidegger at Eighty'

Since so many people who are totally unqualified to be authors (no essential idea to communicate, no essential mission, no ethically conscious responsibility) nevertheless become authors, being an author becomes for men a kind of distinction similar to woman's adorning themselves: the primary point and the purpose for writing are to become noticed, recognised, praised.

Kierkegaard, journal entry

I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.

— Nan Goldin, in Couples and Loneliness

via Time Immemorial

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

— Late fragment, Raymond Carver

via Time Immemorial

Arvo Pärt and his wife Nora Pärt, speaking to an interviewer:

N.P.: The last chord in Cantus seems not to want to come to an end. It stands still, without growing or diminishing. Something has been achieved and now one doesn't want to let it go. The content of the entire work strives toward this point. When the plateau of this cadence has been reached the chord does not want to stop. The same thing happens at the end of the first part of Tabula Rasa: always this final chord that appears to want to go on forever.

[…] A.P.: I believe the sacred texts are still 'contemporary'. Seen in this light there are no significant differences between yesterday, today and tomorrow because there are truths that maintain their validity. Mankind feels much the same today as he did then and has the same need to free himself from his faults. The texts exist independently of us and are waiting for us: each of us has a time when he will find a way to them.

[…] A.P.: It is possible that the people who follow my music with interest hope to find something in it. Or perhaps there are people who, like me, are in search of something and when listening to my music, feel that it is moving in the same direction as they are.

Arvo Pärt and his wife Nora Pärt, speaking to an interviewer:

[…] my experience with the third symphony left me dissatisfied. It became clear to me that I was caught within my relationship to musical history, which was too much one of debt. And that my work somehow lacked a style of its own. But I had succeeded in building a bridge within myself between yesterday and today – a yesterday that was several centuries old – and this encouraged me to go on exploring. During those years I filled thousands of pages with exercises in which I wrote out single voiced melodies. At home there is a cupboard full of exercises like this. […]

N.B.: Arvo wanted to develop his spontaneity, and not just through this experiment with the psalms – I can remember that he observed flocks of birds, sketched them in a book, and wrote a melody next to the drawing. In other cases he used photos of mountains as inspiration to find a musical phrase. He had the feeling that the observation of cold, dead roles from years gone by had extinguished his own free, creative impulse.

[…] You can't imagine how important this period was, with all its pages of exercises and psalms. He didn't know if he had found anything at all, and if he had, what it was. But he would certainly have given up composition if he had found nothing. I knew that he would not have been able to go on living without that music, which was the real content of his life.

If there's one dream that never left me, whatever I've written, it's the dream of writing something that has the form of a diary. Deep down, my desire to write is the desire for an exhaustive chronicle. What's going through my head? How can I write fast enough to preserve everything that's going through my head? I've sometimes started keeping notebooks, diaries again, but each time I abandoned them […]. But it's the biggest regret of my life, since the thing I'd like to have written is just that: a 'total' diary.

Derrida, interviewed

Arvo Pärt: As you can see, we are dealing once more with the concept of spirituality. By spirituality I do not mean something mystic, but something in fact quite ordinary. There are different attitudes – a very negative way of thinking, and another attitude that sees everything in a positive light. Old music and art teach us to see things from the second of these two perspectives. This is the way Fra Angelico painted, for example, in representing the Day of Judgement. Naturally hell is shown, but even this seems to be imbued with sanctity, and here hell is simply some 'added colour'. For other painters that came later, hell was a real place, but heaven was not so pure as that of Fra Angelico.

In this context the words of Peter Brook occur to me: I am thinking of his comments on the legendary Aix-en-Provence production of Don Giovanni. He said that the miracle of Mozart consists in the way he never condemns anyone, how in his work he accompanies his protagonists lovingly and with equal generosity and empathy.

To my surprise [Kafka] spoke to me not only in my mother tongue but also in another language that I knew intimately, the language of the absurd. I knew what he was talking about. It wasn't a secret language for me and I didn't need any explications. I had come from the camps and the forests, from a world that embodied the absurd, and nothing in that world was foreign to me. 

