Poverty, poverty. Richness in art is called bad taste. A poem is not a jeweller’s shop window; creators are those who make beauty from materials of no value. I would be full of admiration for a sculptor who worked in cardboard. Blue, who is the genius of our time, uses wallpaper, newspapers, sand and labels in his pictures. I find even more objectionable the richness of people who always use three words where one will do. Let us be poorer. … You need to be able to hold back from facile development, limit yourself to expressing an image without pursuing it. Abundance is damaging. Above all avoid description; it is fussy and too comfortable, unhealthy richness. We have known for some time that all trees are green. Kill description. You must not be led by the wish to shine. You must be animated by a real spirit of sacrifice; you must risk not being heard, rather than exploit an image or situation. Keep the spirit of poverty in everything you do.
~ Anicet or the Panorama, A Dadaist Novel by Louis Aragon, Louis Aragon, Atlas Press, London, UK, 2016, pg. 76 – 77
^^^
For when I forgo something beautiful: doesn’t a brand-new, never-before-dreamed-of beauty a thousand times more beautiful come flying toward me in reward for my display of goodwill and my kind, strongly felt self-denial? And if, of my own free will, elevated by courage and compassion to nobler sentiments, I should forgo heaven: won’t I then, sooner or later, in reward for my righteous behaviour, fly into heaven many times more beautiful?
~ Masquerade and Other Stories, Robert Walser, Forward by William Gass, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1990 (1917), pg. 97
^^^
“How does one know that art is present in a work? he asked. As if echoing his words the fireback shook with laughter. “Because you can only find ready-made expressions to talk about it,” the critic answered. “No,” said Chipre, “it is because when you look at it you feel persuaded you could have made it yourself.”
~ Anicet or the Panorama, A Dadaist Novel by Louis Aragon, Louis Aragon, Atlas Press, London, UK, 2016, pg. 82
^^^
Indelicate human figures make you think of the soil, of country bustle and country life, of God himself, whose body surely isn’t so extraordinarily beautiful either. God is the opposite of Rodin.
~ Masquerade and Other Stories, Robert Walser, Forward by William Gass, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1990 (1908), pg. 35
^^^
But you should just at least take note that in an age when one can deny God, Country and Family without unleashing a tempest, you could still get your eyes put out for declaring that art does not exist. Art and Beauty are mankind’s last divinities.
~ Anicet or the Panorama, A Dadaist Novel by Louis Aragon, Louis Aragon, Atlas Press, London, UK, 2016, pg. 135
^^^
You can’t want to understand and appreciate an art. Art wants to snuggle up to us. She’s so terribly pure and self-satisfied a creature that she takes offence when someone tries to win her over. She punishes anyone who approaches with the intention of laying hold of her. Artists soon find this out. They see it as their profession to deal with her, the one who won’t let anyone touch her.
~ Masquerade and Other Stories, Robert Walser, Forward by William Gass, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1990 (1902), pg. 9-10
^^^
The most banal reality suddenly speaks directly to me with such a muffled tone that it brings tears to my eyes. This feeling that arises is the love of life suddenly provoked by the sight of a still-life. What human issue is at play behind these inert images? Nothing could be less expected to make one think of life, but here it is palpitating (how lovely that crude word is). What pain or joy lies at the heart of the artist that reveals it to us? You would think he was about to reach a dangerous crisis in his life. It is alive with a wonderful secret which communicates deep anxiety, transforming it for us so that we will never know what drama these tobacco tins mask, or what ecstasy these mandolins recall. Here there is only pure emotion, and it is so akin to the feeling lying dormant within us that it will rouse it, as the harmonic pitch rouses a mute vase at the far end of a room. This spell is inescapable, for we no longer know where it comes from. What comes to us rings true – we cannot refute it. How we tremble suddenly at the site of a pipe; what weakness puts us at the mercy… at the mercy of what?
~ Anicet or the Panorama, A Dadaist Novel by Louis Aragon, Louis Aragon, Atlas Press, London, UK, 2016, pg. 145-7
^^^
Aimlessness leads to the aim, while firm intentions often miss. When we strive too zealously, it may happen that our strivings harm us. I would advise speedy slowness or slow rapidity. Still, advice can’t be more than advice. Be patient, everyone, both with yourselves and with others. Bustling about doesn’t bring any great reward. This much is certain: he who never sets out need never return. Think twice before you get energetic.
~ Masquerade and Other Stories, Robert Walser, Forward by William Gass, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1990 (1924), pg. 123-4
^^^
Here’s an exercise: look inside yourself, assess yourself, work out the relationship between your desires.
~ Anicet or the Panorama, A Dadaist Novel by Louis Aragon, Louis Aragon, Atlas Press, London, UK, 2016, pg. 178
^^^
The phenomenal realm and the noumenal realm – the world from which we come, and the one towards which we are heading. Memory that dances and amplifies, beautiful and faithless with its veneer of trustworthiness, is a kindred spirit, of the same race and the same essence as the anticipation that was nourished beforehand by images and emotions. One must look deep within oneself, force oneself to discover something new and personal, something unexpected, the incomparable shock of Difference, here where so many people who have written and spoken the same language have already been.
~ Journey to the Land of the Real, Victor Segalen, A translation of Equipée by Natasha Lehrer, Atlas Press Anti-Classics, London, 2016 (1929), pg. 92
^^^
Throughout this time, [Robert Walser]’s been an inventor’s assistant, worked in banks and insurance offices, as an archivist or the secretary of an art dealer, attended a school for servants, and become a butler for a bit, before he accepts insanity as his true profession. … His mind pleads incompetence. Asylums are asylums. There he can guiltlessly surrender his fate and pass his days at the behest of others. He will no longer need to write in such a way that its public obscurity is assured. He will no longer need to write. The daily walk will suffice.
~ Masquerade and Other Stories, Robert Walser, Forward by William Gass, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1990, pg. x/xvi-xvii
^^^
Exoticism is therefore not an adaptation to something, it is not the perfect comprehension of something outside one’s self that one has managed to embrace fully, but the keen and immediate perception of an eternal incomprehensibility.
~ Essay on Exoticism: an Aesthetics of Diversity, Victor Segalen, translated by by Yaël Rachel Schlick, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2002, pg. 25
^^^
In an unpublished lecture in 1937, Eliot spoke of a pattern of emotion in which a man acts beyond character, according to a hidden and mysterious order. Four Quartets follows emotions beyond those we ordinarily know as human, though we may have hints and guesses. The drafts show the personal source of these emotions; the revisions Eliot’s control of personal matter, allowing just enough to enliven the poem with the urgency of private struggle, yet subduing it to the ideal pattern. Deliberately, he allowed his own life to fall away so that it is the perfect life that remains before us.
~ Eliot’s New Life, Lyndall Gordon, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York, 1988, pg. 141
^^^
And I assure you, if it were up to me I’d hardly ever laugh. He’s the one who’s always full of laughter, this “he” in the middle of me whom things occur to, the one I harbor, the one of fairy tales.
~ Masquerade and Other Stories, Robert Walser, Forward by William Gass, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1990 (1924), pg. 138
^^^
You may, at any moment, close this book and free yourself from what comes next. As long as you do not believe that such a gesture liberates you from the fundamental problem – deeply-felt and penetrating uncertainty is bound to fill even the least significant words here, as blood fills the narrowest vessels all the way to the soft tissue beneath the fingernails – which is the following: is the Imagination weakened or reinforced when it comes face to face with the Real? Does the Real not have its own appeal and joy?
~ Journey to the Land of the Real, Victor Segalen, A translation of Equipée by Natasha Lehrer, Atlas Press Anti-Classics, London, 2016 (1929), pg. 15-16
^^^
Trying to pull aside the dark with his fingers he tore his face and heart
…
Between all the objects was an emptiness he would have liked to fill and his head floated from one to the other
…
When he spread his arms wide open the Other had just enough time to throw himself into them
…
Poor slaves, a table remains a table if we don’t know how to make something else from it.
…
A breath of air put out the lamp
And everything that was about to happen disappeared
…
Where did you steal these rare jewels from
They’re the coolest drops of water to flow
onto your hands
And me I’m ready to die
…
A child threw a stone at the sky
which defended itself
And a new light began to shine
…
~ The Thief of Talant, Pierre Reverdy, translated by Ian Seed, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016 (1917), pg. 6/7/36/65/71
^^^
And what are your thoughts regarding this? Stretching the obvious to the point of outrageousness. Tremendous! You’re glad, too, aren’t you, as I am, even now, that I’ll do this some time? I can feel it coming the thing to be raised up from within me. And perhaps, let me say, there’s still a long time to go before it comes, but one day it will come. What will come? What intimations are these?
~ Masquerade and Other Stories, Robert Walser, Forward by William Gass, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1990 (1925), pg. 147-8
^^^
Murakami: Freud is said to have been deeply respectful of Mahler. That kind of straightforward pursuit of the underground springs of the unconscious may make us cringe – but I think it is probably what helps to make Mahler’s music so very universal today.
~ Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa, Haruki Murakami, Bond Street Books, Canada, 2016, pg. 212-13
^^^
The Jew becomes […] this ambivalence, this border where the strict limits between the same and other, subject and object, and beyond even these, inside and outside, disappear. Object, therefore, of fear and fascination. Abjection itself. He’s abject, filthy, rotten. And as for me, who identifies with him, who desires a fraternal and mortal embrace with him, wherein I lose my limits, I find myself reduced to the same abjection.
~ Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva, 1980
Abject-
(of a person or their behavior) completely without pride or dignity; self-abasing: an abject apology.
^^^
I was en route through the suburb, seeking the Jew. And no Jew to be found in the streets. Nevertheless I needed at all costs to come to grips with him, that night being the last one available, and once the fixed time had passed I would, thanks to a sinister reversal of roles, become the hunted man.
~ Spells, Michel de Ghelderode, Translated by George MacLennan, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016 (1941), pg. 208
^^^
Then he encountered a decidedly noble figure, completely invisible to ordinary mortals, who said to him: “Don’t make a fool of yourself. Have you forgotten that greatness is unrefined, and that refined individuals consider anything that can’t be called refined impossible? You are mine!” She who said this bore the name Immortality.
~ Masquerade and Other Stories, Robert Walser, Forward by William Gass, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1990 (1926), pg. 170
^^^
And so, with this improvisation, we have the juxtaposition of two Opposites: the imagined and the taught; together with the stone – the Real – which could be either stumbling-block or shipwreck. Between the two, neither instructed nor prearranged, the crude Beast of the Rescuer-Instinct – as yielding as the water’s caress, as shrewd as a peasant and as wily as a cat emerging from who-knows-what cave or underground passage – interposed its presence of mind and its enigma. The lesson is a good one.
~ Journey to the Land of the Real, Victor Segalen, Atlas Press, London, 2016 (1929), pg. 51
^^^
Nobody comes anymore to confide their hopes or their torments to you. Aren’t you hurt by that abandonment? If yes, perhaps you’d accept someone to keep you company sometimes? I’ll do so if it’s agreeable to you, on days when I’m crushed by memories that I’d be able to get rid of if I could only write them down; you won’t write them down, no point in that, but you’ll be able to listen; that’s where all your art, all your genius lies, in this gift for listening, for understanding …
~ Spells, Michel de Ghelderode, Translated by George MacLennan, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016 (1941), pg. 8-9
^^^
It is the point of de-creation, when the artist in his unparalleled style no longer creates but de-creates – that untitled messianic moment in which art stays miraculously still, almost astounded: fallen and risen in every instant.
~ Beauty That Falls, Giorgio Agamben, republished in Cy Twombly, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Gallery 1, November 30, 2016 – April 24, 2017, pg. 210
^^^
… which brings us to the great lights in the realm of art who, out of insufficient namelessness or dearth of renown, need not be named or mentioned, for they do, after all, shimmer starlike in the sky of cultural and educational interest.
~ Masquerade and Other Stories, Robert Walser, Forward by William Gass, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1990 (1926), pg. 174
^^^
When the man in the streets forgets his dream, the theatre becomes a myth and a dispenser of signs.
~ Marcel Marceau
^^^
The surrealists know that the surreal is in the real, just as the mage knows that the invisible is in the visible and the alchemist knows that the infinite is to be found in the finite – and the Great Work consists of its extraction.
~ The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism, Patrick Lepetit, Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 2014, pg. xii
^^^
I’m not afraid of the dead, not all the dead, and I believe what my mother taught me, namely that, above all, it’s the living we should be afraid of …
~ Spells, Michel de Ghelderode, Translated by George MacLennan, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016 (1941), pg. 49
^^^
When the Trojan horse arrived, in the form of clever, infinitely sophisticated professors of literature from France, we accepted their delicious gifts of irony, novelty, and nihilism and did not see the danger. Now, a generation later, the edifice that took a hundred years to put in place, and that spread a kind of enlightenment over America, is gone. We have to do all over again the work of proving that there is any point to reading a novel besides making the time pass more quickly. This book is my way of making amends for not fighting when I should have. I thought the problem would go away if I waited, and eventually it did. But, as with a tsunami engulfing a city, when the waters receded, the city was gone.
~ The Shelf: Adventures in Extreme Reading, Phyllis Rose, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2014, pg. 6
^^^
When you roam the streets the way I do, and when you make it your business to spend time with no one, you owe it to yourself to meet only people who are infinitely noble or untouchable pariahs.
