“Intercourse with Resuscitated Wife” by Ben Marcus, from The Age of Wire and String.
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Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new.
Book log 2011!
The top 25 books I read for the first time last year (one per author):
Island People [Coleman Dowell, 1976]
A Minor Apocalypse [Tadeusz Konwicki, 1979]
The Ice Palace [Tarjei Vesaas, 1963]
Joko’s Anniversary [Roland Topor, 1969]
62: A Model Kit [Julio Cortazar, 1968]
The Dragon: Fifteen Stories [Yvgeny Zamyatin, 1913-1933, pub.1968]
The Hearing Trumpet [Leonora Carrington, 1976]
The Ship [Hans Henny Jahnn, 1936]
Bright Green Field [Anna Kavan, 1958]
Scorch Atlas [Blake Butler, 2009]
Compact [Maurice Roche, 1966]
Quake [Rudolph Wurlitzer, 1972]
Memories of the Future [Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, pub.1989, written 20s/30s]
Tripticks [Ann Quin, 1971]
Closer [Dennis Cooper, 1989]
Ubik [Philip K. Dick, 1969]
Steps [Jerzy Kosinski, 1968]
The Holy Terrors [Jean Cocteau, 1929]
The Goose of Hermogenes [Ithel Colquhoun, 1961]
Forever Valley [Marie Redonnet, 1994]
Liquidation [Imre Kertesz, 2003]
The True Deceiver [Tove Jansson, 1982]
Motorman [David Ohle, 1972]
Dimensions v.1 [anthology, 2011]
The Portable Frank [Jim Woodring, 2008]
And all 108 books, and a bunch of comics, that I read this year after the break.
Leonora Carrington, The Seventh Horse
And here is another thing: the objects around me are becoming terribly clear and vivid, much more alive than I am. You know, Eleanor, I’m afraid… . Listen, the chairs in this room are very old, and so is all the rest of the furniture. Last week, I saw a little green bud on one of the chairs, the kind of bud that appears on trees in the spring. And now … how horrible … it has become a leaf … Eleanor!
From “Pigeon, Fly”, 1937-1940.
For centuries, they dressed up love for easy digestion as a fat little boy with wings, pale blue bows, and anemic-looking flowers. behind this bland decoration Love snarled its rictus through the ages. With shrieks of adoration, it flung itself on human breasts, “to crush you, to suck your life away. I cannot drag my own weight over the crust of the earth, so you must carry me on your back so that in time you will be crippled with my weight.” These words are in every heart in the mating season.
From The Stone Door, 1940s, pub.1976.
Leonora Carrington may be my favorite surrealist writer, so many more after the jump.
Coleman Dowell, Island People
1976:
What conveyance is crossing the land, narrow-wheeled and noiseless, killing wild things? The only moving presence through this day besides his has been the sun’s. Time moving across the heavens, mortal below like the gnomon of a sundial, and at his feet the mystery of death’s conveyance, unseen and unheard in passage; unimaginable in shape — plumed, dark, carven, white, pristine as chaos — only known factor is the wheel’s involvement, the narrow wheel — a radience of spokes, or solid, tired or metal rimmed, unknown. Only the wheel’s complicity with what is carried in whatever vehicle cannot be imagined by a man of the earth. (p.115)
further quotations after the jump.