My real world was far beyond the power of imagination, and my task as an artist was not to develop my imagination but to restrain it, and even then it seemed impossible to me, because everything was so unbelievable that one seemed oneself to be fictional.

… the Jewish experience in the Second World War was not 'historical'. We came into contact with archaic mythical forces, a kind of dark subconscious the meaning of which we did not know, nor do we know it today.

To write things as they happened means to enslave oneself to memory, which is only a minor element in the creative process. To my mind, to create means to order, to sort out, and choose the words and the pace that fit the work. The materials are indeed materials from one's life, but ultimately the creation is an independent creature.

When I wrote Tzili I was about forty years old. At that time I was interested in the possibilities of naiveness in art. Can there be a naive modern art? It seemed to me that without the naivete still found among children and old people and, to some extent, in ourselves, the work of art would be flawed. I tried to correct that flaw.

It took me years to draw close to the Jew within me. I had to get rid of many prejudices within me and to meet many Jews in order to find myself in them. Anti-semitism directed at oneself was an original Jewish creation. I don't know of any other nation so flooded with self-criticism. Even after the Holocaust, Jews did not seem blameless in their own eyes. On the contrary, harsh comments were made by prominent Jews against the victims, for not protecting themselves and fighting back. The ability of Jews to internalize any critical and condemnatory remark and castigate themselves is one of the marvels of human nature.

Appelfeld, interviewed by Philip Roth

Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more. Humanity, such as it is, inspires only an attenuated curiosity in us. All those prodigiously refined ‘notations’, ‘situations’, anecdotes . . . All they do, once the book has been set aside, is reinforce the slight revulsion that is already adequately nourished by any one of our ‘real life’ days.

Houellebecq, from his book on Lovecraft

Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, just like Austria, have never been part of Eastern Europe. From the very beginning they have taken part in the great adventure of Western civilization, with its Gothic, its Renaissance, its Reformation – a movement that has its cradle precisely in this region. It was there, in Central Europe, that modern culture found its greatest impulses: psychoanalysis, dodecaphony, Bartok's music, Kafka's and Musil's new aesthetics of the novel. The postwar annexation of Central Europe (or at least its major part) by Russian civilization caused Western culture to lose its vital centre of gravity. It is the most significant event in the history of the West in our century, and we cannot dismiss the possibility that the end of Central Europe marked the beginning of the end for Europe as a whole.

… France: for centuries it was the centre of the world and nowadays it is suffering from the lack of great historical events. This is why it revels in radical ideological postures. It is the lyrical, neurotic expectation of some great deed of its own, which is not coming, however, and will never come.

I learned the value of humour during the time of Stalinist terror. I was twenty then. I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person hom I needn't fear, by the way he smiled. A sense of humour was a trustworthy sign of recognition. Ever since, I have been terrified by a world that is losing its sense of humour.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything.

Kundera, interviewed by Philip Roth

I find myself unable to formulate just how I think the messianic future will be. But that is no proof against it. When the time comes, the details will fall into place.

Rosenzweig, in a letter

[In writing his autobiographical narrative] Paul opens up a new world of inwardness, a world he himself explores and describes with passionate detail, and which will always have room for fresh explorers, such as Augustine, Pascal and Rousseau. Yet the cost of this is high. Giving up this world of confusion, uncertainty and limited horizons for the apparent surer world of the spirit, he condemns himself to the sustaining of his vision by nothing other than the sheer power of his imagination and the constant reiteration of the drama of his conversion.

Josipovici, The Book of God

I'm sure you all remember the silly old saying 'The pen is mightier than the sword'. Perhaps when swords were the weapons in current use, there was some point in this proverb. Anyway, in our time, the least of our problems is swords.

But the power and influence of the creative arts is not to be belittled. I only say that the art and literature of sentiment and emotion, however beautiful in itself, however striking in its depiction of actuality, has to go. It cheats us into a sense of involvement with life and society, but in reality it is a segregated activity. In its place I adovate for the arts of satire and of ridicule. And I see no other living art form for the future.

