There is no eternal return, time does not enable nonchalance; rather, it is distress.
Jacob Taubes (cited)
You are able to destroy everything but if you meet up with someone who is already destroyed, who is definitely on the edge between the life and the death, then these people have to stop. And everyone who has human being, who has humanity, has to stop.
This is my illusion – I believe still in humanity, and I believe still everybody has this humanity because it's in the blood. I know this is a delusion, but I want to believe.
Bela Tarr, interviewed
If you believe in God, you are mad without having gone mad. It is similar to being sick without suffering from any specific illness.
'One thought of God is worth more than the entire world' (Catherine Emmerich). Poor saint, she was so terribly right!
The restlessness of sleepless nights digs trenches where the corpses of memory are rotting.
As a function of despair, God should continue to exist even in the face of irrefutable proof that he does not exist. Truly, every can be used as argument for or against him, because everything in the world both confirms and denies his divinity. Blasphemy and prayer are equally justified. When uttered in the same breath, one comes very close to the Supreme Equivocator.
From the cradle to the grace, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.
E.M. Cioran, Tears and Saints
The globally positioned consumer-citizen is promised freedom and mobility through the wonders of the Internet, but this constant connectivity is in reality just another pressure. Digital consumption becomes an obligation, almost a form of self-care. Like unpaid technicians, we all obediently maintain our own media networks, and we are constantly contactable (especially by employers) through the miracle of the mobile phone, its de-yuppification another example of remote control disguised as liberation.
from Ivor Southwood's Non Stop Inertia
I often think of the hermits of ancient Egypt who dug their own graves and wept in them day and night. When asked why they cried they replied that they wept for their soul.
In the infinity of the desert, a grave is an oasis, a place for comfort. To have a fixed place in space, one digs a hole in the desert. And one dies so that won't get lost.
E.M. Cioran, Tears and Saints
The painter talks, and I listen. I understand little of what he says, often he speaks too softly, as if talking to himself, or else I don't undersand it because it doesn't seem cohenrent, or else because I'm too stupid.
[…] I have observed the painter Strauch, I have lain in wait for him, I have lied to him, because that is what my assignment has called upon me to do, I have driven him crazy with my questions, much crazier than he was before, and I struck him on the head with my silences, on his head that he fears so much. I bothered him with my youth. With my plans. With my fears. With my incapacity. With my moodiness. I talk about death without knowong what death, what life is, what any of it is …
Thomas Bernhard, Frost
One starts off writing with a certain zest, but a time comes when the pen merely grates the dusty ink, and not a drop of life flows, and life is all outside, outside the window, outside oneself, and it seems that never more can one escape into a page one is writing, open out into another world, leap the gap.
[…] A page is good only when we turn it and find life urging along …
Sister Theodora, in Calvino's Our Ancestors
Prefix: What did you think when I told you I loved the record?
Josh T Pearson: I’m kind of saddened of by it. That sounds stupid, but if you really love it, obviously some bad things have happened to you. If they hadn’t, you could be dismissive and wouldn’t need to spend any time with my album. People gravitate towards light if they’re healthy. It’s not natural to go with the darkness. I’d probably tip my hat and pat you on the back if I saw you, and say “I’m sorry brother. We’ll get through this hopefully.” I’m sorry that you like it.
… there is not going to be a next serious thing in the novel. Our lovely vulgar and most human art is at an end, if not the end. Yet that is no reason not to want to practice it, or even to read it. In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishoners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words.
Gore Vidal, 'French Letters'
I don't believe in materialism, this consumer society, this capitalism, this monstrosity that goes on here…. I really do believe in something, and I call it 'a day will come'. And one day it will come. Well, it probably won't come, because they've already destroyed it for us, for so many thousands of years they've always destroyed it. It won't come and yet I believe in it. For if I can't believe in it, then I can't go on writing either.
Ingeborg Bachmann, interviewed (cited)
However much we want the dramaturgy to stay out of it, it’s always there. And it’s some kind of game that little Lars has staged in some primary school, and it’ll never have any reality because in a basic basic basic sense deep deep deep down you’re onehundredandninetythousand percent lonely in your own tiny tiny little stupid, ridiculous, humiliating world.
Lars Von Trier, via Notes For Nothing.
[Bloch's] style was that of a prose poet. It modulates brilliantly between the apocalyptic and the everyday, the lyric and the polemic. It sings and stabs. It can be utterly luminious (the early morning was Bloch's hour as it had been Nietzsche's) but it can also be portentously opaque. But above all, it comprises and enacts a range of experience immensely beyond that of customary philosophic and political debate.
from George Steiner's obituary of Ernst Bloch
True genesis is not at the beginning but at the end.
Moses […] forces his god to go with him, makes him into the exodus-light of his people […]
Where there is hope there is religion.