Anna Kavan, Eagle’s Nest
1957:
Everything appeared slightly distorted to me just then. I saw the station as the garishly lit shrine of some cult, dedicated to huge iron monsters, bellowing peremptorily at the timid subservient humans, who flocked to and fro in obedient herds. (p.18)
In the foreground too there was only rock: boulders heaped up in a frenzied confusion, in imitation of every imaginable and unimaginable form, a chaos of the grotesque, the obscene, the mad, an exhibition of insane statuary, producing an almost terrifying effect on myin my exhausted condition; I could hardly bear to look, repelled by the extraordinarily bizarre agitation of the lifeless stone. (p.29)
Wherever I looked, I encountered the same blank rejection, as though, by rejecting the hand, I had initiated a mass-reaction in my surroundings. With dreadful finality, the room itself was casting me into outer darkness. (p.138)
![Julio Cortázar, Cronopios and Famas
I’ve not been one hundred percent on Cortazar in the past, but this is fantastic. 1962, just one year before Hopscotch:
Tighten your fingers around a teaspoon, feel its metal pulse, its mistrustful warning. How it hurts to refuse a teaspoon, to say no to a door, to deny everything that habit has licked to a suitable smoothness. How much simpler to accept the easy request of the spoon, to use it, to stir the coffee. [pp.3-4]
In order to cry, steer the imagination toward yourself, and if this proves impossible owing to to having contracted the habit of believing in the exterior world, think of a duck covered in ants, or of those gulfs in the Straits of Magellan into which no one sails ever. [p.6]
At Amalfi, where the seacoast ends, there’s a jetty which stretches out into the sea and night. Out beyond the last lighthouse, you can hear a dog bark. [p.8]
No one will have failed to observe that frequently the floor bends in such a way that one part rises at a right angle to the plane formed by the floor and then the following section arranges itself parallel to the flatness, so as to provide a step to a new perpendicular, a process which is repeated in a spiral or in a broken line to highly variable elevations. [p.21]
They aren’t giving you the watch, you are the gift, they’re giving you yourself for the watch’s birthday. [p.24]
We live in this lower-middle-class neighborhood called the barrio Pacifico, and we do things every chance we get. There are a lot of us who come up with ideas and manage to put them into action. [p.30]
In his struggle against pragmatism and the horrible tendency of reaching useful ends, my eldest cousin proposed the following procedure: to pull from the head a good thick strand of hair, make a knot in the middle of it, and drop it gently down the sink drain.. Should the hair get trapped in the metal grate which used to propagate in such drains, all you have to do is open the faucet a bit and it will disappear for good. Without a moment of hesitation, you must begin the job of recovering the hair. [p.39]
Either the tiger agrees to be lodged, or it must be lodged in such a way that its acceptance or refusal is of no consequence. [p.48]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lsar47qCbQ1qd5c9vo1_400.jpg)
Julio Cortázar, Cronopios and Famas
I’ve not been one hundred percent on Cortazar in the past, but this is fantastic. 1962, just one year before Hopscotch:
Tighten your fingers around a teaspoon, feel its metal pulse, its mistrustful warning. How it hurts to refuse a teaspoon, to say no to a door, to deny everything that habit has licked to a suitable smoothness. How much simpler to accept the easy request of the spoon, to use it, to stir the coffee. [pp.3-4]
In order to cry, steer the imagination toward yourself, and if this proves impossible owing to to having contracted the habit of believing in the exterior world, think of a duck covered in ants, or of those gulfs in the Straits of Magellan into which no one sails ever. [p.6]
At Amalfi, where the seacoast ends, there’s a jetty which stretches out into the sea and night. Out beyond the last lighthouse, you can hear a dog bark. [p.8]
No one will have failed to observe that frequently the floor bends in such a way that one part rises at a right angle to the plane formed by the floor and then the following section arranges itself parallel to the flatness, so as to provide a step to a new perpendicular, a process which is repeated in a spiral or in a broken line to highly variable elevations. [p.21]
They aren’t giving you the watch, you are the gift, they’re giving you yourself for the watch’s birthday. [p.24]
We live in this lower-middle-class neighborhood called the barrio Pacifico, and we do things every chance we get. There are a lot of us who come up with ideas and manage to put them into action. [p.30]
In his struggle against pragmatism and the horrible tendency of reaching useful ends, my eldest cousin proposed the following procedure: to pull from the head a good thick strand of hair, make a knot in the middle of it, and drop it gently down the sink drain.. Should the hair get trapped in the metal grate which used to propagate in such drains, all you have to do is open the faucet a bit and it will disappear for good. Without a moment of hesitation, you must begin the job of recovering the hair. [p.39]
Either the tiger agrees to be lodged, or it must be lodged in such a way that its acceptance or refusal is of no consequence. [p.48]
Arno Schmidt, Scenes from the Life of a Faun
Germany, 1953:
<Communal Reception, 12 noon> : And it was another Reichstag session, withm Hurrah and Heil and glee club and lusty bellowing; for closers : “passed unanimously”. (Plus : “A song !”. And were so proud : in England there’s always that disgusting pro and con in parliment : but we’re united, from top to bottom !). And throughout the populace the serene, happy conviction : the Fuhrer will take care of it ! God, are the Germans stupid ! 95% ! (I.e., the others are no better either : just let the Americans elect themselves a Hindenburg sometime !)