…
Fire, in truth, constitutes the wealth of the solitary man.
…
The few shadows that stole by in the distance couldn’t be those of passersby, rather of sleepers in search of matches.
…
Had I cried too loudly to heaven that I was abandoned? God abruptly manifested Himself to reply to me that He was still there even if no one else was, infallibly above and below disasters; He threw me a lifeline …
~ Spells, Michel de Ghelderode, Translated by George MacLennan, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016 (1941), pg. 124/126/143/145
^^^
I have never seen such a bemused expression. It was as if he were simultaneously enjoying the sensuality of life and death, the feeling of a bliss of profundity, the awareness of a new form of life or annihilation.
~ Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah from the Notes of Dr. Renard de Montpensier, Louis Levy, Translated by W. G. Bamberger, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2017 (1910), pg. 4
^^^
No, this innkeeper wasn’t a nonentity! I felt an instinctive and spontaneous sympathy with him. Hi inebriation left him elusive and unworldly, maintaining him in a kind of artificially prolonged dream. I suspected that this man, full of unspoken visions, was like me, someone unsuited for the disenchantments of ordinary life and who moved in a world of imagination.
~ Spells, Michel de Ghelderode, Translated by George MacLennan, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016 (1941), pg. 152
^^^
Sparks of thought jumped through my fragile consciousness like an electric connection that breaks for a moment.
And again Kzradock asked, “What do you see, brother?”
I had a sudden inspiration. I answered clearly and firmly: “I see myself reflected in your eyes.”
“You see yourself?” Kzradock asked, whimpering. “Is that true? You see yourself? Look deeply, search … You see nothing but yourself?”
“No,” I whispered with effort. “I see only myself in your pupils. Nothing more.”
“Then you cannot save me.”
My entire body trembled.
~ Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah from the Notes of Dr. Renard de Montpensier, Louis Levy, Translated by W. G. Bamberger, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2017 (1910), pg. 64
^^^
God has placed me in despair as if in a constellation of dead ends whose radiance culminates in me. I can neither live nor die, nor can I not desire to die or live. And all mankind resembles me.
~ Antonin Artaud, Le Disque vert, edited by Franz Hellens and Henri Michaux, 1925
^^^
How terrible it is to be dependant on a thought which one cannot find!
~ Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah from the Notes of Dr. Renard de Montpensier, Louis Levy, Translated by W. G. Bamberger, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2017 (1910), pg. 65
^^^
… if all the locomotives in the world began screeching at the same time they could not express my anguish – I am perhaps the king of failures, because I am certainly the king of something – the same while changing – I go to … the spheres … – athletic melancholy –
~ 4 Dada Suicides, Arthur Cravan, Atlas Press, London, 2005 (1942), pg. 64
^^^
At the edge of the abyss between madness and reason language comes to a stop, and words can no longer explain …
~ Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah from the Notes of Dr. Renard de Montpensier, Louis Levy, Translated by W. G. Bamberger, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2017 (1910), pg. 68
^^^
On the benches of the square
amongst strange victims
The poet sits down equal to those with amputated limbs –
Atlas without a world, overburdened
~ 4 Dada Suicides, Arthur Cravan, Atlas Press, London, 2005 (1942), pg. 68
^^^
“Brothers!” I said. “Dear brothers! My friends, I love you! You are fearful, you are timid, and you obeyed … You had no wish to do evil. Your minds have betrayed you, as has my own! And yet, in the end, what we do depends on neither our minds nor even on our souls. Our innermost mission lies outside ourselves. We all serve greater powers, both those of us who are in possession of our reason, and those who have lost it. We all must obey. We must obey and grow, grow like a plant, sprout blossoms and fruit; we must obey nature – that is the deepest drive in all of us. Brothers, how I love you! And that’s why I’m speaking to you now!”
~ Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah from the Notes of Dr. Renard de Montpensier, Louis Levy, Translated by W. G. Bamberger, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2017 (1910), pg. 72
^^^
10. The interest alone was valid, at least, who can find his path without recourse to the senses. The five illegitimate senses. By “interest” should be understood the stake, the promise of some comfort, a pleasure, a discovery.
~ 4 Dada Suicides, Jacques Rigaut, Atlas Press, London, 2005 (1934), pg. 90
^^^
Is reason only disciplined insanity, an insane hallucination that has taken on form, and under whose influence we all live? Is reason a dream created by chance, made useable by necessity?
~ Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah from the Notes of Dr. Renard de Montpensier, Louis Levy, Translated by W. G. Bamberger, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2017 (1910), pg. 73
^^^
Lord Patchogue stands before another mirror, facing Lord Patchogue. On his forehead, the cut is bleeding once again. Lord Patchogue repeats: “I am a man trying not to die.” And when he passes through the third mirror amidst a noise which is now familiar, he knows that he will meet Lord Patchouge whose forehead will be bleeding more heavily in the fourth mirror and who will tell him: “I am a man trying not to die.” This is what happens. Now he knows, all he can do is to break the glass; the eye that looks at the eye that looks at the eye that looks …
~ 4 Dada Suicides, Jacques Rigaut, Atlas Press, London, 2005 (1934), pg. 94
^^^
“Listen to the ghost child!” whispered Mr. Wells. “Listen to how a child’s thought, freed from being tied to either gender, expresses itself! Listen to the way it sings! No earthly melody can compete! This is the song of the angels that we dreamed of in childhood, the sound of a soul in perfect harmony!
~ Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah from the Notes of Dr. Renard de Montpensier, Louis Levy, Translated by W. G. Bamberger, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2017 (1910), pg. 98
^^^
Forgetting is the most living thing there is in life. The secret of magical renewal and of virtù, valour, strength. Reconciliation too is the only solution, the solution of continuity.
~ 4 Dada Suicides, Julien Torma, Atlas Press, London, 2005 (1926), pg. 94
^^^
I myself am a beaten man.
My will is broken.
But at the same time the seals on my mouth have been broken. I now understand my inner life … if not my outer one.
And in my defeat lies my redemption.
I want to plunge into the Gospel of Doubt and preach it to everyone who has the ears to hear.
~ Kzradock the Onion Man and the Spring-Fresh Methuselah from the Notes of Dr. Renard de Montpensier, Louis Levy, Translated by W. G. Bamberger, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2017 (1910), pg. 128
^^^
I am also that shadow that follows me and which I flee.
Shadow of a shadow, dancing on the ramshackle walls of chance, to the point of preceding me during those moments when the heat on my back dissolves me in the sight of that frenzied caricature which frightens me too much for me to laugh to my heart’s content.
~ 4 Dada Suicides, Julien Torma, Atlas Press, London, 2005 (1926), pg. 143
^^^
I thought of the ancients: they always reproduced the current life and the eternal fable. Putting this eternal fable into modern garb, into modern life – this is what can produce a painting.
~ Fausto Pirandello
^^^
So? It’s very simple. To succeed, sell the real or the unreal. Be a banker or a poet. A superficial difference.
Otherwise there’s only failure.
~ 4 Dada Suicides, Julien Torma, Atlas Press, London, 2005 (1926), pg. 147
^^^
He looked out the window and noticed a couple passing by on the sidewalk. The figures appeared “flat” to him in relation to the sidewalk, which “rose up and came forward … like a tone,” and the couple spread out “in opposition” to the tone of the sidewalk.
~ A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture, Sharon Hecker, University of California Press, Oakland, 2017, pg. 41
^^^
To understand, to despair, or to remain silent, is always an act of faith of a kind, a way of settling down, of resting on one’s despair or one’s silence.
~ 4 Dada Suicides, Julien Torma, Atlas Press, London, 2005 (1926), pg. 148
^^^
What was called sorcery and magic all led to the same thing: to shape thought, give it a body.
~ Sorcerer’s Screed: The Icelandic Book of Magic Spells, Jochum Magnús Eggertsson, Lesstofan, Reykjavik, 2016, pg. 174
^^^
Our business is with sniffed-out complicities and the open secret, laughter refused although affected and earnestness treacherously encouraged, the savouring of the pure spectacle of imbecility in its triumphal necessity …
~ 4 Dada Suicides, Julien Torma, Atlas Press, London, 2005 (1926), pg. 153
^^^
As the art historian Michele Hannoosh writes, Baudelaire ingeniously posited the “peculiar oxymoronic nature of comic art, which he treats as a contradiction in terms, represent[ing] … like a good caricature, the dualism of art itself, the contradiction inherent in all artistic creation, as in mankind – at once diabolical and divine, real and ideal, ugly and beautiful, temporal and enduring, inferior and superior … Here it becomes the necessary (and fertile condition of art) … the image of oneness is born of the dualism of the comic.”
~ A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture, Sharon Hecker, University of California Press, Oakland, 2017, pg. 71-72
^^^
All the great endeavours – or, what comes to the same thing, every poetic endeavour – have been directed againstlanguage and thought.
To attempt to restore to thought the fundamental and unthinkable ambiguity which is nonetheless THE reality: to take language apart and get out of literature. Lautrémont, Rimbaud, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Jarry, Fargue, Jacques Vaché … It’s impossible anyway. First degree failure.
~ 4 Dada Suicides, Julien Torma, Atlas Press, London, 2005 (1926), pg. 157
^^^
As the critic Michael Brenson has eloquently written of this work [Aetas aurea], in contrast to Rosso’s usual insistence on reserved introverted figures, “the tension between directness and secretness, nakedness and privacy, can be almost excruciating.”
~ A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture, Sharon Hecker, University of California Press, Oakland, 2017, pg. 94
^^^
You lose on account of not knowing how to lose. But you would gain nothing from learning it: for you would seek to lose in order to win, and since you would actually lose, you would have lost again and would not have been able to enjoy it.
~ 4 Dada Suicides, Julien Torma, Atlas Press, London, 2005 (1926), pg. 170-1
^^^
Unreadability hides the image within the safe haven of raw material, the sculptor’s most primordial form of self-comfort. This was typical of Rosso. It resonates with the anecdote told years later by his son and daughter-in-law, when he left Paris, “Rosso hid his most precious belongings in a mound of clay, locked his studio, and moved to Milan.”
~ A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture, Sharon Hecker, University of California Press, Oakland, 2017, pg. 137
^^^
(Jacques Vaché) frustrated this plot of obscure forces in me that lead one to believe in something as absurd as a vocation. I congratulate myself, in my turn, for not being a stranger to the fact that today several young writers do not recognize the least literary ambition within themselves. We publish to search for men, and nothing further. From one day to the next I am more and more curious to discover men.
~ Disdainful Confession, André Breton, in 4 Dada Suicides, Atlas Press, London, 2005 (1923), pg. 214
^^^
For Morice, Rosso aimed to unmask the artificiality of sculpture’s decorative function, as well as its urge to arrange nature harmoniously in order to create Beauty. Relying on the idealist, quasi-religious language of Symbolism, Morice saw Rosso’s art – indeed, all of art’s – task as one of breaking open the surface of materiality to gain access to a deeper Truth. It is noteworthy that Morice, in his idealized view, missed out entirely on a feature of modernity that involved the fraught nature of the relationships between self and other, which I believe was a central concern of Rosso’s art.
~ A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture, Sharon Hecker, University of California Press, Oakland, 2017, pg. 150
^^^
The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It’s the artist’s responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.
~ Just Kids, Patti Smith, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2010, pg. 256
^^^
I think that Rosso was the first to understand the phenomenological sense of balance as both a physical experience and a psychological concept. As the philosopher Mark Johnson writes, balance is an activity learned wholly through our bodies, not by grasping rules or ideas. Activities of balancing, like bike riding or juggling, cannot be taught. One simply gets a “feel” for the body in balance; therefore, the meaning of balance can only emerge from the physical act of balancing. Balance is something we take entirely for granted – until it is disrupted, and its lack becomes a negative bodily experience.
~ A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture, Sharon Hecker, University of California Press, Oakland, 2017, pg. 165
^^^
Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen. Have you seen my coat? It is black and absent of detail, with frayed sleeves and a tattered hem. Have you seen my coat? It is the dead speak coat.
~ M Train, Patti Smith, Vintage Canada Edition, Toronto, 2016, pg. 161
^^^
… Rosso sought in Ecce puer “the ghost of form … a bit alien … in the process of being born … the direct meeting with the image that comes forth and pushes from within the form.”
~ A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture, Sharon Hecker, University of California Press, Oakland, 2017, pg. 212
^^^
As masks are the sign that there are faces, words are the sign that there are things. And these things are the sign of the incomprehensible. Our perfected senses allow us to break them down, our reasoning to calculate them under a continuous form, no doubt because our course, centralizing organization is a sort of symbol for the uniting faculty of the Supreme Center.
~ The King in the Golden Mask, Marcel Schwob, Translated by Kit Schluter, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2017 (1892), pg. 8
^^^
Happiness teased him, then tilted, almost as if happiness were itself in a rage – or some graceful convulsion of nature.
~ These Possible Lives, Fleur Jaeggy, Translated by Minna Zallman Proctor, New Directions, New York, NY, 2017, pg. 16
^^^
A great poet has taught that speech cannot be lost, being movement, that it is powerful and creative, and that perhaps, at the far reaches of the world, its vibrations give birth to other universes, to aqueous, volcanic stars, to new, combusting suns.