Ridicule is the only honourable weapon we have left.

[…]

We have come to a moment in history when we are surrounded on all sides and oppressed by the absurd. And I think that even the simplest, the least sophisticated and uneducated mind is aware of thise fact. I should think there is hardly an illiterate peasant in the world who doesn't know it. The art of ridicule is an art that everyone can share in some degree, given the world that we have.

Muriel Spark, from her essay 'The Desegregation of Art' (1970)

… you write because you do not know what you want to say. Writing reveals to you what you wanted to say in the first place. In fact, it sometimes constructs what you want or wanted to say. What it reveals (or asserts) may be quite different from what you thought (or half-thought) you wanted to say in the first place. That is the sense in which one can say that writing writes us. Writing shows or creates (and we are not always sure we can tell one from the other) what our desire was, a moment ago.

[on his early years] … as I remember those days, it was with a continual feeling of self-betrayal that I did not write. Was it paralysis? Paralysis is not quite the word. It was more like nausea: the nausea of facing the empty page, the nausea of writing without conviction, without desire. I think I knew what beginning would be like, and balked at it. I knew that once I had truly begun, I would have to go through with the thing to the end. Like an execution: one cannot walk away, leaving the victim dangling at the end of a rope, kicking and choking, still alive. One has to go all the way.

I do believe in sparseness […] Spare prose and a spare, thrifty world: it's an unattractive part of my makeup that has exasperated people who have to share their lives with me.

I should add that Beckett's later short fictions have never really held my attention. They are, quite literally, disembodied. Molloy was still a very embodied work. Beckett's first after-death book was The Unnamable. But the after-death voice there still has body, and in that sense was only halfway to what he must have been feeling his way toward. The late pieces speak in post-mortem voices. I am not there yet. I am still interested in how the voice moves the body, moves in the body.

[Nabokov]  was proud of his family and his family history. His childhood in Russia was clearly a time of unforgettable happiness. His love and his longing for that departed world are plain in his work; they are what is most engaging in him. But I am not sure he approached the reality that took Russia away from him in a responsible way, in a way that did justice to his native gifts […] That is why, I think, I have lost interest in Nabokov: because he balked at facing the nature of his loss in its historical fullness.

[On the influence of film and photography on The Heart of the Country:] There was a moment in the course of high modernism when first poets, then novelists, realised how rapidly narration should be carried out: films that used montage effectively were connecting short narrative sequences into longer narratives much more swiftly and deftly than the nineteenth century novelist had thought possible, and they were educating their younger audience too into following rapid transitions, an audience that then carried this skill back into reading texts.

… like children shut in the playroom, the room of textual play, looking out wistfully through the bars at the enticing world of the grownups, one that we have been instructed to think of as the mere phantasmal world of realism but that we stubbornly can't help thinking of as the real.

Writing is not free expression. There is a true sense in which writing is dialogic: a matter of awakening the countervoices in oneself and embarking upon speech with them. It is some measure of a writer's seriousness whether he does evoke/invoke those countervoices in himself, that is, step down from the position of what Lacan calls 'the subject supposed to know'.

… contemporary criticism has become very much a variety of philosophizing.

Stories are defined by their irresponsibility: they are, in in the judgement of Swift's Hoynhnhms, 'that which is not'. The feel of writing fiction is one of freedom, of irresponsibility, or, better, of responsibility toward something that has not yet emergeed, that lies somewhere at the end of the road.

[On Foe:] Friday is mute, but Friday does not disappear, because Friday is body. If I look back over my own fiction, I see a simple (simple-minded?) standard erected. That standard is the body. Whatever else, the body is not 'that which is not', and the proof that it is is the pain in feels. The body with its pain becomes a counter to the endless trials of doubt.

… it is not that one grants the authority of the suffering body: the suffering body takes this authority: that is its power. To use other words: its power is undeniable.