SA, SS, military, HY andsoforth : humans are never more trying than when playing soldier. (Surfaces periodically among them about every score of years, something like malaria, of late the pace is quicker). In the end, it’s always the worst ones who end up on top, to wit: bosses, executives, directors, presidents, generals, ministers, chancellors. A decent person is ashamed of being a boss !
Or wait ! That was it : <In the Department Store> : 4th floor : Hands are yapping bright-dyed fabrics jaws gape barrels eyeballs rummage distance buzzes may-I-help-you’s boxes slumber armchairs settle clothing jungles clothing forests ribbons bubble elbows jostle buttons ogle stockings shelter digits finger D-mark pieces thighs are reaching down from bottoms
Hans Henny Jahnn, The Ship
With darkly swollen sails, the ship traveled over chasms that were filled with water. The air had been saturated for an extraordinarily long time with light whirlwinds, and the new day, as if trying to triumph over the white light, was clear and cold, and completely illuminated with a silvery brightness. Everything on deck looked hard and formless and not at all in keeping with the slight motion of water and wind. Long before nightfall, warm, suffocating vapors were wafted across the deck and the livid cold blended surprisingly quickly with the mild haze. Walls of fog closed in on the vessel. Clouds that seemed to have just appeared fell abruptly and seethed about the ship. Masts and sails grew to gigantic proportions. Only a short while before, the horizon had been a thing that could be measured. Now, suddenly, everything visible was narrowed down. The man-made structure hung suspended, alone in a sea of fog, as if fallen from the earth. Tops of masts disappeared into infinity, blood black sails were harried by ashen fumes foaming around them. From time to time, the prow of the ship took a nose dive into the clouds and ceased to exist in the eyes of the men. The waters of the ocean were sticky slime that adhered to the hull. (p.82)
Hans Henny Jahnn (1896 - 1959) was a German expressionist novelist and playright. The Ship, the prologue to a never-completed trilogy, is a dense and unsettling story in its own right, a kind of philosophical horror tale of an irrational schooner hauling mysterious cargo amid waves of mistrust and recrimination. It’s amazing. Among its most striking traits is Jahnn’s use of descriptions from outside the narrative (like intercut images in film) as model, explanation, and emphasis for the events on the ship. More quotes after the jump.
A fragment guide for The Lost Notebook
Evan Dara’s the Lost Notebook is a novel told entirely in fragmentary dialogue and monologue, each running from a single line to twenty or so pages, most highly disconnected from eachother. Or are they? I thought it might be instructive to make note of each of the fragments, for myself and now for anyone else reading this book, to make it easier to spot recurring characters (names in bold, except very few actually do recur afterall) and motifs, and to serve as a kind of thematic and narrative index. Hopefully it will be of some use:
01 (p.6) career counseling and the limitation of specialization
02 (p.8) on invisibility and making your absence felt
(walkman, phillip glass, shoplifting, problems of figure and ground)
——02a (p.13) gunpoint at Andy the mechanic’s (inconsequential and unreported)
03 (p.19) an obscure meeting overtaken by firefly gathering
(communication via headlights, videographers Jurgen and Dave (also a musicalogist), Ribber’s electronics promo trick, persistence of image, presence and absence (ground state off or on?), Eisenstein portrait, Beethoven’s variations as working-through, unknown narrator needs to speak with Dave about his grandfather.
——03a (p.35) drum set as signifier first, instrument second (Dave’s son Michael and Bob the candid salesclerk)
04 (p.42)
(balding animator and sprinkler frustratee Nick, “how I got started” (unknown narrator), grandfather’s living scrapbook, Jesus joke no.1, inbetweening (Piaget’s transition states?), mitosis.
05 (p.50) the golden age of radio
(antenna installation, Nixon vs. Kennedy on radio vs. TV, Raymond’s voice pre-leukemia, World of Blondes assurances, Fred Allen records, Neville and Peggy Madden at the memorial, Susan and Alex, Rashomon and on and on)
06 (p.58) counting the unvotes
(not all action is radicalism, Reagan with 26%, perspectives on revolution, the eighth nonvoter, grandfather’s Scottish textile factory and failed commune and minstrel travels)
07 (p.72) pirate cassette radio
(news, testing the signal, solidarity, two fingers on the clavicle, inside or outside).
