Lars Iyer's Blog, page 73

- The first man on the moon! There always has to be a fir...

- The first man on the moon! There always has to be a first man. A discovery presupposes a first man and some surprises.

- Ah,

- In discovering other worlds, man will learn that all stars are empty and that he is alone. I say he is unique. I say he is alone.

- With a lot of sky around him.

- Too much sky. And a sky without colour.

- Without angels.

- Angels are in the mind and in books. And only man prints those.

- You imagine the universe made of empty closets turned into satellites by other closets.

- Empty closets, but occupied by a few clotheshangers swinging ceaselessly...

- Yes... hangers and trembling...

[...]

 

[...] Our most daily gestures, our simplest, most normal gestures are charged with our memory of the Bible without us really being aware of it. We come out of the Bible, we are the Bible. [...]

 

After a long silence, then he continues:

- The forests are very old. The forests are older than man.  They have seen the gods die. And man is naked in a forest of dust, dry leaves and roads covered with leaves and dust.

 

from Jean Daive, Under the Dome: Walks with Celan

He thinks: I am a scream of God. A searching growl. Vacil...

He thinks: I am a scream of God. A searching growl. Vacillation. Slowness. Perplexity. Different reading.

- But a scream can burrow into wound and scar. A kind of saliva, basically, that attenuates the pain.

- I believe the scream is the chosen stance of a voice evicted from itself, mortally wounded, silent, terribly, become non-instrumental from being dispossessed, blank. A drunken voice, crouching. That regards no one...

- A geometric scream.

 

He watches the goat tied to the biboquet. He watches it climb down the step-ladder to the roll of the drum. He smiles. There is applause. A crowd in purplish light. I ask him:

- How do you, Paul Celan, get from stammer to stutter?

- The stammer is linked to childhood, the stutter to knowledge.

- If I understand you correctly, your idea of stammer and stutter is close to Hoelderlin's idea of ideal states...

- That is...

- Hoelderlin says there are two ideals: extreme simplicity, childhood for you, and extreme knowledge, i.e. your stutter.

- Yes, the stutter is literally dumbfounded. He is 'stupid', that is to say aphasic, and we can think of Hoelderlin.

- The monkey is aphasic, therefore...

- Therefore he dances... he has seen the lightning. He is silent and dances.

 

[...]

- I have hidden the blood. My poems hide the blood. What do you think? I have paid ... I have paid, he says.

[...]

- I have hidden the madness... My poetry masks the madness.

 

from Jean Daive, Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan

It allowed me personally to advance where there is no lon...

It allowed me personally to advance where there is no longer any path, to separate myself from the world of psychology and analysis, and understand that feelings and existences can be felt deeply only in a place where, in the words of the Upanishads, there is neither water, light, air, spatial infinity or rational infinity, nor a total absence of all things, neither this world nor another.

Blanchot, on writing Thomas the Obscure. From a letter to Jean Paulhan dated 27 May 1940. (Via)

When speech becomes prophecy, it is not the future that i...

When speech becomes prophecy, it is not the future that is given, but the present that is withdrawn, alongside any possibility of firm, stable, durable presence. Even the Eternal City and the indestructable Temple are suddenly - unbelievably - destroyed. It is like the wilderness once again, and speech too is a wilderness, a voice needing the wilderness in order that it may cry out, and continually reviving in us dread, understanding, and the memory of wilderness.

from Blanchot, The Book to Come

Has the time come for me to face the questions of my book...

Has the time come for me to face the questions of my books?

As if I should, at least as far as they are concerned, accept responsibility for writing them,

when it seems to me that I am not responsible at all, when on the contrary in my innermost thoughts I would accuse them for having swapped my life for another that I have difficulty in living

but perhaps they are calling me to account precisely for the existence I owe to them.

In which case, through me, it is my own books that question my books.

from Edmund Jabes, The Book of Questions, Aely

Dogma by Lars IyerPublisher: Melville House PublishingP...

Dogma by Lars Iyer
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
Publication Date: February 2012
ISBN: 978-1612190464
Paperback, $14.95

The United Kingdom has a Thomas Bernhard, and his name is Lars Iyer. Dogma is the second novel in a trilogy that began with Iyer’s first novel Spurious. It is the story of two Kafka-obsessed windbag British intellectuals, W. and Lars, on a mission to devise and hawk an odd, spartan meta-philosophy they call Dogma. W. is a hardheaded and hyperbolic Jewish professor who spends much of his time devising eloquent ways to insult his colleague Lars, a slovenly and depressed Danish Hindu with an inexplicable obsession with the mysterious Texas blues musician Jandek. The two are unabashedly referential, pulling inspiration from (and speaking constantly of) numerous avant-garde artists and directors: Dogma is a reference to filmmaker Lars Von Trier’s manifesto Dogme95. W. seems to be constantly projecting Werner Herzog’s film Strozsek on a wall in his house. They quote Bataille, Pascal, Leibniz, Rosenzweig, and Cohen. Dogma is hilarious and bleak and loaded with illuminating, brilliant passages, and Iyer’s rapid-fire staccato prose is well-suited to the task. For those who like their dark, difficult books to be funny.

From Hey Small Press.

I hear the somber roar of two distinct sounds.The weepi...

I hear the somber roar of two distinct sounds.

The weeping of Life and the laughter of Death. How eloquent they are!…

But why does Life weep? Why does Death laugh?

Renzo Novatore, Spiritual Perversity (1920) (via)

Self-criticism [is] clearly only the refusal of criticism...

Self-criticism [is] clearly only the refusal of criticism by the other, a way to be self-sufficient while reserving for oneself the right to insufficiency, a self-abasement that is a self-heightening.

from Blanchot's The Unavowable Community (via)

We must believe in the body, but as in the germ of life, ...

We must believe in the body, but as in the germ of life, the seed which splits open the paving-stones, which has been preserved and lives on in the holy shroud or the mummy's bandages, and which bears witness to life, in the world as it is. We need an ethic or faith, which makes fools laugh: it is not a need to believe in something else, but a need to believe in this world, of which fools are a part.
 
Deleuze, from Cinema 2 (via)

I feel the value of my work is determined very precisely ...

I feel the value of my work is determined very precisely by the audience. What does entertainment mean, anyway, and what's the difference between that and art? I would say the main difference is that art isn't necessarily funded by the consumer, but entertainment always is. In that way, entertaininment is a million times more important to me than art, and being an entertainer is more important to me than being an artist. The relationship with the audience is so direct, while the government or rich collectors are going to pay for something that is art rather than the person who is actually going to have a relationship with the piiece. That's what most important to me about what I do. I think of eterntainment as being very serious and impoirtant, from Laurel and Hardy upward. It has to do with emotions of release, giving up or extreme hilarity and absurdity.

Will Oldham, interviewed in Will Oldham on Bonnie 'Prince' Billy