~ The King in the Golden Mask, Marcel Schwob, Translated by Kit Schluter, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2017 (1892), pg. 94
^^^
When Keats wrote, “I thought a lot about Poetry,” we can’t see in that a mirror reflection of Keats. The mirror is empty, uninhabited. The idea has no facial features and could look like anything, but theologically it’s more beautiful empty.
~ These Possible Lives, Fleur Jaeggy, Translated by Minna Zallman Proctor, New Directions, New York, NY, 2017, pg. 35
^^^
For Schwob, to adapt a phrase of the American poet Ann Lauterbach, writing was reading as writing, and reading was writing as reading.
…
[The King in the Golden Mask] suggests time and again that one’s true identity comes to light only in the crucible of a struggle so intense that it bares him of any privilege or nicety behind which he could otherwise hide.
~ Translator’s Afterword to The King in the Golden Mask, Marcel Schwob, Translated by Kit Schluter, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2017, pg. 175/183
^^^
People, nearly all of them, don’t know how to worry about others without being presumptuous, with finesse, with modesty. They think they know. My sister thought she knew. Knew the human race. She was highly annoying. I don’t like people who know. Or pretend to. Knowledge doesn’t know. But that’s something few understand.
~ I Am the Brother of XX, Fleur Jaeggy, Translated by Gina Alhadeff, New Directions, New York, NY, 2015, pg. 20
^^^
What we can say is that initiation myths often deal with rupture. How secular society accommodates rupture is an interesting question – the word indicates a break or fissure in the surface of appearances. In the myth world, it is not the steady road of societal affirmation that defines us but rather that we orientate ourselves through hierophany – a sacred rupture. Myth could be said to be a collision of ruptures. From this perspective, our rupture, our ruin, is our axis mundi, our place of orientation, our holy hills, our cathedral.
~ A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace in Wildness, Martin Shaw, White Cloud Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2011, pg. 7
^^^
Having talked to the servants, Caspar turned to the Godhead. Not knowing what it might be, other than darkly, he appealed to Nothing. And Nothing took on the name of Godhead. … Of Nothing he had yet to form a suitable view. To conjure it one had only to say, “Nothing.” It was like a game. The servants heard him say, “Nothing.” They thought he had gone mad.
~ I Am the Brother of XX, Fleur Jaeggy, Translated by Gina Alhadeff, New Directions, New York, NY, 2015, pg. 31/32
^^^
Like teatime, the exquisite hour, when nothing could disturb her, nothing can disturb her life, a life some might define as empty. Incautious people who immediately pass judgement. They don’t know what the void might be. And believe that an empty life is contemptible. Not so. Regula appreciates the void, in all its nuances. … In front of portraits. She was drawn to the faces. The young man turning the pages of a book, but not looking at them. His gaze was distant, toward the unknown that pulled him elsewhere. The lizard, poised on a pale blue cloth, turning its small head toward him, knew this. It is the unknown, it said. It is the abyss. It is the wing of the abyss. So high up.
~ I Am the Brother of XX, Fleur Jaeggy, Translated by Gina Alhadeff, New Directions, New York, NY, 2015, pg. 37/38
^^^
For us, creatures of the streets, instinct is our dwelling. And a total disregard for good. And often,when it feels like it, evil is the best form that the highest good can take.
~ I Am the Brother of XX, Fleur Jaeggy, Translated by Gina Alhadeff, New Directions, New York, NY, 2015, pg. 50/51
^^^
The ceremony of nonexistence had been completed. They wished for nothing more than renunciation. Now they are happy, darkly happy. They shared the words of the ascetic: staying in one’s own prison, in the painted prison, and observing one’s own void.
~ I Am the Brother of XX, Fleur Jaeggy, Translated by Gina Alhadeff, New Directions, New York, NY, 2015, pg. 78
^^^
If you want to know more about it then go ahead and become you yourself – her steady eyes are saying – become you yourself the victim.
~ I Am the Brother of XX, Fleur Jaeggy, Translated by Gina Alhadeff, New Directions, New York, NY, 2015, pg. 100
^^^
The best work that anybody writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.
~ Arthur Miller
^^^
That which is oldest is most young and most new. There is nothing so ancient and so dead as human novelty. The “latest” is always stillborn. What is really new is what was there all the time.
~ Zen and Birds of Appetite, Thomas Merton
^^^
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
~ Rumi
^^^
… taking his walks, busy about the idle business of being mad, waiting for the blank which would blanket his attendant blankness (such word play was characteristic of Walser), and finding it, we might say, when his heart failed in a field full of snow.
~ Masquerade and Other Stories, Robert Walser, Translated by Susan Bernofsky, Foreword by William Gass, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 1990, pg. x
^^^
Colors can overload your memory with such a hodgepodge. Colors are all too sweet a chaos. I love things that are all one color, all one tone.
~ Masquerade and Other Stories, Robert Walser, Translated by Susan Bernofsky, Foreword by William Gass, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 1990, pg. 6
^^^
The problem is to materialize nothingness, to trace the filigree of the void at the edge of the void, to play according to the mysterious rules of indifference at the limits of indifference.
~ From Jean Baudrillard’s The Object that is None, published for Olivier Mosset’s exhibition at the Swiss pavilion of the 1990 Venice Biennale.
^^^
Evidently, a clear consciousness cannot cope with itself in the metaphysical monstrosity of Existence, and the mind has always needed something to muddle its faculties. The use of narcotics has always been an integral part of religious rituals and any number of cults. After all, religion and art once served to shield the eyes from the Eternal Mystery, the dazzling glare coming from the black abyss of Being.
~ Narcotics, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, 2018 (1930), pg. 19
^^^
A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.
~ Henri Matisse
^^^
Certainly, when considering the art of someone like Matisse we often define its superiority in terms of an ‘immediate totality’ of sensation: a sensorial datum magnified by the self-evidence of a felicitous harmony. De Staël’s immediacy draws its strength from its rejection of the favourable arrangement: it must bring a kind of incontestable visual manifestation in the taut harmonies of the red, yellow and blue that followed the greys, the beiges, the mauves of before. In short, with regard to Matisse as to Braque, de Staël found himself in a position of active criticism, which confirms the magnitude of his initiative and articulates it with diamantine knots to the great undertakings of the century.
~ Nicolas de Staël in Provence, André Chastel, Yale University Press, 2018, pg. 177
^^^
Take one cubic centimeter of
tobacco smoke and paint
the exterior and interior surfaces
a waterproof color.
~ Duchamp’s Last Day, Donald Shambroom, David Zwirner Books, New York, NY, 2018, pg. 9
^^^
… I am now able to organize in an optimal way the little solar systems in the home, I’ve understood the objects’ interdependence and the necessity of placing them in a certain manner so as to avoid catastrophes, or of suddenly changing their placement to provoke acts necessary for the common good. For instance, choosing my big leather armchair as the main celestial body, having around it and at a distance of fifty centimeters in east-west position a wooden table (originally, a carpenters bench and strongly imbued with artisanal emotions); behind the armchair, at a distance of two and a half meters, the skull of a crocodile; to the left of the armchair, among other objects, a pipe inlaid with fake diamonds, and to the right, at a distance of three meters, a green earthenware pitcher; …
~ Letters, Dreams & Other Writings, Remedios Varo, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2018, pg. 23/24
^^^
I stand forgotten until the Resurrection. Like the toad sealed in a lunar chill beneath an obscure stone, I shall remain enclosed in my hideous gangue when the others arise, clear-bodied.
~ The Children’s Crusade, Marcel Schwob, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2018 (1896), pg. 13
^^^
The kingdom of Vilboa at that time found itself in a state of great unrest and heresy and its inhabitants let as many as four or five hours go by without saying any prayers at all. This state of affairs prevented the Sonorous Spiral of Prayer from reaching the heavens on a regular basis, provoking, accordingly, many atmospheric disturbances and storms.
~ Letters, Dreams & Other Writings, Remedios Varo, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2018, pg. 66/67
^^^
Devoted sea, what have you done with our children? Raise to Him your cerulean visage; extend to Him your fingers, quaking with spume; shake your unnumbered wine-dark laughter; let speak your murmur, and make Him aware.
~ The Children’s Crusade, Marcel Schwob, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2018 (1896), pg. 48
^^^
three men veiled in the secretive manner of those who must conceal themselves because they know, but next to this knowledge that is not of the day-to-day, they haven’t the slightest idea of the day-to-day, and no wonder!
~ Letters, Dreams & Other Writings, Remedios Varo, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2018, pg. 77
^^^
It is while blindly dancing the Dance of Death that we make our way toward our downfall.
~ Exemplary Departures, Gabrielle Wittkop, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2015 (1995), pg. 16
^^^
… his concern has been ‘to express [himself] at the limit of things, at the place where the world of visual art and poetry may perhaps, I couldn’t call it meet, but converge on the exact dividing line that absorbs both’.
… Text and image counteract one another so that, no matter how you look at these objects, no clear meaning or clearly identifiable semantic content can be established.
… Broodthaers indicated from the outset the kind of art he had in mind – an art that had to be conquered through the demystification of art. It was a decisive factor to him that in the process of demystification his works ‘contain within them the negation of the situation in which they find themselves’.
… Marcel Broodthaers’ abstraction is a ‘necessary absence’, in this case an abstract book-form, that carries its contents within it as substance, without illustrating or representing them.
~ Marcel Broodthaers, Wilfried Dickhoff, D.A.P., New York, NY, 2013, pg. 12/16
^^^
Genius is a kind of sanity, superior style and a good mood – but at the summit of grief.
~ Albert Camus in his journal
^^^
Art stands in opposition to general ideas, describing only the individual, desiring only the unique. It does not classify; it declassifies. For all that it concerns us, our general ideas could be similar to those in circulation on the planet Mars, and three lines that intersect each other form a triangle at any point in the universe.
~ Imaginary Lives, Marcel Schwob, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2018 (1896), pg. 3/4
^^^
It’s just that Jewish cultural life with all its disasters, brilliance, learning, evasions, and daring has conducted me and my art like an excited zombie or Golem stumbling into real trouble, like my Jews so often do.
~ Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter, R.B. Kitaj, Schirmer/Mosel, Munich, 2017, pg. 84
^^^
What is silence
in reading?
— Silence is the sand of noise.
~ The Table, Francis Ponge, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2017 (1991), pg. 14
^^^
The ideas of great men are the shared heritage of humanity: but all each of them actually possessed was his own peculiarities.
~ Imaginary Lives, Marcel Schwob, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2018 (1896), pg. 4
^^^
I welcome anything which draws my attention away from the painting I’m looking at even if I’m doing the painting myself. Attention = Temptation, and I like to follow my little temptations, like following a whore up a creaking old stairway, for better or worse. Thus, the appearance of a painting is deception. You don’t judge a person by her looks, so why judge a painting by its look alone? My Jewish Wedding picture, and every picture, is a history of attentions which are temptations.
~ Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter, R.B. Kitaj, Schirmer/Mosel, Munich, 2017, pg. 250/251
^^^
But he is not as great an artist as Holbein. He does not know how to preserve an individual for eternity by way of his unusual traits, and all of this set against a background of resemblance with the ideal.
~ Imaginary Lives, Marcel Schwob, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2018 (1896), pg. 11
^^^
We call ourselves not only what we are, but also what we seek to be. This is stirring, but it is also corrupting. It allows us to see the one in the other, to mistake what we aspire to be for what we are.
~ Against Identity, Leon Wieseltier, New York, 1996, No. 1
^^^
The critic and editor Bernard Beugnot wrote of a “methodology of decomposition” in regard to Ponge’s writing, with the form of the unpolished, unfinished manuscript manuscript as one of decay. The ritualized repetition of the object at the heart of the manuscript, however, functions as an effort to remember, an effort toward recomposition. In an early poem, “The Orange,” Ponge writes: “Just as in a sponge, there is in the orange a desire to recover its content after having been subjected to the ordeal of expression.”
~ From the introduction by Colombina Zamponi to The Table, Francis Ponge, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2017 (1991), pg. viii
^^^
Indeed, during torture, he admitted that he had all of a sudden come to understand the meaning of the words of Heraclitus, the upward path, as well as the reason the philosopher had taught that the best soul is that which is both the driest and burns the hottest.
~ Imaginary Lives, Marcel Schwob, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2018 (1896), pg. 24
^^^
Because a person ought to leave something behind, something so sincere it couldn’t seem at all calculated, that comes from within and will be stirred by any breath of fear or love.
~ Curl, T. O. Bobe, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2019, pg. 25
^^^
… as if my fate were dependent on [the object] (which is in fact what has taken place, what has happened); as if the law it contains, that it incarnates, should be made I won’t say explicit but rather urgently formulated; as if everythingdepended on it (everything that is to say my very life and from that, everything else: the world (nature) as a whole.
~ The Table, Francis Ponge, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2017 (1991), pg. 23
^^^
And one day, as they came out of a thicket, they happened upon a clearing that was surrounded by ancient cork oaks, set so closely together that their circle cut a blue well into the sky. The peacefulness of that sanctuary was infinite. It seemed as if they were on a large, bright road that led into the highest heights of the divine sky. It was there that Lucretius learned to be moved by the benediction of calm places.