——07a (p.118) lost in search of John Cage-shaped moss (the man in the woods, monotheism and empire, Akhenaton the first individual)
08 (p.175) Ravel interlude no.1
09 (p.175)
(Kenning Flack, Billy the soundman, Natalie in makeup, fearless director Mario, “well we are near the end”, Ameliorator tics, no second chances / no eternal returns)
——09b (p.179) bossman Jake’s memorandum (Phillip Morris layoffs, hobo grip)
10 (p.185) planting trees of language
(“make of my evanescence something everlasting”, Chomsky, Robin’s letter no.1, the risk of attempting to verbalize an effortless relationship, staring at “love” til it loses meaning)
11 (p.188) the devaluation of empathy
(“Joan, Jess, Madeline, and I” packing up for Henry’s move across town, a television melodrama about Hilary with leukemia, the inescapability of unoriginal thoughts, finding my own means to suffer)
12 (p.191) a press conference on giving the consumer’s intelligence due credit
(ablutions, correlation is not causation, repetition).
13 (p.199) office hours
(Freudian film analysis, changing topics, Eisenstein’s montage, Piaget’s water jars, permanence of objects)
14 (p.206) The Invention of Solitude and the undying struggle of the artist
(narrator Dudley on the greatness of fresh muffins, Ronnie’s enchanted wrenches, zony shit, section manager Lonno, Mr. Big Huey, Bob from sales, opening attitude, artificial monkey mother love, Jesus joke no.2, getting a job)
15 (p.225) Ravel interlude no.2
16 (p.225) Soyuz docking sequence
17 (p.230) magazine death-signals
18 (p.233) how I lost my hand
(golden gate bridge jumpers, what are they pointing towards?)
19 (p.237) telemarketing automaton blockade nightmare
(Robin’s letter no.2, to 5.5-month Rebecca, Chomsky again, coughing, economical teflon gutters)
20 (p.249) stereo hutch and fishing tips
21 (p.249) on neighborliness and yard care
(Angelo moves into Forresters’ house when they go back east, illusion of choice, customer divorcee Cathy Watkins and Vicky, moto-wreck)
22 (p.259) on the arbitrary straight-jacket of the 12-tone scale
(Harry Partch, it is 1985, Timotheus, commercial shoot)
23 (p.264) cut the stupid neo-pythagorean shit
(even without positive absolutes there are negative ones)
24 (p.265) Ravel interlude no.3
25 (p.266) 66 men
(a different Raymond, shared solitude, my unknown father’s voracious puppy-spirit)
26 (p.277) a moral objection to Darwin
(internal exile and neo-pythagorean silence, alas for the egg, maximum possible suffering, Darwin was an ad-man)
27 (p.278) hostage thoughts
28 (p.280) …other thoughts?
—-BREAK—-
29 (p.282) Robin’s letter no.3
(chaffinch songs, new selves to inhabit, bone marrow melodrama via selfish exec [11], beaten by the media, Piaget redux [13], Procustian bed or centrifuge [1], walkmen, inside same as outside)
30 (p.298) people open up to hitchhikers
(the reader is addressed, Archie the hitchhiker, fairgrounds, Erwin the ex-gerbil, the self-importance of suffering, special relativity’s lack of absolute center, why not voting, lost scrapbook (narrator’s grandad’s), coyote films, eternal return [09], music + kodak, jesus joke no.3)
31 (p.314ish) driving back to campus
(self-destructing Civic, Harder They Come, translating English to English)
32 (p.318) crying against the parade grain (Anders Crosby and Puddenhead Wilson)
33 (p.320) for a purpler lilac (Flower Box owner Greg)
34 (p.321) use your nervousness (extra ticket from narrator’s girlfriend Rina)
35 (p.322) on turn-of-the-century novelty banks and the container outvaluing the content
36 (p.323) in defense of wedding registries
(I told Alicyn, knitting into the business community)
37 (p.324) Tiny also has a horn
38 (p.224) gland-made bagels
39 (p.225) anthropological considerations
(grant, Joe Schiller’s canoes, the recorder corrupts the source)
40 (p.328) Tom follows Greg into the family business [maybe 33, probably not]
—ISAURA CHORUS COMMENCES—
41 (p.329) Nonet Minus One bone tones (Jake on trumpet)
42 (p.330) suggested uses for the Schroeder House
43 (p.331) enamel-based paints
44 (p.331) employee discounts
45 (p.331) Buy-Day program
46 (p.332) Jeremy the Springer is off
47 (p.332) optimal subdivision lot size
48 (p.332) Ozark Park proposals
49 (p.333) Mother Ozark
50 (p.333) eye irritation and CD jukes (Curt White subbing for Ron, Ginnie quitting smoking)
—-micro-fragments—-
51 (p.405) once bent, the snap won’t hold
52 (p.406) on the complexity of two-channel vcrs
53 (p.407) Mr. Archer and Mrs. Culhane will have to understand the tea cut-backs
54 (p.408) Roy Rogers expenses
55 (p.409) Ma won’t leave her crullers