Violence, as soon as I sense its presence within me, becomes introverted as violence against myself: I cannot project it outward. I am unable to, or refuse to, conceive of a liberating violence[….] I understand the crucifixion as a refusal and an introversion of retributive violence, a refusal so deliberate, so conscious, and so powerful that it overwhelms any reinterpretation, Freudian, Marxian, or whatever, that we can give it.

… as Flaubert observed, popular literature tends to be the most literary of all.

Coetzee in dialogue with David Atwell

The bitter, the hollow and – haw! haw! – the mirthless. The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not true! Well, well. But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout - haw! – so. It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs – silence please – at that which is unhappy.

Beckett, Watt

[On why she admires some authors rather than others:] I think too that I need a brazier of historical experience, a horizon of events, to sense a centre of political suffering, as is the case for Lispector, Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, Bachmann. (Woolf doesn't lack this, but she comes from the same milieu as Proust, and within me there's a little Jewish girl who feels so removed from these social classes …

[On the sense that her work has offspring among contemporary writers:] I think of this often, telling myself that my future library is already in place, I can hear the breath of works already formed, that will extend beyond my death, and for me, this is happiness, this adds life to my life. 'To have children' late in life is a wonderful experience! It made Sarah laugh and thrilled Abraham. It's miraculous. One wants to be proud but once can only be humble. For one is not the cause of these marvellous 'descendants', nor the condition, but only the first person, more or less, to see the great future approaching, at which one will not be present, but where one will be recollected, kept by a person in whom one is glad to be continued.

The proofs and their correction: there you touch upon a sore point: I have never dared to continue working at this stage. I feel it's utterly forbidden by editorial reprobation; I know how much it costs. Even when I correct minimally, I apologise profusely in the margins. I don't feel at home any more once the proofs arrive, I am a guest (same with the plays, as soon as rehearsals begin, I have no more rights).

[On titling her books:] … since the title doesn't come along until after the book, coming from it, and sometimes very late […], it escapes from the book like a sigh, a sigh of regret. Or a burst of laughter. The book could get along without it. Then it accepts the yoke, while trying to play with it to the limit. Shake it up. Then it submits to the judgement of God, which liberates it from its submission.

 […] there will always be 'the two worlds' […] once, hence, the dominant, the one which is now the globalizer; the other, the impure, the hounded out, the marginalised, the 'filthy' of the clean, and which is composed of people or classes considered, on the political level, as the 'damned' of the period; but – and this matters a great deal to me – also on the cultural level composed of the 'rich' in spirit, the intolerable, the poets, philosophers, seekers of the absolute, all those whose sources of delight are found at pretty inaccessible altitudes, who live on languages, and who have found Kleist's second innocence, who desired not power but the poem, and who are hated or feared because they are not aligned and don't conform to the spirit of imitation and predation.

… the time-detached, the dead outliving those who are the inhabitants of literature.

The Bible is everywhere and from the beginning and 'naturally' present in what I write, myths, themes, leitmotivs, songs, promised lands, philosophemes. I am 'at home' in it as in the desert and with God, that is with the need of and the lack of God.

Texts that are broken, fleeting, correspond surely also to urgencies of flight, caused by the pursuit of or dream of a subject which shimmers and sweeps me along but which can't and musn't be taken, grasped, captured.

I write 'a book' and this book lodges itself within me, a passerby, a guest, it exists in flesh and words; and I get to know this complex, composed but unique being, creature. I discover it as we go along. Its vital, animal part is very strong. Moroever it uses my body to make a body, members, for itself, to increase and divide itself into characters. As when I dream and people, at times complete strangers, populate me and I myself become a novel of a kind, in which I am myself a character who has heaps of adventures, and assault and battery.

from Helene Cixous, Frederic-Yves Jeannet, Encounters

… literature is the infinite of the finite.

… Yves Berger, Bernard Fasquelle took the book (Le prenom de Dieu), a 'crazy' book, and Dedans. I published these books 'looking the other way' because I didn't think they were books.