~ Imaginary Lives, Marcel Schwob, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2018 (1896), pg. 39/40
^^^
Whereas masons, constructors build walls from bottom to top, the written Law has begun and will continue to descend, like a window blind that’s closing (it closes and opens at the same time: Venetian blind), on the white page {on the wall, | the stele, | the pedestal}.
~ The Table, Francis Ponge, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2017 (1991), pg. 56
^^^
I would have named you
the model
of flowers painted
by Georgia O’Keefe.
~ Curl, T. O. Bobe, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2019, pg. 55
^^^
I am a moralist in the sense that I want my text on the table to be a moral law, take on this value (and solely a verbalformula, that is to say abstracted to the maximum, but at the same time concrete, because of its use of the alphabet and syntax, the method of writing and the language common to our species and to our time revolutionizes them) but a revolutionary moralist…)
~ The Table, Francis Ponge, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2017 (1991), pg. 26
^^^
That is why Paolo Uccello lived like an alchemist in the back of his small house. He believed that he could transform all lines into one ideal aspect. He wished to forge a conception of the universe that was created in the same way it was reflected in the eye of God, who sees all figures spring forth out of a complex center.
~ Imaginary Lives, Marcel Schwob, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2018 (1896), pg. 79
^^^
Could memory then be defined as: the place where memories are found (rather than their collection)? Resemblance and difference between memory and a museum (or a library).
~ The Table, Francis Ponge, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2017 (1991), pg. 36
^^^
The flower is one of the typical passions of the human spirit. One
of the wheels of its contrivance. One of its routine metaphors.
One of the involutions, the characteristic obsessions, of that spirit.
Let’s change our minds about it.
Outside this involucrum: The concept which it became
By some devolutive revolution, Let us return to it, safe from all definition,
to what it is. — But what then? — Quite obviously: a conceptacle.
~ Changed Opinion as to Flowers, Francis Ponge
^^^
Whether it be horizontal, oblique, or vertical a table or tablet is indispensable to the inscription of its own quality
*
To obtain a true table well it is enough to remove from veritable that naive and pretentious veri
~ The Table, Francis Ponge, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2017 (1991), pg. 81/82
^^^
Rational functionalism is technique,
Irrational functionalism is art.
~ Truthfulness in Art, Josef Albers, 1936
^^^
It was only in the daytime that the thinker’s clients would visit him. Approaching his shelter, you’d talk to him behind the stones, stating as best you could whatever tormented you. And the thinker would respond in his hut, by banging on a pot, or farting, or snapping a bone, or letting loose a raucous tune – the means hardly mattered. In his mind, the client would turn over and over the sound induced by his secret, and it consumed his thoughts from that point on. His health quickly returned.
~ Odd Jobs, Tony Duvert, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2017 (1978), pg. 28
^^^
To paint is to go to the edge: to occupy this distance from others and the world that is named solitude. But, even more, to paint is literally to step aside from what one wants to paint, so that the painting can acquire its constitutive density in that distance taken.
~ Here and elsewhere De Staël in Provence, Pierre Wat, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2018, pg. 39
^^^
(2) The Table since the dawn of time has waited for man, vertical at first then he lowered it before him, obliquely or horizontally,
Vertical at first before him like a wall the moment he armed himself with a point {and by chance in order to stare at it | perhaps stared at it} became aware of the power he had
to imprint {his | some} rhythm and thereby defy oblivion, defy time
From then on, it became a necessity for him. It became indispensable.
~ The Table, Francis Ponge, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2017 (1991), pg. 83/84
^^^
But it is given to some to enjoy themselves like God himself, because God is most pleased with them as they are the most perfectly grotesque caricatures of Him. These are the artists. They know that God has created the world not out of love, rather out of necessity … God! What … would God be? God would be loneliness.
~ Samalio Pardulus, Otto Julius Bierbaum, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2019 (1908), pg. 14
^^^
Everything ties us together unties us loses us and finds us again seated at our table or strolling down your streets. We count the syllables, the syllables count us. Rhyme lacks what eternity provides.
~ For Balthazar, Louis Soutenaire, Ugly Duckling Press, Brooklyn, NY, 2018 (1967), unpaginated
^^^
All intellectual movements prepare for their emergence by first showing themselves, to some degree, in anachronistic individuals. Before they become the destiny of a time, before they become an epoch, they manifest themselves in some measure as a sort of ferment in the destinies of individuals who are thereby condemned to solitude and, usually with no apparent positive impact, fulfill a purpose the meaning of which we do not grasp.
~ Samalio Pardulus, Otto Julius Bierbaum, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2019 (1908), pg. 22
^^^
Fourth dimension … Einstein … point of extension … intercalary world … eighteenth-degree equation … infinite power of the cypher … wave vibrations of unlimited frequency … the magnificent formula …
And, roughly, I summarize: there exists a neighbouring world, invisible, impenetrable for us because it exists on another plane. This world is strangely and – according to Paukenschläger – villainously connected to our own. Nonetheless there are places on Earth where that seal is less hermetic than others.
~ Whiskey Tales, Jean Ray, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2019 (1925), pg. 158
^^^
Yet the Casino becomes a mythical place. Like the vulva of some huge primeval hussy but also the secret charm of a Ganymede at its zenith, it gapes before the onrush, at the exact moment when the act is consumed in the triumphant erection of porphyry columns, so thick that they look as though about to burst, in the gold decorations reflected in the mirror where the chandeliers’ infinite galaxies explode, and in the simultaneous ejaculation of the innumerous thrusting palms, eternally soaring, as far as the eye can see, toward the nudity of the ceilings.
~ Exemplary Departures, Gabrielle Wittkop, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2015 (2012), pg. 8
^^^
When working as a sculptor, Picasso, like Matisse, demonstrated that, if it is to go to the heart of things, sculpture must claim the entire artist. The impulses that radiated from the painters during the twentieth century had an inspiring effect on sculptors, Lipchitz included, and he would be the last to deny it. But throughout the history of sculpture the task of penetrating to the central problem, and the actual work of sculpting, have always called for a continuous effort no painter was ever able to sustain.
~ Jacques Lipchitz, A. M. Hammacher, Harry N. Abrams, New York, NY, 1975, pg. 27
^^^
Remember that the soul appears and disappears little by little, that it comes into existence slowly and dies in the same way. A three-month-old dog has much more soul than a three-week-old kid, or someone at death’s door. Keep this useful information to yourself. I remain your humble servant.
~ Exemplary Departures, Gabrielle Wittkop, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2015 (2012), pg. 85
^^^
A chiselled medium dissolves into its smallest and purest particles: its letters and phonemes, its dots and lines. In terms of cinema, Isou insists that we find its ‘primary particle’, and that particle is the individual film frame, or what he calls the film medium’s physico-chemical base.
~ The Post-Photographic in 1951: A Secret History, Adrian Martin, Annex Press, Ann Arbor, MI., 2015, unpaginated (Introduction to Treatise On Venom & Eternity, Isidore Isou.)
^^^
One must still have chaos within oneself, to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
^^^
We should leave the cinema with a migraine! Every week there are so many films that people exit just as stupid as when they entered. I’d rather give you neuralgia than nothing at all.
~ Treatise On Venom & Eternity, Isidore Isou, Annex Press, Ann Arbor, MI., 2019 (1951), unpaginated
^^^
Rietveld worked his ideas out meticulously; when the first two Utrecht estates were complete, the new residents even received a floor plan indicating where the furnishings could be placed in the home. Not everyone appreciated this advice, as this response from one resident testifies: ‘We think everything is fine, we are happy with the house, we don’t want to leave, but could we please be allowed to figure out for ourselves where to put our things?’.
~ Gerrit Rietveld: Wealth of Sobriety, Arjan Bronkhorst, Lectura Cultura, Amsterdam, 2018, pg. 331
^^^
Daniel told Ève the same well-thought-out things that he’d used, for a long time, as semaphores, guides, and signposts in conversations, and between them, he wove spontaneous remarks soaked and infected with the intelligence of his contrived clichés.
~ Treatise On Venom & Eternity, Isidore Isou, Annex Press, Ann Arbor, MI., 2019 (1951), unpaginated
^^^
What is more surreal than a nose between two eyes?
~ Lucian Freud in Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney & the London Painters, Martin Gayford, Thames & Hudson, London, 2018, pg. 77
^^^
Why does everything work out for him? Is it because he never remembers his failures? Our memories are of victories. Our defeats become part of that expanse that escapes our grasp, like the absolute.
~ Treatise On Venom & Eternity, Isidore Isou, Annex Press, Ann Arbor, MI., 2019 (1951), unpaginated
^^^
As Mikhail Bakhtin argued in his important study of Rabelais, the grotesque subject destroys “dogma” and “authoritarianism”; Rabelaisian, carnivalesque images “are opposed to all that is finished and polished, to all pomposity, to every ready-made solution in the sphere of thought and world outlook”.
~ Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada, Amelia Jones, MIT Press, New York, NY., 2004, pg. 26
^^^
When I think about what my film contributes on all sides:
a) A new pictorial technique: the “chiseled” or putrified picture.
b) An original script-writng technique, where a phrase explains the invisible.
c) A totally new “discrepant” montage.
d) An unheard-of-way of viewing the cinema: cinema as the aesthetic of cinema.
~ Treatise On Venom & Eternity, Isidore Isou, Annex Press, Ann Arbor, MI., 2019 (1951), unpaginated
^^^
“He had the impression that it was not enough for him to say ‘cinema’ for it to be a film. It is somewhere, around this word CIŃEMA, and above all in this ‘almost’ that the originality of the film no doubt lies.” The work evokes the register of the almost by developing the ‘not,’ the quasi, thereby recalling the figure of Bartleby. How far can cinema remain itself when destroying its own constituents? Can its definition proceed via negation or subtraction? “The film, certainly, can reside in the words that designate it.”
~ On Performative Cinema: The films of Roland Sebatier, Erik Bullot, in Treatise On Venom & Eternity, Isidore Isou, Annex Press, Ann Arbor, MI., 2019 (1951), unpaginated
^^^
Behold the word: Destroy, destroy, destroy. Destroy within yourself; destroy what surrounds you. Make space for your soul and for all other souls.
~ The Book of Monelle, Marcel Schwob, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2012 (1894), pg. 7
^^^
… Duchamp’s relationship to masculinity in his New York Dada period parallels the “Warren Beaty effect in Shampoo” – the less macho man adopting feminine attributes in order to seduce women.
~ Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada, Amelia Jones, MIT Press, New York, NY., 2004, pg. 9
^^^
“And now you are alone here, all alone, a child and you used to weep when you were alone.”
“I am not alone,” she said, “For I am waiting.”
“O Monelle, whom are you waiting for, sleeping, rolled up in this dark place?”
“I do not know,” she said, “but I am waiting. And I am in the company of my waiting.”
…
And as before, in her sleep, Monelle nestled up against the invisible and said: “I am sleeping, my love.”
Thus I found her, but how can I be sure that I will find her again in that cramped and dark place?
…
So I destroyed within myself the sadness of my memory and the longing of my violence, and my entire intelligence vanished. And I remained in waiting.
~ The Book of Monelle, Marcel Schwob, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2012 (1894), pg. 85/87/89
^^^
For myself, I am only interested in art that is in some way concerned with truth. I could not care less if it is abstract or what form it takes.
~ Lucian Freud in Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney & the London Painters, Martin Gayford, Thames & Hudson, London, 2018, pg. 336
^^^
Men seek their joy in memory and reject existence and boast of the world’s truth, which is no longer true, having become the truth.
~ The Book of Monelle, Marcel Schwob, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2012 (1894), pg. 95
^^^
The final picture – and this can be said for Kossoff as well as Auerbach – only comes into being as the result of a crisis. To create such a picture the artist has to go beyond the familiar, beyond what is already known, into a place where he does not know what he is doing. As a result, Auerbach concludes, ‘a good painting always seems a bit of a miracle’.
~ Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney & the London Painters, Martin Gayford, Thames & Hudson, London, 2018, pg. 136
^^^
Having been forced to imagine his own death, Kirchner seems to watch himself with great fear as his masculinity dribbles away through neurasthenic effusions of castration anxiety, confirming Freud’s pronouncement, in his own 1915 response to the war, that, “our own death is indeed unimaginable, and whenever we make the attempt to imagine it we can perceive that we really survive as spectators.”
~ Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada, Amelia Jones, MIT Press, New York, NY., 2004, pg. 82
^^^
History, in everything it displays that was from the beginning untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, expresses itself in a face – no, in a skull. … It articulates as a riddle, the nature not only of human existence pure and simple, but of the biological historicity of an individual in this, the figure of its greatest natural decay.
~ Trauerspiel, Walter Benjamin, 1916 – 1925
^^^
The wound thus has its place in New York Dada. Furthermore, as suggested at the beginning of this essay with my analysis of Fountain, the void, the empty hole that functions as a kind of wound, is appropriately enough a reiterated motif in the works of the three main figures associated with New York Dada. [Picabia; Man Ray; Duchamp.]
~ Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada, Amelia Jones, MIT Press, New York, NY., 2004, pg. 91
^^^
Essential to Surrealist behavior is a constant state of openness, of readiness for whatever occurs, whatever object might be encountered by chance that has something marvelous about it, manifesting itself against the already thought, the already lived. Everything is new, and happens, over and over, always for the first time, a celebrated line in one of Breton’s poems states.