56 (p.409) why you should not forget your unlisted number
57 (p.410) Roy cracks the whip
58 (p.411) nosebleed
59 (p.411) Piaget [13, 29]
60 (p.412) Archie’s mom investigates local animal health [30]
61 (p.415) father checks the fridge
62 (p.416) Nonet Plus One Minus One [41]
—-micro-fragments—-
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
1931:
“Now the cock crows like a spurt of hard, red water in the white tide,” said Bernard. “Birds are singing up and down and in and out all around us,” said Susan. “The beast stamps; the elephant with its foot chained; the great brute on the beach stamps,” said Louis. (p.10)
The train now stamps heavily, breathes stertorously, as it climbs up and up. At last we are on the top of the moor. Only a few wild sheep live here; a few shaggy ponies; yet we are provided with the every comfort; with tables to hold our newspapers, with rings to hold our tumblers. We come carrying these appliances with us over the top of the moor. Now we are on the summit. Silence will close behind us. If I look back over that bald head, I can see silence already closing and the shadows of clouds chasing each other over the empty moor; silence closes over our transient passage. This I say is the present moment; this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the merging monster to whom we are attached. (p.65)
Now glancing this side, that side, they looked deeper, beneath the flowers, down the dark avenues into the unlit world where the leaf rots and the flower has fallen. Then one of them, beautifully darting, accurately alighting, spiked the soft , monstrous body of the defenseless worm, pecked again and yet again, and left it to fester. Down there among the roots, where the flowers decayed, gusts of dead smells were wafted; drops formed on the bloated sides of swollen things. The skin of rotten fruit broke, and matter oozed too thick to run. Yellow excretions were exuded by slugs and now and again an amorphous body with a head at either end swayed slowly from side to side. The golden-eyed birds darting in between the leaves observed that purulence, that wetness, quizzically. Now and again they plunged the tips of their beaks savagely into the sticky mixture. (pp.74-75)
Now I will walk, as if I had an end in view, across the room, to the balcony under the awning. I see the sky, softly feathered with its sudden effulgence of moon. I also see the railings of the square, and two people without faces, leaning like statues against the sky. There is then a world immune from change. When I have passed through this drawing room flickering with tongues that cut me like knives, making me stammer, making me lie, I find faces rid of features, robed in beauty. (p.107)
Ann Quin, Tripticks
1972:
If you come filled with dreams, it may happen that your dream changes about every 15 minutes. The most is yet to come. (p.8)
Then he went on about a fund he was creating to provide huge public cocktail parties with free food and drink for anyone who wants to attend. ‘This would be a nice way to be remembered,’ he said. There had to be a hitch - the parties would not start until after his death, and he wants to enjoy them too. So, for every party, he has arranged with a local funeral home to have his remains wheeled out in a big silver casket. (p.14)
Eerie rites greet the morning sun. He kneels on the floor grasping a small wheel with both hands and slowly prostrates himself. On a roof not far away someone runs on a treadmill. The president of a dressmaking company puts on a belt that sends electric shocks to his abdomen, while his wife stands with on foot on a four-wheeled board and the other foot on another four-wheeled board reverently squatting and rising, while their daughter lies head down on a slanted board, jerking convulsively at the waist. Sauna belts to sweat into. Executive Barbells to swing. Tensolators for building up muscles; vibrator massage machines (‘both centrifugal and percussive action’) and roller massage machines (‘for deep-penetrating massage’) treadmills and rocks and vibrating belts and electric bicycles (‘Do your story dictation aboard a Trimcycle’). Tone-O-Matic weighted belts - belts weighted with 10 pounds of lead and intended to be worn in the normal course of a day’s activity. One man cried that his hands were getting bigger and bigger. (pp.19-20)
At one point when the victim-to-be showed signs of losing interest in the blandishments of the sirens, the girls put on an impromptu performance that made Salome’s dance of the seven veils resemble a Girl Scout’s festival. (pp.23-24)
Yevgeny Zamyatin, “The North”