Ernst Bloch, cited
The temptation to continue May, without noticing that all the force of the originality of this revolution is to offer no prcedent, no foundation, not even for its own success, for it has made itself impossible as such, leaving only a trace that divides everything, sky and earth, like lightening. NOTHING WILL BE AS IT WAS. Thinking and writing, organising and disorganising: everything is posed in other terms, and not only are the problems new but the problematic itself has changed. In particular, all the problems of revolutionary struggle, and above all of class struggle, have taken a different form.
Blanchot, from Political Writings
My true book will appear only as an opus posthumum: I do not want to have to defend it or know about its 'influence' …
I will only truly speak after my death …, I place my entire life beneath the sign of that 'posthumousness'.
Rosenzweig, letters of 1916 and 1917 (i.e., before The Star), to Ehrenburg and Oppenheim. Cited.
For me, real objective life is impossible, unbearable…. So I transpose as I go along, without breaking my stride. I suppose it's more or less the world's pervasive illness we call poetry.
I am nothing more than an instrument of work…. Existence is much too heavy and monotonous to bear without constant artifice.
Celine, in letters (cited)
Kitano Gempo, abbot of Eihei temple, was ninety-two years old when he passed away in the year 1933. He endeavoured his whole life not to be attached to anything.
[…] When he was twenty-eight he studied Chinese calligraphy and poetry. He grew so skilful in these arts that his teacher praised him. Kitano mused: if I don't stop now, I'll be a poet, not a Zen teacher'. So he never wrote another poem.
Recounted here
As I worked in the factory, indistinguishable to all eyes, including my own, from the anonymous mass, the affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul. Nothing separated me from it for I had really forgotten my past and I looked forward to no future, finding it difficult to imagine the possibility of surviving all the fatigue. What I went through marked me in so lasting a manner that still today when any human being, whoever he may be and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me without brutality, I cannot help having the impression that there must be a mistake and that unfortunately the mistake will in all probability disappear. There I received the mark of a slave, like the branding of the red-hot iron which the Romans put on the forehead of their most despised slaves. Since then I have always regarded myself as a slave.
Simone Weil, in a letter (cited)
Review of Spurious by Laura McLean-Ferris, Art Review, Issue 51, Summer 2011
That the two protagonists of Spurious are constantly asking themselves what Kafka would do in any given situation is indicative of their melodramatic intellectualism, one that this book burlesques in a highly comedic fashion. A fragmented, diaristic account of a dysfunctional friendship between two writers, Spurious emerges from a blog of the same name and is the literary debut of Lars Iyer (a Blanchot scholar based at University of Newcastle). Here 'Lars' and his friend W. endlessly decry their failures as humans, intellectuals and writers, in an atmosphere of gloom so pervasive that it enters a world of hysterical pathos, creating an amusing and occasionally moving piece of writing.
The pair's passion for other writers, expressed in conversations and phonecalls, only heightens their sense of inadequacy. Comparing their correspondence to that of Levinas and Blanchot, and lamenting that only a few letters of that relationship survive, Lars notes that: 'Of ours, which take the form of obscenities and drawings of cocks exchanged on Microsoft Messenger, everything survives, though it shouldn't'. Ominously, Lars's home is damp and festering with ever-growing mould: at times he fears the building will deliquesce completely.
What's left for W. and him to cling to? Only their pathetic excuse for a friendship. As Lars says, 'I am his idiot, but he is mine, and it's this we have in our joy and laughter, as we wake each day into the morning of our idiocy'. As the title suggests, these characters might only be a sham, a satire on intellectuals gone to seed. Nevertheless, the depiction of writers ruined by their own work rings true.
John Self reviews Spurious at Asylum.
I will be contributing to the panel, 'Once Upon a Time the End' as part of the HowTheLightGetsIn Philosophy and Music festival at Hay on Wye at 12.00 this Weds in the Globe tent, and discussing Spurious in the Talk Tent on the same date at 3.00.
An abrupt question: Was Trakl a Christian? Yes, of course, at times he becomes Christian, among a general confusion of becomings – becoming an animal, becoming a virus, becoming inorganic – just as he was also an anti-christ, a poet, a pharmacist, an alcoholic, a drug addict, a psychotic, a leper, a suicide, an incestous cannibal, a necrophiliac, a rodent, a vampire, and a werewolf. Just as he became his sister, and also a hermaphrodite.
Trakl's texts are scrawled over by redemptionist monotheism, just as they are sustained by narcotic fluidities, gnawed by rats, cratered by Russian artillery, charred and pitted by astronomical debris. Trakl was a Christian and an atheist and also a Satanist, when he wasn't simply undead, or in some other way inhuman.
It is perhaps more precise to say that Trakl never existed, except as a battlefield, a resevoir of disease, the graveyard of a deconsecrated church, as something expiring from a massive cocaine overdose on the floor of a military hospital, cheated of lucidity by the searing onslaught of base difference.
from Nick Land's Fanged Noumena
The Teach-In
They want us to say something, W. says. He's not sure what.