~ The Milk Bowl of Feathers: Essential Surrealist Writings, Mary Ann Caws, New Directions, New York, NY., 2018, pg. 5
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The shadow is a trace, but one of paradox. … Ultimately, then, we might argue that the shadow confirms the fact that the living present “is always already a trace” and “the self of the living present is primordially a trace.” The shadow exemplifies the fact that representation and identity are attached to reproduction. Something can be pictured (shadowed, as it were) only through the reiteration of trace.
~ Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada, Amelia Jones, MIT Press, New York, NY., 2004, pg. 92/3
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As [Peggy] Phelan observes about performance art: “The more dramatic the appearance, the more disturbing the disappearance.”
~ Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity – A Cultural Biography, Irene Gammel, MIT Press, New York, NY., 2002, pg. 191
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Duchamp and other members of the New York avant-garde during the World War I period drew on the works of architect-philosopher Claude Bragdon, who theorized at length the geometric vicissitudes of the shadow. Bragdon notes in his Primer of Higher Space of 1913 that “lower-dimensional representations may be conceived as the shadows cast by higher-space forms on lower-space worlds.” Expanding on such ideas, Duchamp argues in his notes that the shadow is a two-dimensional projection of a three-dimensional person or thing; in this way, we might conceive of the three-dimensional person or thing as a projection of some unknown in the fourth-dimension, “something we’re not familiar with.” Within this logic, we are the shadow projections of something beyond ourselves.
~ Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada, Amelia Jones, MIT Press, New York, NY., 2004, pg. 96
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She systematically applied mass-produced technological objects (taillights, cable) and consumer objects (tomato cans) to her body – humorously rendering unfamiliar the familiar and creating art out of the most banal. She took the “found object” as her raw material, stripping it of its conventional semantic, utilitarian, and pragmatic meaning. By reclaiming it in a radically new context – as performance art – she effectively decolonized it from its commodity status.
~ Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity – A Cultural Biography, Irene Gammel, MIT Press, New York, NY., 2002, pg. 186/7
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The avant-garde’s evaluations of the engineer or everyday worker also functioned to privilege the untutored eye, which intuited a kind of machine-age beauty that overtrained artists could no longer see.
~ Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada, Amelia Jones, MIT Press, New York, NY., 2004, pg. 139
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… Just as if illogicality were a comfort, as if thought allowed laughter, as if error were the road, love the acceptable world and chance a proof of eternity.
~ Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious, Hans Bellmer
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[In 1861] Bachofen had documented the traces of a prepatriarchal culture, a gynocratic and hetaera-ruled society in which sexuality was free and women were in charge of their bodies and sexuality. With Bachofen’s Mutterrecht in hand, the Kosmiker now proposed to renew Germany’s culture at the dawn of a new century by injecting matriarchal and pagan values into their lives and art – by trying to recover the prepatriarchal time when women were in control.
~ Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity – A Cultural Biography, Irene Gammel, MIT Press, New York, NY., 2002, pg. 103
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A curator of a print show asked me to loan a print. When she came to pick it up, I handed her a small bowl. She took it and I dusted it for fingerprints and that was my contribution.
~ John Baldessari, 2009
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“At least we never have been afraid to live,” as she had summed up her life’s motto to [Peggy] Guggenheim. “I and my people – die for it in open day duel – we are no marauders but frank warriors – offering life for life.” Swishing her whip, she hollered her orders at her contemporaries: “I have learned from my former experience [ . . . ] that I must holler. Before it is at the last breath – for then you choke speechless with misery disgust swirling nausea.” And so she remained a warrior-artist to the last – refusing the safety net and consuming herself to create a new chemistry in art and life.
~ Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity – A Cultural Biography, Irene Gammel, MIT Press, New York, NY., 2002, pg. 388/389
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His duties entail producing printed matter and issuing communiqués to other departments as the case may be. In addition, he must never forget the world of difference that exists between making known and informing.
~ The Sundays of Jean Dézert, Jean de La Ville de Mirmont, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2019 (1914), pg. 7
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“Oh, Uncle Star Councilor,” said The Little One, “when someone thinks about these things, he feels such a great fear of the big world.”
“Hang on to this fear,” said the old man, “and you will never be unhappy in life. You can call this fear awe.”
~ The Stairway to the Sun: Dance of the Comets, Paul Scheerbart, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2016 (1903), pg. 17
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The mirror promises so much and gives so little, it is a pool of swarming ideas or neoplatonic archetypes and repulsive to the realist. It is a vain trap, an abyss.
~ Ultramoderne, Robert Smithson, 1967
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The courtiers who make up the king’s entourage belong to every race on the globe – most are new mixes of races. Because the story is of course set in the distant future, the costumes of the entourage are the freest composites of historical costumes with many fantastic elements: Polish fur hats are worn with Japanese robes, turbans with European frock coats and Scottish britches, Indian-style feathered headdresses with Hungarian hussars’ uniforms, top hats with Chinese Mandarins’ coats, etc., etc.
~ The Stairway to the Sun: Dance of the Comets, Paul Scheerbart, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2016 (1903), pg. 75
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My theory was safe and sound.
~ Psychology of the Rich Aunt, Erich Mühsam, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2018 (1905), pg. 51
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I need my clear reason for my own benefit. I must cross the threshold with conviction, without doubts – above all without doubts. The threshold between life and death is a narrow one, no wider than the shiny bullets lying ready in my revolver’s skull. You just need the courage to press the right spot and you’re already on the other side. The new horizon must be wide and clear, there can be no clouds there, for that is a beautiful death, a true death.
~ A Death: Notes of a Suicide, Zalman Shneour, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2019 (1909), pg. 47
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The letter x mainly plays a role in mathematics. As a rule, it represents an unknown quantity to be determined on the basis of attendent circumstances. The case of Aunt X is rather similar. I intend to tell her story to prove that, also in human life, there are mathematical existences that admit grave miscalculation if one does not solve for them correctly.
~ Psychology of the Rich Aunt, Erich Mühsam, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2018 (1905), pg. 82
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Eureka! … I’ve solved the riddle. I’ve found the key to my recent puzzlingly stagnant disposition. …
I realize that I’ve reached a dead zone between two equal forces, where even the strongest energy loses momentum. Life is pulling me from one side, death from the other and I hang between both magnets, spinning in one spot around my own axis – neither here nor there. I’ve pulled myself away from life, set out toward death but, being impractical in such matters, I’ve fallen into a point where the forces of life and death are equally far away, or equally close, and my will, the third force, is cancelled out between the two. …
I’ve come to a place where, if I wish it I can die, just as I decided, or if I want, by all means, I could keep living …
The scales of life and death are in equilibrium for me now.
~ A Death: Notes of a Suicide, Zalman Shneour, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2019 (1909), pg. 47-48
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Vladimír regularly recorded his daily events not because he wanted to, but because he had to, because writing was integral to his psychotherapy, because his hand in the act of writing ventilated the overheated furnace of his brain.
~ The Tender Barbarian, Bohumil Hrabal, Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, The Czech Republic., 2019 (1974), pg. 13
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I’m well acquainted with those half-dead students — I know the type. They emerge from the yeshivas and from dark corners of their small-town parents’ houses, seeking a ‘goal.‘ They set off for the big cities, starve and languish in cellars, begging and earning a pittance from private lessons. They in turn take lessons from other students for next to nothing. Their brief youths stifled among dusty books, of no use to anyone. And by the time they’ve attained their goals they are already sick, depressed, and broken for good. Consumptive, short-sighted, emaciated, with protruding Adam’s apples. I can’t stand those sickly, talentless scholars with their pure diplomas, with their sunken chests, without flesh, without life. I can’t stand those victims of education. They are nothing more than yeshiva boys in a new format. Eunuchs with feeble bodies, with thin noses, with blue spectacles and sunken eyes, gazing right into the grave.
~ A Death: Notes of a Suicide, Zalman Shneour, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2019 (1909), pg. 72-73
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I saw two people with the thumbprint of God on their brows: Vladimír and Egon Bondy. Two ornaments of materialistic thought, two Christs in the guise of Lenins, two romantics to whom it had been granted at the age of twenty-five the ability to plumb the retinal field of the university library …
~ The Tender Barbarian, Bohumil Hrabal, Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, The Czech Republic., 2019 (1974), pg. 71
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I’d drawn a great big skull and crossbones right on my coat, along with smaller ones on my vest, shirt, and trousers … my knees were starting to ache. I got up and sat down on the chair near the bed. I sat there, mute, chalk in hand, eyes fixed upon the white skulls on the dark fabric. They looked like pale death-seals. An unknown, mystical hand had stamped them onto my clothes, by the border between life and death … the clothes were already on the other side of life … these were stamps from the customhouse of the other side, it wasn’t me who’d put them there, not me …
~ A Death: Notes of a Suicide, Zalman Shneour, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2019 (1909), pg. 101-102
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Vladimír’s entire life resembled the work of a human heart that thinks. He picked out and selected only those experiences that were compatible with his type, that is to say, not every experience, only those that simultaneously possessed a creative sensibility and thought. His criterion was always the presence of a trembling and pealing in the whole of his being, a signal system that had been with him since childhood, since the very beginning of his life, plasma, sperm flowing along all umbilical cords back to the smooth seamless belly of the Ur-mother, Eve. So Vladimír’s art is a regressus ad originem, letting haptic sensation swallow him up in the maternal womb, pulling over his head one vagina after another as if a sweater, returning to the Great Mother like Goethe once did. Yet Vladimír’s return, his regressus od originem, is simultaneously a progressus ad futurum. The circle closes, the first day of the world’s creation linked to its end … eternity …
~ The Tender Barbarian, Bohumil Hrabal, Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, The Czech Republic., 2019 (1974), pg. 73-74
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You hear me, that’s what I maintain anyway. Good. Many. People. So very many. Great! If they were human beings, full souls, full personalities, living artworks of nature and of the human spirit, giant butterflies — intoxicated by the summer light and by ideas, by the beauty of the world, and by their own splendor … it would be comprehensible.
~ A Death: Notes of a Suicide, Zalman Shneour, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2019 (1909), pg. 115
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Through relative freedom he attained an absolute lack of freedom requiring no explanation, no justification, in which a man is what he is. Identity of the music of the spheres and the things strewn over this earth. Absolute game, fruitio Dei, monad of monads, ens realissmum, Ding an sich selbst, a cave not with the shadow of things but where the very ideas themselves are beheld. So in this way he penetrated and surpassed those places beyond us. Vladimír, as the firstborn Son of God, invoked matter and action to reinstate drama as an active love for the Universe and Humankind.
~ The Tender Barbarian, Bohumil Hrabal, Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, The Czech Republic., 2019 (1974), pg. 74
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The Table—at this very minute, from the wall of my room, its purple figures on their golden ground are looking down at me sternly and tenderly, straight in the eyes. I can’t help thinking of what the ancients called an ‘icon,’ and I feel like composing a poem or a prayer (which is the same thing). Oh, why am I not a poet, so that I might celebrate you properly, O Table, O heart and pulse of OneState!
~ We, Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884 – 1937), The Folio Society, London, 2018, (1924), pg. 12
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The bell has tolled for phenomenological angst, now you can say so long to having to adapt, no need to bother with existence or imagination or transcendence antmore, no need to care about metaphysics anymore. Mister Valadimír! You’re flying straight to where the essence of things inhuman as well as indispensable to humanity are found. My farewell to you is only for a moment, because my solace is also mere ontology, an invisible yet very real kingdom into which you now enter in a rocket far more powerful than Apollo 12! No need to go into orbit first, you’re flying without a transfer ticket, direct by way of grace, just like an intervention by the ancient God, now dead. Monsieur Vladimír! I see you flying on your back, zipped up in the fly of ontology, right into the center of an equilateral triangle, right into the heart, into the switchboard of being . . . !
~ The Tender Barbarian, Bohumil Hrabal, Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, The Czech Republic., 2019 (1974), pg. 88-89
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Matisse believed that a “definitive portrait” only emerged after he came to know his sitters over time and through the process of creating various iterations of their image. By the end of his process, as he told a sitter in 1918, “ideally a portrait should resemble your ancestors and your descendants.”
~ Matisse in the Studio, Ellen McBreen and Helen Burnham, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA., 2017, pg. 96
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If someone wanted to learn the form of a thing in the most absolute way possible, or at least its exterior, then it would need to be observed from millions of angles, in other words, from the spherical space enveloping the given object …
~ The Tender Barbarian, Bohumil Hrabal (Vladimir Boudnik), Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, The Czech Republic., 2019 (1974), pg. 114
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What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.
I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over.
~ Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All, Friedrich Nietzsche, Penguin Books, London, 1978, Pg. 15
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“So what you’re doing here is Surrealism, is that it?!” condescendingly said the uncouth highbrow in the hat, “I mean, what is this supposed to depict?”
“Nothing.” I said in resignation.
The interrogator portentously looked at his wristwatch and announced: “Good people, remember this historic moment. At 6:35 p.m. this genius here created for you NOTHING.”