Zamyatin is best known fro his pre-Brave New World, pre-1984 dystopia of communist totalitarianism We, written in 1921 against what would come to pass all too soon. But some of his earlier fables of Russian life are equally compelling, rigorously arranged, and, free from the official mechanical diction employed to appropriate effect in We, extremely poetic. 1918:
This is how it happens: the sun flies slower and slower until it hangs suspended, motionless. And everything is locked, imbedded for eternity in greenish glass. On a black stone near the shore, a seagull has spread its wings and poised for flight—and it will sit forever on that black stone. Over the chimney of the fat-rendering works a puff of smoke hangs, petrified. The quick, tow-headed urchin in the boat leans over the side to splash his hand in the water, and is caught, immobile, still. For a long moment, everything is made of glass. This moment is night. (p.89)
A glove on the hand. And now the glove is off and it lies on the counter, seemingly the same, yet different: unalive, the flesh and substance taken out of it. And so with Kortomikha behind the counter: the innards have been taken out of her, and her cheeks are sunken forever, and the chest is hollow. But her hat is pink, with flowers, and he pink hat makes it still more painful to look at her. Between the wrinkles at the corners of her lips there is a smile, and the smile is even more painful than the hat. (p.95)
The mouth of the bay between two cliffs was like a window. A window shutting out curious eyes with a white shade—white woolly fog. And all you could see was that behind it, something red was happening. (p.97)
A naked arm pulled aside the skin over the window. Behind the window, in the sky—a pink bright slit, pink snow, pink smoke over the roofs. “But no! The night is over? No, it’s just a…” And the skin was dropped once more. But daily the slit grows wider, brighter. And now there are red strips outside, on the snow—and red strips inside, in the hut, on the white curve of a leg with its pale-blue network of tiny veins, on the closed lids, the rusty head. The lids are held together with sweet glue. If only one need never open them… (pp.109-110)
One day—it had been long ago, everything had been long ago. One day Marey walked in the woods, his gun loaded with bullets, for bears, and suddenly a goose flew out from underfoot. He fired straight at the neck, the head was cut clean off. There was no head, but the goose still flapped his wings in flight; it fluttered a few yards more, and then dropped to the ground. Just so, as though still in mid-flight—Marey still flapped his wings, and Pelka hers. (p.131)
○
Jun
27
Blaise Cendrars, Moravagine
The anarchic poetics of nihilism, 1926:
“You are lovely as a stovepipe, smooth and rounded into yourself, elbowed. Your body is like an egg on the seashore. You are concentrated as rock salt and transparent as rock crystal. You are a prodigous blossoming, a motionless whirlpool. The abyss of light. You are like a sounding line that sinks to incalculable depths. You are like a blade of grass magnified a thousand times.” (pp.41-42)
“There it was, in the utter darkness of the cavern, that I captured the loveliest forms of silence. I held them, they slid between my fingers, I recognized them by their feel. First, the five vowels, wild, apprehensive, watchful as vicuna; then, following down the spiral of the corridor, even narrower and lower, the edentate consonants, rolled into a ball in a scaly carapace, sleeping, wintering through the long months; farther still, the fricative consonants, smooth as eels, nibbling at my fingertips; then the weak ones, flabby, blind, often slobbering like white worms, and these I pinched with my nails, scratching their fibrils of prehistoric turf; then the hollow consonants, cold, cutting, corticate, which I gathered on the sand and collected like shells; and, at the very bottom, flat on my belly, leaning over a fissure, there among the roots, I felt god knows what poisoned sir come whipping at me, dtinging my face, while tiny animalcules skittered over my skin in the most ticklish places; they were spiral shaped and shaggy like a butterfly’s proboscis and let off sudden, raucous, husky sounds. It is noon. The sun pours boiling oil in the ear of the sleeping demiurge. The earth opens like an egg. Out of it surges a tongue, undulating and bloodshot. No, it is midnight. The tiny night-lamp is exhausting as an arc light. My ears are buzzing. My tongue is peeling. I make futile efforts to speak. I spit out a tooth, the dragon’s tooth.” (pp.54-55).
