Lars Iyer's Blog, page 49

Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millenni...

Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose [a thoughtful lightness]: 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, agressive revving and roaring - belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty cars.

Italo Calvino, On Lightness, Six Essays for the Millennium

... a line of flight is an immobile movement in situ, whi...

... a line of flight is an immobile movement in situ, which must be internal to the very life that one lives at this place and time, as long as one manages to be and not to be in the here and now, to be absent while present, to be perceptible and imperceptible at the same time. At its best, philosophy functions as a perfect manifestion of this impalpable form of life (maybe this is the reason that venues like the classroom and the conference rarely produce philosophy worthy of its name). [...]

Philosophy is, above all, a way of life in its own right. Until this elemental fact (which, as Pierre Hadot has shown, was an obvious one for the ancient Greeks) returns to inform current philosophical practice, it has no chance of getting out of the inconsequential mess in which it finds itself today. Luckily, when philosophy as a form of life devolves into philosophy as a profession, when friends degenerate into peers, the unique power that inheres in this strange mode of being does not become yet another one of those powers that dominate life (aside from the occasional stray student). Kierkegaard probably said it best: Instead of having any power whatsoever, today's philosophers seem to cheerfully 'speculate themselves out of their own skin'.

David Kishik, The Power of Life. Agamben and the Coming Politics

The magnificent, liquid word 'suicide' emerged in the hea...

The magnificent, liquid word 'suicide' emerged in the heart of the baroque world. Up to that point, French legal scholars and priests with their Latin employed circumlocution. They spoke of 'self-inflicted' or 'impetuous' death. Religion and superstitution no doubt didn't wishthis decisive act to become a common noun. By denying it a place in the dictionary, they hoped, perhaps, to drive the sun out of reality. But what was Lancelot doing when, believing Guinevere to be dead, he tied a rope to the pommel of his saddle? What was Roland doing in the rocky recess at Roncevaux, renouncing flight and refusing surrender? In order to designate the 'homocide of someone who is not a third party', the theologians of the Church of Rome formed a Laton word by adding sui and caedes together. Literally: of oneself the murder. In 1652 Caramuel entitled a chapter of his Theologia moralis fundamentalis 'De suicidio' - on suicide. The word was employed first in England, then in France and Italy, before reaching Spain.

Pascal Quignard, The Silent Crossing

Venomously malignant. Noxious. Blasphemous. Grotesque. Di...

Venomously malignant. Noxious. Blasphemous. Grotesque. Disgusting. Repulsive. Entirely bestial. Indecent. Being among the critical greetings for Leaves of Grass. Not to omit ithyphallic audacity. Plus garbage.

Profound stupidity. Maniacal raving. Pure nonsense. Among some for the best of Shelley. Which was also called abominable.

No philosopher has ever influenced the attitudes of even the street he lived onh. Said Voltaire.

I am not an orphan on the earth, so long as this man lives on it. Said Gorky re Tolstoy.

So difficult and opaque it is, I am not certain what it is I print. Said John Donne's very publisher about the first edition of his verse.

Stories happen only to people who know how to tell them. Said Thucydides.

He never thinks about something; he thinks something. Said Hannah Arendt, re Heidegger.

Realizing that as recently as in the case of Haydn, musicians under the patronage of royalty were still treated as servants - and still wore livery.

He kept bottles of wine at his lodgeing, and many times he would drinke liberally by himselfe to refresh his spirits, and exalt his Muse. Said John Aubrey of Andrew Marvell.

The imagination will not perform until it has been flooded by a vast torrent of reading. Announced Petronius.

The nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later. Said Louis Aragon.

Was he Christian, Jewish or atheist? Samuel Beckett was once asked in a Dubling courtroom. To which: None of the three.

The Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum. An early French critic called Dostoevsky.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice. Said Cyril Connolly.

Kant's irrationally compulsive 3.30PM walk, which it is said he forswore only once in thirty years - on the day when the post brought him a first copy of Rousseau's Emile.

The sound of Paul Desmond's alto saxophone: Like a dry martini, being what Desmond himself said he wanted.

The sign in the window says Pants Pressed Here. But when you bring in your pants, you discover that it is the sign that is for sale. Being Kierkegaard - on the typical obscurity of what normally passes for philosophy.

If you value my work, please, do not knock. Requested a notice on Hermann Hesse's door in Ticino.

A fiend of a book. The action is laid out in Hell - only it seems places and people have English names there. Said Dante Gabriel Rossetti of Wuthering Heights.

It is never difficult to paint, said Dali. It is either easy or impossible.

Thinking with someone else's brain. Schopenhauer called reading.

You have but two topics, yourself and me, and I'm sick of both. Johnson once told Boswell.

A designated area for booksellers existed in the central market in Athens as far back as in the fifth century BC.

Neither Graham Greene nor Evelyn Waugh ever learned to drive a car.

Chopin was buried in Pere Lachaise in Paris - but with Polish earth later sprinkled on the grave.

The only excuse for the suffering that God allows in the world - is that he does not exist. Stendhal said.

Dostoevsky gave me more than any thinker, more even than Gauss. Einstein said.

'Tis such a task as scarce leaves a man time to be good neighbour, an useful friend, nay, to plant a tree, much less to save his soul. Said Pope, re writing well.

A portable fatherland, Heine called the Torah.

When a head and a book collide, and one sounds hollow - is it always the book? Asked Lichtenberg.

Not to be born is far best. Wrote Sophocles.

Not to be born at all would be the best thing. Wrote Theognis, at least a half a century earlier.

The man who has seen a truly beautiful woman has seen God. Said Rumi.

Morningless sleep. Epicurus called death.

Dr Donne's verses are like the peace of God: they pass all understanding. Said James I.