~ The Tender Barbarian, Bohumil Hrabal, Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, The Czech Republic., 2019 (1974), pg. 131
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“And so I felt that I – not generations of people, but I myself – I had conquered the old God and the old life, I myself had created all this, and I’m like a tower, I’m afraid to move my elbows for fear of shattering the walls, the cupolas, the machines …”
~ We, Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Folio Society, London, 2018, (1924), pg. 7
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Throughout each exploration, one becomes aware of a split in consciousness. While there is a mind at play, courting chaos, there is also a mind acutely observant and vigilant, taking note of every synapse, each glimmer of the unknown. As much as Michaux is desirous of vision, he is desirous to chart the course. While the work is strange, dark, and fantastic, his stance is often scientific, rational, that of one who is taking account, detached.
~ Introduction by Gillian Conoley of Thousand Times Broken: Three Books, Henri Michaux, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 2014 (1956), pg. 9
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‘Yes, good,’ I said aloud to myself. And then to her, ‘I hate the fog. I’m afraid of the fog.’
‘That means that you love it. You’re afraid of it because it’s stronger than you, you hate it because you’re afraid of it, you love it because you can’t master it. You can only love something that refuses to be mastered.’
~ We, Yevgeny Zamyatin , The Folio Society, London, 2018, (1924), pg. 63-64
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trampled by this whole crowd
nothing but crowds!
crowd that repulses the angel
~ Thousand Times Broken: Three Books, Henri Michaux, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 2014 (1956), pg. 59
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What happened yesterday turns in me like a gaudy whirlwind: the upside-down houses and people, the tormentingly strange hands, the flashing scissors, the keen drops falling in the washbowl – that’s how it was, or how it was once. And all this, tearing my flesh apart, is twirling there, beneath the surface melted by fire, where the ‘soul’ is.
~ We, Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Folio Society, London, 2018, (1924), pg. 81
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purity gives birth to me
I have gone through the door
I go through a new door
without moving, I go through new doors
because of my extreme thinness I pass through
because of a thinness that has no equal in nature
the light omnipotent current has stripped me
my waste no longer sticks to me
I have no more waste
purified of masses
purified of densities
all connections purified in the mirror of mirrors
~ Thousand Times Broken: Three Books, Henri Michaux, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 2014 (1956), pg. 71
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And now I don’t know dream from waking. Irrational magnitudes are growing up through everything that is stable, customary, three-dimensional, and all around me something rough and shaggy is replacing the firm, polished surfaces …
~ We, Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Folio Society, London, 2018, (1924), pg. 88-89
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He who was born in the night
again and again will remake his Mandala
~ Thousand Times Broken: Three Books, Henri Michaux, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 2014 (1956), pg. 111
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I try to tell her – in stupid, confused, drowned words – that I am a crystal, and that that is why the door is in me, and why I can feel how happy the chair is. But such balled-up nonsense comes out that I stop, I’m ashamed, I … and suddenly I say, ‘I-330, darling, forgive me … I don’t understand, I’m talking such nonsense …’
What makes you think nonsense is bad? If they’d nurtured and cared for human nonsense over the ages the way they did intelligence, it might have turned into something of special value.’
~ We, Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Folio Society, London, 2018, (1924), pg. 114
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There was a television program that gave me whispered instructions. It was a children’s morning program of animated cartoons, moderated by a policeman. He told about his son who would spend his time in the garden, nailing boards together. Any kind of boards, just nailed together. Because of this inscrutable anti-social behaviour the father, in anger and in sorrow, decided not to send his son to summer camp. Well, it happens I had a lot of scrap of 1/4-inch plywood. What came out was a nailed stack of plywood about the size of a human figure, weighing about 400 pounds, hung from the ceiling by a chain. This was one of the private works whose making filled up my spare time.
~ Artschwager, Autobiographical Fragment, c. 1973, in Richard Artschwager: Drawings, New York, Nolan/Eckman Gallery, 1993, pg. 4
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One problem with much art is the will toward meaning. Un-meaning is what is crucial to art. This is not an anti-intellectual stance. Just the opposite (I hope). It is precisely in un-meaning where we are tasked with thinking and engagement. “Meaning” itself is superficial (“superficial” meant here in the conventional and pejorative sense of the word).
~ The Black Flame of Paradise (A Novel), Zachary Cahill, Mousse Publishing, Milan, 2018, pg. 31
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Do you believe that you will die? Yes, man is mortal, I am a man, ergo … No, that isn’t what I mean. I know that you know that. What I’m asking is: Have you ever actually believed it, believed it completely, believed it not with your mind but with your body, actually felt that one day the fingers now holding this very piece of paper will be yellow and icy … ?
~ We, Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Folio Society, London, 2018, (1924), pg. 162
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Pure, unadulterated meaning would be a solid note, without space between notes, which is another way of saying without life. Life itself might not have a thing to do with seriality, but we need seriality to keep producing un-meaning, which is to say art.
~ The Black Flame of Paradise (A Novel), Zachary Cahill, Mousse Publishing, Milan, 2018, pg. 113
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Kamau Braithwaite describes such moments as “simply a legba or limbo or lembe x-perience: the sudden or apparently sudden discovery of threshold or watergate into what seems ‘new’ because it’s very ancient; becomes palpable of infinite detail, if necessary; where the real … has entered continuum, holding w/in its great wheel all the ‘tenses’ — pastpresentfuture …”
~ Caribbean Anthropoetics, Christopher Winks in Lydia Cabrera Between the Sum and the Parts, Americas Society and Koenig Books, London, 2019, pg. 30
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An exile lives in the margins of history, in life but without a place. Having been expelled from her or his own life, she or he is not condemned by history but to history, as life is defined only in the liminal space of the ruins of the past.
~ Her Phantom Cuba, Gabriela Rangel in Lydia Cabrera Between the Sum and the Parts, Americas Society and Koenig Books, London, 2019, pg. 48-49
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In the struggle between yourself and the world, hold the world’s coat. (52)
Test yourself against mankind. It teaches the doubter to doubt and the believer to believe. (75)
Two tasks of the beginning of life: to keep reducing your circle, and to keep making sure you’re not hiding somewhere outside it. (94)
The conception of the infinite plenitude and expanse of the universe is the result of taking to an extreme a combination of strenuous creativity and free contemplation. (98)
Humility gives everyone, even the lonely and the desperate, his strongest tie to his fellow men. Immediately and spontaneously, too, albeit only if the humility is complete and lasting. It does so because it is the language of prayer and is both worship and tie. The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of striving; out of prayer is drawn the strength with which to strive. (106)
It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can do no other, it will writhe before you in ecstasy. (109)
He proves nothing but himself, his sole proof is himself, all his opponents overcome him at once but not by refuting him (he is irrefutable), but by proving themselves. (“He”)
~ Aphorisms, Franz Kafka, Schocken Books, New York, 2015 (1931), pg. 53/74/93/97/105/108/115
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The great art is always ceremonial. The great art is terrifying, sometimes monstrous and repellent, but always beautiful. When the gods speak, the figure is stupendous and frightful.
~ System and Dialectics of Art, John Graham, 1937
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Because an idea is what you are: an idea in a particular state. You are touched by a breath of something, and it’s like a note suddenly emerging from the humming of strings; in front of you there is something like a mirage; out of the confusion of your soul an endless parade is taking shape, with all the world’s beauty looking on from the roadside. All this can be the effect of a single idea.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 384
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“Query: How contrive not to waste one’s time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one’s days on an uneasy chair in a dentist’s waiting-room; by remaining on one’s balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language one doesn’t know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.”
~ The Plague, Albert Camus, Vintage Books, New York, N.Y., 1991 (1947), pg. 26
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What we call an age – without specifying whether we mean centuries, millennia, or the time span between schoolchild and grandparent – that broad unregulated flow of conditions would come to mean a more or less chaotic succession of unsatisfactory and, in themselves, false answers out of which there might emerge the right and whole solution only when mankind had learned to put all the pieces together.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 388
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In short, we returned to our prison-house, we had nothing left us but the past, and even if some were tempted to live in the future, they had speedily to abandon the idea – anyhow, as soon as could be – once they felt the wounds that the imagination inflicts on those who yield themselves to it. … Thus, in the middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.
~ The Plague, Albert Camus, Vintage Books, New York, N.Y., 1991 (1947), pg. 72/73
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A cube would not be a cube if it were not just as rectangular at nine o’clock as at seven. The same kind of rules work for keeping the planets in orbit as in ballistics. We’d have no way of understanding or judging anything if things flitted past us only once. Anything that has to be valid and have a name must be repeatable, it must be represented by many specimens, and if you had never seen the moon before, you’d think it was a flashlight. Incidentally, the reason God is such an embarrassment to science is that he was seen only once, at the Creation, before there were any trained observers around.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 409
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But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is that of knowing whether two and two do make four.
~ The Plague, Albert Camus, Vintage Books, New York, N.Y., 1991 (1947), pg. 132
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And so Arnheim now felt haunted at every step not only by the urge to sound some deafening wrong note, or perform some foolishly illegitimate act, but also by the annoying thought that on some irrational level this would be the right thing to do. Ever since he had come to know again the fire that makes the tongue go dry in the mouth, he was overcome with the sense of having lost a path he had always followed, the feeling that the whole ideology of the great man he lived by was only an emergency substitute for something that was missing.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 416
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We must aspire beyond ourselves toward that high and fearful vision. And on that lofty plane all will fall into place, all discords be resolved, and truth flash forth from the dark cloud of seeming injustice.
~ The Plague, Albert Camus, Vintage Books, New York, N.Y., 1991 (1947), pg. 228
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He danced with dignity and invisibly, he who never danced with anyone in real life, moved by a music that increasingly turned into self-communion and sleep, the womb of the Mother of God, and finally the peace of God himself, a wondrously incredible state of deathlike release; he danced for days, unseen by anyone, until it was all outside, all out of him, clinging to things around him like a cobweb stiffened and made useless by the frost.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 430
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Vice is an activity that makes the existence of virtue possible.
~ At the Blue Monkey, Walter Serner, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2019 (1921), pg. 9
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Properly paid officials in charge of the faith can be trusted to uphold the regulations with the necessary firmness. In general I feel that we never do justice to the value of our vulgar qualities; if they were not so dependable, no history would be made at all, because our purely intellectual efforts are incurably controversial and shift with every breeze.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 446-7
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Everything’s relative. Silence, too. Sure: it’s quite striking at first, if properly orchestrated; optimally, it engenders boundless respect. But at the same time, silence is quite restricted in temporal and individual terms. When the line’s crossed, a break in human relations is achieved – in the best of cases; but in the worst case, it bears witness to the most egregious mental impoverishment.
~ At the Blue Monkey, Walter Serner, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2019 (1921), pg. 38
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The train of events is a train that lays down its own tracks as it goes along. The river of time carries its own banks along with it. The traveler moves on a solid floor between solid walls, but the floor and the walls are strongly influenced by the movements of the travelers, though they do not notice it.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 484
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Nothing seems to me more common or more negligible than the poet reduced to a poet.
~ Untitled Notebook, Paul Valéry, 1915
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Since the world began, no creature has as yet died of a language defect, and yet the Austrian and Hungarian Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy can nevertheless be said to have perished from its inexpressibility.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 491
^^^
Ideas striving for power tend to attach themselves to ideas that already have power. I hardly know how to put it to you; the difference between ideas that aim high and those that are merely ambitious is hard to pin down. But once the genuinely great, with its usual material poverty and purity of spirit, is displaced by the mere label of greatness, all sorts of spurious candidates for the label push their way in – quite understandably – and then you also get the kind of greatness that can be conferred by publicity and business acumen.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 510
^^^
What with laws being the most impersonal thing in the world, the personality becomes no more than the imaginary meeting point of all that’s impersonal, so that it’s hard to find for it that honorable standpoint you don’t want to relinquish….
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 516
^^^
The opacity of objects appeared to have been abrogated; everything was colored glass, nothing was concealed behind anything; the phrases I heard were precise and simple, like mathematical theorems, and seemed resolvable into numbers.
~ Hashish, Oscar A. H. Schmitz, Knopf, Inc., Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2018 (1902), pg. 17
^^^
Every one of our truths seems to be born split into two opposing falsehoods, and this, too, can be a way of arriving at a result that transcends the merely personal. In that case the final balance, the sum total of all the experiments, no longer rests with the individual, who becomes unbearably one-sided, but with the experimental collective.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 534
^^^
“Another story,” someone cried. “This emptiness is just too unbearable!” We lay as if blind in a dark hole, hungry for the sound of a human voice. Our lives, our wills were numbed. Only imagination–itself barren–was awake and demanded that another, stronger, more sober, should fill it with ideas.
~ Hashish, Oscar A. H. Schmitz, Knopf, Inc., Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2018 (1902), pg. 45
^^^
At peak moments of perception, one senses how the cosmos turns on an axis of vertical austerity.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 548
^^^
They felt that through the power of the will alone–with assistance from humor, imagination, courage, and finesse–that unprecedented spiritual dramas should be produced in others. Dramas that would perhaps cast their shadows into the next world–a kind of jesting with prospects of eternity. … Apart from Satan himself, … the sin can in fact only be committed by a saint who in the service of God has acquired the power of prayer, the faith that moves mountains, who suddenly turns against God.