Dedans […] I was a little embarrassed by, aware that I hadn't written a book but a mangled 'thing'.

I was absolutely not part of [the world of prestigious iterary awards – L.I.]. There were parties and I wasn't there, I was in the hospital, out of it; I didn't see where I was headed, I saw a pit in place of my life.

Neutre was the supreme effort to dig up the secret. All I did was shift it to another grave.

Angst, to my way of thinking, but I may be wrong, is less a new direction than an attempt to conclude: I told myself, really, that if I didn't get to the root of Angst (anguish), the mortal divinity that was persecuting me, I would die, I suffered too much from repeated Angst. So I engaged it as a battle. Of course I wasn't hoping to win, the main thing in a battle is to fight it, to free oneself, in acting, from the misery of passivity. So I didn't win, but I painted its portrait.

… I can't write without feeling I am wronging all the people to whom I owe my life, and the time, to write.

… I never have any idea, either of the theme or of the object, I have only a law: head for whatever is the most frightening. To that which I cannot and do not want to write face-to-face.

As far as time, the duration goes – as I told you, I cannot write except uninterruptedly: it's impossible: hence in a trance. Otherwise I'd be sidetracked by resistances and fears. I only write red-hot, in convulsions, it's highly physical, it's exhausting, it's a gallop, I write ten hours straight, I collapse, but with paper, I don't stop, when I am too tired, I take notes in the evening, at night so as to start fresh, as if heading off to battle, at daybreak, and I do this for two months. During this time I keep in mind the book's landscape or land, its mental map, its armies, its armoires, scraps of sentences, images, dreams, its passages. But not its 'whole', not its composition. This I don't know, I discover. For the same reason, as soon as the 'book' 'ends' it withdraws like a tide, and I no longer remember anything.

from Helene Cixous, Frederic-Yves Jeannet, Encounters

Q. Some paintings are very enigmatic. For instance, when we looked at Up the Hill and I said I thought the figure at the back looked a bit like a scarecrow, you said it wasn't intended that way but you were okay with people thinking that. Looking longer at the painting, I find myself fascinated by the very weird, somewhat ominous shadow, which seems like a tangible thing attached to the figure. Or there is the hard-to-understand setup of the two men with towels in LeBelle Cascade. And you cannot help but wonder what all that stuff is on the floor and the sideboard in Opium. Of course, there are also very straightforward portraits and outdoor scenes. So did you want a mixture of the more direct and the more mysterious (again, like putting together an album)?

A. Yeah, sure, but everything in life, directly or indirectly, has a great degree of mystery. To paraphrase Warren Zevon, "Some days I feel like my shadow's casting me." Persons, places, things … time itself is a mystery. You know, like, who can explain it? It's really difficult to define anything. What's slow can speed up. Love can turn into hate. Peace can turn into war. Pride can turn into humility. Anger to grief. How would you define a simple thing like a chair, for instance—something you sit on? Well, it's more than that. You can sit on a curb, or a fence. But they are not chairs. So what makes a chair a chair? Maybe it's got arms? A cross has arms, so has a person. Maybe the chair doesn't have arms? Okay, so it's a post or a flagpole. But those aren't chairs. A chair has four legs. So does a table. So does a dog. But they're not chairs either. So a chair is a mystical thing. It's got a divine presence.

There's a gloomy veil of chaos that surrounds it. And "chaos" in Greek means "air." So we live in chaos and we breathe it. Is it any wonder why some people snap and go crazy? Mystery is ancient. It's the essence of everything. It violates all conventions of beauty and understanding. It was there before the beginning, and it will be there beyond the end. We were created in it. The Mississippi Sheiks recorded a song called "Stop and Listen." To most music aficionados, it's but a ragtime blues. But to me, it's words of wisdom. Saint Paul said we see through the glass darkly. There's plenty of mystery in nature and contemporary life. For some people, it's too harsh to deal with. But I don't see it that way.

Bob Dylan, interviewed 2011