Reality is under no obligation to be interesting. Said Borges.

Like a vile scum on a pond. Pound viewed G K Chesterton.

Borges' vision of Paradise: A kind of library.

The greatest kindness we can show some of the authors of our youth is not to reread them. Said Francois Mauriac.

I'm a poet, I'm life. You're an editor, you're death. Proclaimed Gregory Corso to someone in the White Horse tavern - who shortly commenced punching him through the door and across the sidewalk.

You can tell from my handwriting that I am in the twenty-fourth hour. Not a single thought is born in me that does not have death graven within. Wrote Michaelangelo at eighty-one - himself with eight years remaining.

I've no more sight, no hand, nor pen, nor inkwell. I lack everything. All I still possess is will. Said Goya - nearing eighty.

It is later than you know. Printed Baudelaire onto the face of his clock - after having broken off its hands.

from David Markson's, The Last Novel

I don’t like realistic and natural descriptions of people...

I don’t like realistic and natural descriptions of people, even if they are magisterial like those of the 19th century, in Stendhal and Flaubert, or in a different form, like Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s. It’s alien to me. I like strong outlines, like in Romanesque art. That is to say, the outline gives form, and inside the form, the reader or observer can come to meet the person. I was searching for a different epic, for what I found as a reader of Medieval epic poems; they let me live in the personalities. I intended to contemporize them as well in My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay, in Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, and in At Night Over the River Morava. These, at their core, are medieval novels, epic poems more than novels. In this sense, I don’t believe as much in the novel as in the epic, the story that comes from afar and is balanced toward the distance. In other words, I am an enemy of psychological writing.

[...] Permeability is what’s decisive. What it says is that the writer converts into a figure in transit, through which many things pass. But who has achieved that? I don’t know; Homer sometimes, and Georges Simenon (laughs). Sometimes William Faulkner. Literature, in reality, does not progress; it has variants. To write like Simenon now cannot be done. Once I said, a long time ago, “sigh…if only I learned how to write like Chekhov, stories like that, theatrical works like Anton Chekhov’s. Then someone said to me, “But that already exists! It’s not lacking. Write what Chekhov transmitted to you, about his world, his movement and rhythm, his quality, and above all about his shaking.” One time I said a great writer closes his path to his successors, but only so they can find their own.

Peter Handke, interviewed

New blog for a new novel.

New blog for a new novel.

Great books do not put to shame lesser or merely importan...

Great books do not put to shame lesser or merely important ones, because they hail from a different planet. Without great books, however, literature  would be a mere omnium gatherum of the written; because they are so  necessary, it is evident that they have no choice but to come into  being.

Flowerville translates Ingeborg Bachmann's essay on Bernhard

'Jandek music was never about the best', Smith insists af...

'Jandek music was never about the best', Smith insists after we have moved to my hotel room. 'It was about saying yes, but not to the best[...] It was never about the best. The people that I played with originally, they are off the map, they are still off the map, there is no map for them'.

Jandek, interviewed in the March edition of The Wire

Exodus reviewed in The Bay (scroll down). Not sure of the...

Exodus reviewed in The Bay (scroll down). Not sure of the name of the reviewer.

Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides.M...

Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides.

Man goes nowhere. Everything comes to man, like tomorrow.

A door opens to me. I go in and am faced with a hundred closed doors.

My poverty is not complete: it lacks me.

In no one did I find who I should be like. And I stayed like that: like no one.

Nothing that is complete breathes.

When the superficial wearies me, it wearies me so much that I need an abyss in order to rest.

Not everyone does evil, but everyone stands accused.

Sometimes I find that misery is so vast that I am afraid of needing it.

The far away, the very far, the farthest, I have found only in my own blood.

He who tells the truth says almost nothing.

Only the wound speaks its own word.

That it man which cannot be domesticated is not his evil but his goodness.

There are sufferings that have lost their memory and do not remember why they are suffering.

Nothing ends without breaking, because everything is endless.

I have come one step away from everything. And here I stay, far from everything, one step away.

Suffering does not follow us. It goes before us.

We tear life out of life to use it for looking at itself.

When everything is finished, the mornings are sad.

Suffering is above, not below. And everyone thinks that suffering is below. And everyone wants to rise.

Sometimes at night I light a lamp so as not to see.

I saw a dead man. And I was little, little, little... My God, what a great thing a dead man is!

Yes, one must suffer, even in vain, so as not to have lived in vain.

Only a few arrive at nothing, because the way is long.

I am in myself so little that what they do with me scarcely interests me.

Certainties are arrived at only on foot.

Man, when he realises that he is an object of comedy, does not laugh.

Near me nothing but distances.

Yes, I will go. I would rather grieve over your absence than over you.

It is a long time now since I asked heaven for anything, and still my arms have not come down.

The shadows: some hide, others reveal.

The loss of a thing affects us until we have lost it altogether.

You are sad because they abandon you and you have not fallen.

The void terrifies, and you open your eyes wider!

When one does not love the impossible, one does not love anything.

My bits of time play with eternity.

My final belief is suffering. And I begin to believe that I do not suffer.

To wound the heart is to create it.

The sun illumines the night, it does not turn it into light.

Every toy has the right to break.

When I believe in nothing I do not want to meet you when you believe in nothing.

Sometimes I believe that evil is everything, and that good is only a beautiful desire for evil.

The love that is not all pain is not all love.

Now humanity does not know where to go, because no one is waiting for it: not even God.

The irreparable is the act of no one: it happens by itself.

I would ask something more of this world, if it had something more.

You do not see the river of tears because it lacks one tear of your own.

When you and the truth speak to me I do not listen to the truth. I listen to you.

I can wait for you no longer. Because you have arrived.

from Antonio Porchia's Voices