~ Hashish, Oscar A. H. Schmitz, Knopf, Inc., Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2018 (1902), pg. 75-76
^^^
For morality replaces the soul with logic; once a soul is thoroughly moral, it no longer has any moral problems, only logical ones; it asks itself whether something it wants to do is governed by this commandment or that, whether its intention is to be understood one way or another, and so on, all of which is like a wildly scrambling mob that has been whipped into shape by a gymnastics coach so that it responds to signals such as Right turn, Arms out, Bend knees, and so on.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 552
^^^
Poets’ lovers are never beautiful, because those whose imagination forges gold crowns from blonde hair must overlook so much of reality that a few especially ugly features, such as hairiness, are unimportant, and he who makes the leap from eyes to stars doesn’t need to leap very much further if those eyes squint.
~ Hashish, Oscar A. H. Schmitz, Knopf, Inc., Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2018 (1902), pg. 113
^^^
There could be no doubt that if God returned this very day to set up the Millennium on earth, not a single practical, experienced man would take any stock in it unless the Last Judgement came fully equipped with a punitive apparatus of prison fortresses, police, armies, sedition laws, government departments, and whatever else was needed in order to rein in the incalculable potential of the human soul by relying on the two basic facts that the future tenant of heaven can be made to do what is needed only by intimidation and tightening the screws or else by bribery — in a word, by “strong measures.”
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 554
^^^
… my memories at this point feel as if they are broken into two existences; a hole, a gap, divides this side from that side. I imagine that many people have such a gap in their existence that they seek in vain to fill. Either they take this lack seriously, dwell on it incessantly and so go mad, or they numb themselves as I do, with work and amusements and by similarly narcotic means. That is, they detour around their own lives.
~ Hashish, Oscar A. H. Schmitz, Knopf, Inc., Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2018 (1902), pg. 115
^^^
Every idea is given due recognition, after some resistance, but this always works out so as to benefit equally the opposite idea. It looks like some tremendous weakness and carelessness, but it is probably also a quite deliberate effort to put the spiritual dimension in its place, for if any one of the ideas that motivate our lives were ever carried out seriously, so seriously that nothing would be left of its opposite, then our civilization would hardly be our civilization.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 568
^^^
When I have a piece of wood in front of me, a hypnosis is in it. If I follow it, something comes out. Otherwise there is going to be a fight.
~ The Gallery of Miracle and Madness, Charles English, Penguin Random House., New York, 2021, pg. 23
^^^
So merely by tracking down the clues in language itself – a blurred, but revealing trail! – one can see how a crudely changed meaning has everywhere usurped the function of far subtler messages now quite lost to us, that ever-perceptible but never quite tangible nexus of things.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 610
^^^
Permanence in motion, eternity in transience, presence in absence, being in nothingness – from the example of a landscape that held opposites in exquisite suspension, Willems distilled a potent aesthetic. He sought to create images whose power lay in the seamlessness, rather than impossibility, of their union.
~ Translator’s (Edward Gauvin) introduction to The Cathedral of Mist, Paul Willems, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016 (1983), pg. xi
^^^
When I speak of emerging from the shadows, I mean from the unreality, from that flickering concealment in which we sometimes sense the presence of the unusual. It is spread out like a net that torments us because it will neither hold us nor let us go. Don’t you think that there have been times when it was otherwise? When the inner life was a stronger presence, when there were individuals who walked in the light or, as people used to say, walked in holiness, and miracles could happen in reality because they are an ever-present form of another reality, and nothing else!
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 618
^^^
Longing! Perhaps the most powerful dynamo that inspires one’s work. That’s how it is for her, because the feeling of “happiness” merely makes her stupid and unproductive. She doesn’t know what to do with it.
~ The Man of Jasmine & Other Texts, Unica Zurn, Atlas Press, London, 2020, pg. 43
^^^
Art means depicting a specialized subject with such power that the generality on which it depends can be understood in it. It can only be expressed very badly in abstract terms, because the subject is itself already an abstract thought – but surely you will understand what I’m saying if you consider how a whole enormous landscape passes through a keyhole when your eye gets close enough to the door. Someone who sees nothing but a lock would see the whole world through that lock if only he knew that he needed to bend down. It is enough if one creates the possibility of generalization; it is the reader’s job, the critic’s job, to make the generalization.
~ Marshlands, André Gide, New York Review Books, New York, 2021 (1920), pg. 46
^^^
She counts the things she is wearing: 1) a coat, 2) a skirt, 3) a blouse 4) a pair of underpants, 5) a brassiere, 6) a left shoe, 7) a right shoe, 8) … herself. Eight things which henceforth move with her throughout the world. She is under the sign of the perpendicular eternity. She has entered a noble state.
~ The Man of Jasmine & Other Texts, Unica Zurn, Atlas Press, London, 2020, pg. 118
^^^
… when the false significance we attach to personality has gone, we may enter upon a new kind of significance as if embarking upon a splendid adventure.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 624
^^^
Repetition has always seemed to me the essential element of our most important actions; how could it be otherwise, when our entire lives are cadenced by the beating of our hearts?
~ The Cathedral of Mist, Paul Willems, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016 (1983), pg. 70
^^^
I promise you that if we envy these people, who are so free, it is because every time we have built in sorrow a roof to shelter us, this roof has followed us everywhere, occupying the place above our heads from then on; it has kept us dry from the rain, true, but also blocked out the sun. We have slept in its shadow; worked, danced, embraced, thought in its shadow.
~ Marshlands, André Gide, New York Review Books, New York, 2021 (1920), pg. 80
^^^
In short, he reflected, the cosmos was generated not by a theory but – he was about to say “by violence,” but a word he had not expected leapt to mind, and so he finished by thinking: but by violence and love, and the usual linkage between these two is wrong.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 645
^^^
Seal hunting must not be mistaken for meditation, which is but a manner, a physical bearing that precedes all important actions, comparable perhaps to a tennis player’s in the few seconds before his opponent sends him a serve.
~ The Cathedral of Mist, Paul Willems, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016 (1983), pg. 82
^^^
In all he did – involving physical patterns as well as spiritual – he had always ended up feeling trapped in endless preparations that would never come to fruition in anything, so that as the years went by his life had lost any sense of its own necessity, just as a lamp runs out of oil.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 647
^^^
You ghostly gaze! Shy and radiant,
wicked with loneliness and humour; your darkness,
seemingly without beginning
and thus without end, shines
through my dream-bright rooms. I ask myself
whether angels might have such eyes?
~ The Man of Jasmine & Other Texts, Unica Zurn, Atlas Press, London, 2020, pg. 143
^^^
The night gave one a sense of impending events, as in a theater. One had a notion of oneself as a phenomenon in the world, something that appears bigger than it is, that produces an echo, and, when it passes lighted surfaces, is accompanied by its shadow like a huge spastic clown, rising to full height and the next moment creeping humbly to heel. How happy one can be! he thought.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 706
^^^
Far from Déroulède’s hectic trumpeting and Aragon’s Magnitogorsk, I turn to poets of solitude. In short, anarchy!
~ The Cathedral of Mist, Paul Willems, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016 (1983), pg. 87
^^^
Our intellect demands a prelude for every event. It has a horror of the instantaneous and expends three quarters of its power in an effort to anticipate. It wants to come at all things by a gentle slope.
~ Cruise of Shadows, Jean Ray, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2019 (1931), pg. 49
^^^
Western students of Japanese art have also observed contrasting perceptions of space. For example, we arrange flowers in space, whereas the Japanese arrange the ma or space between flowers.
~ ABC of Prophecy: Understanding the Environment, Barrington Nevitt, 1985, pg. 68
^^^
The transformation was not objective; it was a subjective expanse of feeling, deep as groundwater, on which the senses and the intelligence, those pillars of objective perception, normally supported themselves but on which they now were gently separating or merging – the distinction lost its meaning almost as soon as he made it.
“It’s a change in attitude; as I change, everything else involved changes too,” Ulrich thought, sure that he had himself well under observation. But one could also say that his solitude – a condition that was present within him as well as around him, binding both his worlds – it could be said, and he felt it himself, that this solitude was growing greater or denser all the time. It flowed through the walls, flooded the city, then, without actually expanding, inundated the world. “What world?” he thought. There is none!” The notion no longer seemed to have any meaning.
~ The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (1930/33), pg. 724
^^^
To consent to paradox is to consent to suffering that which is greater than the ego. The religious experience lies exactly at that point of insolubility where we feel we can proceed no further. This is an invitation to that which is greater than one’s self.
~ Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche, Robert A. Johnson (1921 – 2018), Jungian analyst and author
^^^
And I too opened the door.
And now I know, or I believe I know.
~ Cruise of Shadows, Jean Ray, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2019 (1931), pg. 20
^^^
Since I stepped out of myself, my mysterious being then said, I see things much more clearly. Nothing connects stars as strongly as separation. In the moment of pure parting both are once again dependent on the great shared path.
~ The Mill: A Cosmos, Bess Brenck Kalischer, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2021 (1922), pg. 16
^^^
“We are probably on some other plane of existence. You have some knowledge of mathematics; that will help you understand. Our three-dimensional world is probably lost to us, and I define this here as the world of the nth dimension, which is very vague.
~ Cruise of Shadows, Jean Ray, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2019 (1931), pg. 146
^^^
The belief in that which cannot be lost is the bell of every new morning.
~ The Mill: A Cosmos, Bess Brenck Kalischer, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2021 (1922), pg. 21
^^^
It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.
~ Walden Two, B. F. Skinner, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 1948
^^^
Funny, it’s always only after the blanket of fog that we recognize how many fireworks we can actually tolerate. Basically, our obliviousness is the only common thread for the pearls of chance.
~ The Mill: A Cosmos, Bess Brenck Kalischer, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2021 (1922), pg. 21
^^^
From the beginning my ideal way of working has been not to persist in something once discovered. Not to be a craftsman of a single work. Artists post-Joyce must be interested in everything and realize that the history of the world commands them to do things differently – and to flee from what they already know how to do.
~ Responses • Kafka’s Prague, Jiří Kolář, Twisted Spoon Press, Prague, 2021 (1984), pg. 21
^^^
In the jar the red ray
found its brother in the white spring.
The Invisible bound them tightly together.
~ The Mill: A Cosmos, Bess Brenck Kalischer, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2021 (1922), pg. 30
^^^
What vistas of enchanting harmonies reveal themselves to us! On the other hand, there are many examples … of stories where a refined being surrounds itself with banal entities – and discovers new strengths inside itself because it is surrounded by banalities. We also see how a series of major misunderstandings of something important can generate new aspects of that thing – in the same way that a reflective pool of water, when stirred by wind, distorts the image that it mirrors yet also makes it more interesting to the eye.
~ Munchausen and Clarissa: A Berlin Novel, Paul Scheerbart, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2020 (1905), pg. 113-114
^^^
And suddenly, a column myself, I stared at the dead.
The sacred signs carved into my severity. I sounded
silently.
The beasts of a thousand years spoke to me.
I sounded. Sounded rigidly.
Then a storm reared up against me and rattled me,
rattled me so long that I nearly succumbed.
~ The Mill: A Cosmos, Bess Brenck Kalischer, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2021 (1922), pg. 31
^^^
“There on the sofa, you see an old man sleeping,’ said one of the men, the one who had shaken me the hardest. ‘That is you. We have succeeded in splitting you in two. The part of you that we just shook awake is the other half of your “I.” It’s as light as a phantom, and therefore is capable of journeying throughout the cosmos.’
~ Munchausen and Clarissa: A Berlin Novel, Paul Scheerbart, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2020 (1905), pg. 131-132
^^^
You will laugh yourselves silly if you take all the intricate pandemonium of life as a flowing game. You’ll go mad if you view everything as being profound. The profound must always be regarded as such – it can be separated out from the abundance of shallowness. Therefore let the profound be set to the side, and for the time being take everything merely as a flowing game. This way you will understand the world better than before.
~ Rakkóx The Billionaire & The Great Race, Paul Scheerbart, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2015 (1901), pg. 54
^^^
There are places in the world that date from the beginning of time. These spaces are instants where the Distant Past became frozen. Everything there flows together with ancient rage. This is the face of God. This is the mark of the primordial force more immense than man, more vast than nature, more alive than life, as all embracing as the celestial system that preceded all three.
~ A Terrace in Rome, Pascal Quignard, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016 (2000), pg. 59-60
^^^
He spun songs for all. Then stood alone, with a distant look, dark as the future.
~ The Mill: A Cosmos, Bess Brenck Kalischer, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2021 (1922), pg. 41
^^^
It is matter that imagines heaven. Then it is heaven that imagines life. Then it is life that imagines nature. Then nature grows and shows itself in different forms which it does not conceive so much as it invents while stirring up fire in space. Our bodies are one of those images that nature has attempted to draw from light.
~ A Terrace in Rome, Pascal Quignard, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2016 (2000), pg. 25
^^^
It’s life’s same old song – not to be able to entirely break away from all others – and not to be able to fit everything together.
~ Rakkóx The Billionaire & The Great Race, Paul Scheerbart, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2015 (1901), pg. 49
^^^
The eye of the artist is, however, an incorruptible critic. It sees through the masks, even if they are made of iron. And even if every bush, every flower, every brook, every cliff were hidden by a mask, the artist would see it and say: you’re lying. And he stood there one day, looked around, and saw himself surrounded by a nature that wore masks, and by people who all wore masks, and he said you’re lying, off with those masks. But they were stuck tight and had turned to skin. That was a terrible discovery. And that’s where we are today. Turn whichever way you will: we’re still there.
~ Confessions of a Revolutionary Painter, Otto Freundlich, Paris, November, 1935
^^^
Everything numinous in the far background is also continually changing – one moment becoming larger, the next moment smaller.