I have to control myself, W. says. My tendency is to scare them off, students. It's to bellow and fuss and to deliver great pronouncements on the impending disaster. W. always tries to speak calmly, he says, as a counterbalance. It's alright for me, who am going back to the north, but it will be him, W., who will have to soothe the Plymouth Postgraduates with soft words and sympathy.
New Jerusalem
Students smoking in small groups. The remnants of disposable barbeques. Empty bags of kettle crisps and empty bottles. Spread blankets and a portable MP3 player playing apocalyptic Canadian pop.
This is what he calls a political protest, W. says.
Life is Shit
Life is shit: that's what it reads on the banner strewn across the humanities building at W.'s college. The students are occupying again, W. says.
What are their demands?, we wonder. What do they want? Ah, what are our demands?, we wonder. What do any of us want?
Dolphins
W. went to a lecture on dolphins recently, he says. Turns out they're not intelligent after all. They made a terrible mistake, trying to communicate with them for all those years. There was no point at all; they're quite stupid.
They're related to sheep, dolphins, W. says They're ungulates, basically. They're sheep who decided to go back into the water.
Of course, he was always sceptical about dolphins, W. says. When was the last time you saw a dolphin cathedral? When did you last meet a dolphin philosopher?
Vot-Vot
Lenin died of the same brain disease as his father, W. says. He must have known it was coming, the series of strokes, and then the long decline, which saw his mental powers dissipate altogether. He must have known he'd end up wrapped in a blanket and wheeled along in a bath-chair, one hemisphere of his brain having turned entirely into cottage-cheese-like mush, and the other one about do the same.
His nurses tried to teach him the word worker again, and revolution. His aides tried to teach him the words peasant and people; they tried to teach him the words cell and congress. God knows, his wife even tried to get him to say kulak, a word he used to spit out in hatred, but from his lips came only the nonsense word vot-vot.
Vot-vot, he said to express agreement and disagreement, satisfaction or annoyance. Vot-vot, he said, with various inflections, as his brain died. Vot-vot to the visiting Trotsky, soon to be expelled from the Soviet Union; vot-vot to Stalin, soon to become its absolute ruler. Vot-vot: and isn't that my word, too, or something like it?
What do I actually understand?, W. wonders. What do I really know? Idiocy is unwitting, he says. It doesn't really suffer itself; that's its lightness. The idiot's an innocent, a child. Others laugh at him, the idiot, and he laughs along. Everyone's laughing!, he thinks to himself. What fun! And he laughs too, but what does he understand of what he's laughing at?
Everything's funny! He's an idiot – and that's funny, too. Vot-vot, the idiot says. Vot-vot! But W.'s not laughing anymore. The laughter's stuck to his throat.
Vagrant Sayings
'Without suffering, I'm lost: I wouldn't know what to do without suffering'. W. is reading from a webpage that collects the sayings of vagrants. That's attributed to the Singer, he says.
'"A handshake can judge you': that's Black Sam', W. says. And then several quotes in a row: 'We're all stange people; we're all escapin'; we're all fanatics'; 'You searchin' for somethin', but what? If I could have one spark, just one spark'; 'There's some force that governs. Some gigantic force, but what does it govern?' Who's that?, I ask him. – 'Black Sam again. It's like something from a Malick film', W. says. And then, 'What would your saying be?', he asks. But he knows the answer. 'Vot-vot', he says.
Obsession
W. tells me of his months as an artist's model, being painted by Robert Lenkiewicz, the Plymouth Rembrandt. Lenkiewicz only wanted to talk about philosophy, W. says. He was obsessed with philosophy. He bankrupted himself buying philosophy books, all kinds of books, W. says.
Lenkiewicz bought a derelict church and filled it with books, piles and piles of them, it was quite extraordinary, W. says. W.'d look through the mouldering books with Lenkiewicz, the painter picking up a volume here and there to show him. He had Spinoza's Ethics in a first edition. Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption. He had the pageproofs of Kierkegaard's Discourses on Imagined Occasions, worth thousands of pounds.
Lenkiewicz was painting W. in series of works called Obsession, W. tells me. He always painted in series, Lenkiewicz – projects, he called them. He had a Vagrancy project and a Street Drinking project. He had a Mentally Handicapped project. But W. was part of the Obsession project, or he was supposed to be. Lenkiewicz died very suddenly, just like that, and it was all over. They had to sell all his paintings to meet his debts. They sold his books too – they had to sell the whole church full of books …
Do I see him as an obsessive?, W. says.
Children on a Journey
The train to Manchester.
The hours pass. It's a long journey, infinitely long. We're beginning to forget our pre-train lives. We're beginning to forget who we were once were, out there, on the other side of the glass. Have we ever been anything other than voyagers? Have we ever been anything other than children on a journey, amusing themselves with their nonsense?
Lars Iyer's Blog 