In the last analysis, scientific knowledge is negative. The latest discoveries of science, as well as its most stable and thoroughly proven laws, are just sufficient to allow us to demonstrate the futility of any attempt to explain the universe rationally, and the basic folly of all abstract notions. (pp.117-118)
Intelligence consists of eating stars and turning them into dung. And the universe, at the most optimistic estimate, is nothing but God’s digestive system. (p.118)
My eyes caught glimpses of vast expanses of sky, but the wheels rushed furiously in and destroyed any trace of it. Thy were turning in the depths of the sky, marking it with long, oily streaks! These grease marks spread, grew and took on colors and I could see a million eyes blinking in broad daylight. Enormous eyeballs were rolling from horizon to horizon, passing through each other. They all grew tiny, stationary and hard. A kind of translucent ectoplasm formed all around them, a kind of face: the face was my own. My face printed in hundreds of thousands of copies. (p.133)
Is there a more monstrous thought, a more convincing spectacle, a more patent affirmation of the impotence and madness of the brain? War. All our philosophies, religions, arts, techniques and trades lead to nothing but this. The finest flowers of civilization. The purest constructions of thought. The most generous and altruistic passions of the heart. The most heroic gestures of man. War. Now and a thousand years ago. Tomorrow and a hundred thousand years ago. No it’s not a question of your country, by German or French friend, or yours, whether you’re black or white or Papuan or a Borneo monkey. It’s a question of your life. If you want to live, kill. Kill so you can be free, or eat, or shit. The shameful thing is to kill in masses, at a predetermined hour, on a predetermined day, in honor of certain principles, under cover of a flag, with old men nodding approval, to kill in a disinterested or passive fashion. Stand alone against them all young man, kill, kill, you are unique, you are the only man alive, kill until the others cut you short with the guillotine or the cord or the rope, with or without ceremony, in the name of the Community or the King. (pp.225-226)
Maurice Blanchot, Aminadab
1942:
At other times he would not have missed a word. But his experience had taught him already that the inhabitants of this house did not always tell the truth and that even when they were not lying, their words were rarely of any use. Besides, he could not have understood these words; they were spoken in a tone that stripped them of all sense; no meaning could correspond to an expression of such great sadness; for them to carry so much despair, they had to be deprived completely of the unburdened clarity contained in an intelligible word. (p.24)
Thomas did not understand everything he saw and would have needed some explanation. But the pleasure he took in observing was all the greater. (p.31)
Gradually his eyes became accustomed not so much to the night, which remained perfectly dark, as to their own weakness. It was only dark to the extent that these eyes believed themselves capable of rising to any task. (p.37)
Not only was it extremely tiring to follow the conversation — for at each instant it seemed to him that the most important words were escaping him — it also made him uneasy and weighed down his mind with details he would have preferred still not to know. (p.109)
All these inventions were no less beautiful than they were odd, and the emotion one felt in discovering them far surpassed the feeling of peaceful artistic enjoyment. (p.114)
“Where do you see any contradictions? …There are contradictions only between your hopes and this world that does not grant them.” (p.150-151)
“As the desire drawing them upward becomes more intense, because its obstacles have been diminished, the more they find within themselves the means to combat it and to detach themselves from it. Thus it is that they alone approach those regions that remain inaccessible to others. I could never describe to you the last stages through which they pass before coming upon that great opening without a door that lies at the end of their aspirations. The torments and delights they undergo there are such that they cannot preserve them in their memory. They are no longer anything, and yet they are everything. They are touched by an intense love that, however, has none of the colors of love and that reaches them through the abandonment in which it leaves them. They are driven by a glorious hope composed of all the hopes that they have previously renounced. They are finally so annihilated by the effort to resist the temptation to go where they desire with all their soul to go, that they are often consumed by it and succumb to the force of their passion. Some never move past the first step; others go as far as the doorway, where they remain lying in a heap; and yet most of them do enter and leave, after realizing, as they take their last steps in utter indifference and in the death of their last desire, that everything was indeed as they themselves had guessed; the appartment is quiet and empty, there is nothing left to desire because there is nothing.” (p.153)
This drawing did not, strictly speaking, make much sense; it was a tangle of threads that had not yet been unraveled and that drew one’s gaze ceaselessly in every direction in search of the image they were meant to construct. (p.160-161).
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Apr
08