~ Rakkóx The Billionaire & The Great Race, Paul Scheerbart, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2015 (1901), pg. 57
^^^
… for my particular tastes, there is no voyage to the frontiers of reality, no fantastic tale, no epic or dramatic narrative more powerful than the study of the inexhaustible creator and universal transformer that we call the Mind.
~ The Idea of Perfection, The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valėry, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York, NY, 2020, pg. xii
^^^
After all, confusion produces the summit of our zest for life. Just there, where we can no longer follow, is where the great ecstasy that utterly transports us begins.
~ Rakkóx The Billionaire & The Great Race, Paul Scheerbart, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2015 (1901), pg. 60
^^^
But that which lifted him up was also creating the circumstances for his downfall. Because there’s no great captain that doesn’t dream of being vanquished. The feminine part of any man can be reduced to servitude by the activity of the masculine. But it’s always at risk of reawakening.
~ The Die is Cast, Robert Desnos, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2021 (1943), pg. 79
^^^
The frogs say, “We are the great question marks, and shall now begin the struggle for the redemptive sentences. The redemptive sentences have great answers within them. And the seas have both in themselves: the sentences as well as the answers. And we must snatch these two things from the crafty blue seas. This is a splendid war!” And the frogs leap into the blue seas with a great plop. And laughing, the frogs ask, “What’s more fun than ignorance?” Do we ask in order to know – or do we ask only in order to know that knowledge is only knowledge of ignorance? Doesn’t the knowledge of ignorance give us the greatest amount of self-awareness?”.
~ Rakkóx The Billionaire & The Great Race, Paul Scheerbart, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2015 (1901), pg. 75-76
^^^
If a picture doesn’t relate to one’s intimate life, then the artist will be lacking a necessary moral dimension and a sense of obligation to be faithful to what he calls ‘the relevances’, to a moment that cannot be repeated.
~ Frank Auerbach Speaking and Painting, Catherine Lampert, Thames and Hudson, New York, 2015, pg. 103
^^^
They fell silent, watching each other and watching the passing of the hours, waiting for the end of this eternal night, deferring all their hopes to tomorrow while also, out of fear, hoping for tomorrow to be sent into the very distant future, as distant as their own deaths, which seemed to them impossible, as distant as the end of the world, which seemed even more impossible.
~ The Die is Cast, Robert Desnos, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2021 (1943), pg. 84
^^^
Every journey, whether it occurs in space or time, is, in various and numerous ways, an initiation. […] The progress of a life, this “pilgrim’s progress” that instructs man on the nature of the universe and on his own nature, that leads him to the center of his being, or projects him toward all the circumferential points of his becoming, adds knowledge and experience, brings about modification and metamorphosis.
~ Waystations of the Deep Night, Marcel Brion, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2020 (1942), pg. x
^^^
It is important not to forget at this juncture that religious sacrificial rituals always featured a central protagonist who represented a king or a god and who was publicly venerated and subsequently sacrificed. Admittedly, the modern artist is allowed to survive, but he does not escape completely unscathed. The artist’s actual sacrifice resides in his self-subjugation to the repetition of the sacrificial ritual and in his renunciation of the uniqueness of his artistic individuality – a kind of second-degree sacrifice, so to speak. And this second-degree sacrifice is unique each time it occurs; although the ritual remains the same, the artistic individuality being sacrificed is invariably different.
~ The Art of Participation, Boris Groys, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Thames and Hudson, New York and London, 2008, pg. 26
^^^
An unutterable horror shook me, making me tremble at the thought that I too might encounter the null and void space of the mirror.
~ Waystations of the Deep Night, Marcel Brion, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2020 (1942), pg. 37
^^^
Good art does not break with the past. It breaks with the present by emulating the best of the past. Good art looks new, because the artist has recombined something old to make something better. It does not break rules. It makes rules.
~ Painting After Postmodernism, Walter Darby Barnard, Curated by Barbara Rose, Robert Polo Gallery, Brussels, 2016, pg. 20
^^^
I’m more afraid of the frightful silences that slide secretly inside you and freeze you to the depth of your soul. Fortunately, the grotesque side of this banal ballet of demons was enough to exorcise the feeling of real peril contained within it.
~ Waystations of the Deep Night, Marcel Brion, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2020 (1942), pg. 50
^^^
The photographer and critic Emmanuel Sougez allegedly said of him: ‘Atget never realized that he was Atget’
~ Lives of the Great Photographers, Juliet Hacking, Thames & Hudson, London, 2015, pg. 36
^^^
“… And the ultimate breath of her despair is expelled here -” he showed his cane “and then here -” he raised his fist – “and here -” he touched his heart – “and here -” he hit his skull with the flat of his hand. “And there isn’t a single sigh of the earth that doesn’t sigh in me too.”
~ Waystations of the Deep Night, Marcel Brion, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2020 (1942), pg. 83-84
^^^
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
~ Great Ideas of Western Man, Alfred North Whitehead, 1964
^^^
Am I asleep? Am I awake? Are contrasts real? Is good the opposite of evil? Am I a monk, am I a warrior? Does what I love really exist?
~ Waystations of the Deep Night, Marcel Brion, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2020 (1942), pg. 120
^^^
But at last I found just one thing: that it’s all a variation on the cliché one has of L.A. […]: one owns a garage, but the other one has two. This is what makes the differences. Nothing more happens.
~ Martin Kippenberger: I Had a Vision, Jutta Koether, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, 1991, pg. 76
^^^
A house like that took possession of you as soon as you stepped over the doorsill. It inhabited you more than you it, filling you by turns with enthusiasm and gloom, depending on the path of the sun, the course of clouds, the sudden or furtive entrance of night. It presented one of those traps where the deceptive safety of an open door hid the impossibility of later turning back. It proffered a baited hook disguised as a rose in a crystal vase, a ceiling with stucco volutes, shepherds playing instruments over the doors, acrobat monkeys tucked away in an alcove. The magic of the house was such that it made you forget the portion of time and space you belonged to, offering instead a lure of illusory infinity.
~ Waystations of the Deep Night, Marcel Brion, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2020 (1942), pg. 127
^^^
See that’s it … that’s in you. See so many people misuse you … you don’t know how they come by it.
Lord I don’t know why
Everybody down on me …
~ Liner notes to I do not play no rock’n’roll, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Fuel Records, 2001
^^^
The child felt some marvelous happenstance kept access to its secrets for him alone, and that a certain quality of silence was essential to the lives of mysteries. So thinking, he grew quiet, perhaps because he didn’t know what words to use to reveal the undefinable.
~ Waystations of the Deep Night, Marcel Brion, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2020 (1942), pg. 130
^^^
30. What complicates the leap or letting go: man remains indebted to the logic of life down to his last breath.
41. The end point of all life is death; life is death in a fool’s garb; lifelessness precedes living, the death drive strives for a restoration of the primordial.
186. The self-murderer inverts the order of crime and punishment, standing the hourglass on its head.
288. Death makes us speechless, suicide breathless.
295. Life is not the highest of all goods: the highest of all goods is creation, because it sublates the contingency of existence in the Hegelian sense and thus outlives it.
303. Friedrich Hebbel writes in his diaries: “Art is a higher form of death; it shares with death the same function of destroying all that is defective in the idea.”
352. If according to Hebbel, art is a higher form of death then we designate illness a higher form of art.
355. If somatic syndromes are representational art, mental disturbances are abstract.
369. The true artist substitutes success for recovery.
369. The true artist substitutes success for recovery.
372. The true artist is a death-acrobat, an apparent-death-ventriloquist, a suicidal-trapezist, in short: a handcuff king, viz. Houdini.
546. A person like Camus’s stranger, who owes existence nothing, we call “a wanderer with an empty suitcase.”
606. The deeper we dig – and we are, one and all, vertical land surveyors, with the castle looming over us – the more granitic the pain becomes, and with it, the mortological subsoil.
737. Brecht allegedly said the end of the world hardly bothered him so long as he’d have the opportunity to describe it.
814. The artist has an instinct to cultivate suffering as the ground, in both senses of the term, of his creation.
869. Art is superior to nature because it replaces arbitrariness with law; …
926. We view the sense of wonderment before a miracle as fleeting contact with death.
~Tracatus Logico-Suicidalis On Killing Oneself, Hermann Burger, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2022 (1988)
^^^
From one side came the sound of plates, the music of glasses and voices; from the other, that grave, austere, inexplicably oppressive silence that had something constrained about it, as if awaiting the cry of a bird, the song of a flute, a whistle to suddenly set free powers that asked only to live.
The landscape too maintained the same quality of silence as the flutes and clavichords, a silence enhanced by its detachment from external circumstances, by being absorbed in its own essential center, …
~ Waystations of the Deep Night, Marcel Brion, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2020 (1942), pg. 133/4 and 145
^^^
All human wisdom is manifest in words, and words come in three forms: silent, written, spoken.
~ Media and Formal Cause, Marshall and Eric McLuhan, NeoPoiesis Press, Houston, Texas, 2011, pg. 143
^^^
First you saw the garden, then the garden reminded you of a face, and this face itself was concealed behind a mask, a visor, a grille. The parterres then became letters and the fish ciphers. The path branched off toward the solution of a problem that disappeared behind its enigmas. The contours were hardened by a strict geometry, the forms were stiffened by an algebraic interrogation. Everything that was there alluded to what wasn’t there, people spoke through hidden meanings, through symbols, and through allegories.
~ Waystations of the Deep Night, Marcel Brion, Wakefield Press, Cambridge, MA, 2020 (1942), pg. 181
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This brings us to the immorality of bad art. Bad art is inaccurate art. It is art that makes false reports. … If an artist falsifies his report as to the nature of man, as to his own nature, as to the nature of his ideal of the perfect, as to the nature of his ideal of this, that or the other, of god, if god exist, of the life force, of the nature of good and evil, if good and evil exist, of the force with which he believes or disbelieves this, that or the other, of the degree in which he suffers or is made glad; if the artist falsifies his reports on these matters or on any other matter in order that he may conform to the taste of his time, to the proprieties of a sovereign, to the conveniences of a preconceived code of ethics, then that artist lies.
~ Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound, New Directions, New York, NY, 1918 (1968) (1942), pg. 43 – 44
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Think, therefore, reflect, meditate and, if you have the talent, create lasting works of art that grasp how time and space work for us.
~ Rilke The Last Inward Man, Lesley Chamberlain, Pushkin Press, London, UK, 2022, pg. 32
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For Rilke to extend his post-Darwinian fascination with evolution into art history, and from there to reimagine the Archaic Apollo, was a magnificent artistic gesture. It even turned the subject of art history into a poem. For it asked: could there be a prehistory of art, of the materials that existed before they were gathered together, and of the idea that worked them? All ‘thingliness’ has a prehistory in unnamed materials not yet gathered together. Meaning too is a long time coming into being.
~ Rilke The Last Inward Man, Lesley Chamberlain, Pushkin Press, London, UK, 2022, pg. 36
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Rilke was different because he wanted to believe, and praise, what he found. When he despaired he became morbid, so he was never frivolous or cynical. Even without God the rich human response to God mattered: mattered for art and for human character.
~ Rilke The Last Inward Man, Lesley Chamberlain, Pushkin Press, London, UK, 2022, pg. 60
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There is a dark patience in Rodin that makes him almost nameless, a quiet superiority and a capacity to wait out his time, something of the great patience and generosity of nature, which begins with nothing, in order in silence and all seriousness to embark on the long road to what is plentiful. [From the first part of Rilke’s Rodin essay (Lesley Chamberlain translation)].
~ Rilke The Last Inward Man, Lesley Chamberlain, Pushkin Press, London, UK, 2022, pg. 101
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The landscape is something alien for us, and we are terribly alone among the trees that blossom and the streams that pass. Alone with someone who has died we are nowhere near as exposed as we are alone with trees. For however mysterious death is, life is all the more so, a life that is not our life, a life that takes no part in ours, that celebrates its festivals without seeing us, and which we look upon with a certain discomfort, like guests who have turned up by accident and speak a different language. (Rilke 1902/03)
~ Rilke The Last Inward Man, Lesley Chamberlain, Pushkin Press, London, UK, 2022, pg. 152
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Rilke was at his most Dantesque imagining these other realms through which a pilgrim might walk, and yet, far from thinking of them as hellish, he was half in love with easeful death.
~ Rilke The Last Inward Man, Lesley Chamberlain, Pushkin Press, London, UK, 2022, pg. 185
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Eliot’s problem was the world’s incoherence. He was a highly educated critical intellectual and yet he needed faith if his world was not to fall apart. As he observed in that magnificent but disconcerting five-part poem of 1922 [The Waste Land], complete with notes, to be so clever with words threatened his spiritual ruin.
~ Rilke The Last Inward Man, Lesley Chamberlain, Pushkin Press, London, UK, 2022, pg. 196
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But we can see what Rilke was now. He was a pagan modernist poet responding to Christian memories. He was a materialist, but not in any trivial sense. He was a materialist because the matter of the world is everything of value to us. Human lives are led in the weighty and dazzling presence of things.
~ Rilke The Last Inward Man, Lesley Chamberlain, Pushkin Press, London, UK, 2022, pg. 220
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James K-M: Paintings and Sculpture 