Torrential

The mention of Trakl made Amalfitano think, as he went through the motions of teaching a class, about a drugstore near where he lived in Barcelona, a place he used to go when he needed medicine for Rosa. One of the employees was a young pharmacist, barely out of his teens, extremely thin and with big glasses, who would sit up at night reading a book when the pharmacy was open twenty-four hours. One night, while the kid was scanning the shelves, Amalfitano asked him what books he liked and what book he was reading, just to make conversation. Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said he was reading Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who in another life might have been Trakl or who in this life might still be writing poems as desparate as those of this distant Austrian counterpart, and who clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

- 2666 by Roberto Bolano, p227

Expression & Property

The growing proleterianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving the masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, with its Fuhrer cult, forces to their knees has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

- Epilogue, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin

Exercise

There's nothing new, nothing different. The same pattern over and over. The same clouds, the same music, the same insight felt an hour or an eternity ago. There's nothing here for me now, nothing at all. Now I remember. This happened to me before. This is why I left. You have begun to find your answers. Although it will seem difficult, the rewards will be great.

Exercise your human mind as thoroughly as possible, knowing it is only an exercise. Build beautiful artifacts, solve problems, explore the secrets of the physical universe. Savor the input from all the senses. Feel the joy and sorrow, the laughter, the empathy, compassion... and tote the emotional memory in your travel bag. I remember where I came from and how I became a human. Why I hung around. And now my final departure is scheduled. This way out. Escaping velocity.

Not just eternity, but infinity.

- From Waking Life by Richard Linklater

Sociability

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have - and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

• Franz Kafka
  

Beauty never grows old

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

• Franz Kafka
  

Unmasking

"It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet"

• Franz Kafka

Writers

"Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. [...] Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like".

• Walter Benjamin - Unpacking my Library: A Talk About Book Collecting

Flow

Tà pánta rheî kaì oudèn ménei.

"Everything flows, nothing stands still."

Heraclitus

Stage

… And yet your shadow isn't following you anymore. At some point your shadow has quietly slipped away. You pretend you don't notice, but you have, you're missing your fucking shadow, though there are plenty of ways to explain it, the angle of the sun, the degree of oblivion induced by the sun beating down on hatless heads, the quantity of alcohol ingested, the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain, the fear of more contingent things, a disease that begins to become apparent, wounded vanity, the desire just for once in your life to be on time. But the point is, your shadow is lost and you, momentarily, forget it. And so you arrive on a kind of stage, without your shadow, and you start to translate reality or reinterpret or sing it. The stage is really a proscenium and upstage there is an enormous tube, something like a mineshaft or the gigantic opening of a mine. Let's call it a cave. But a mine works, too. From the opening of the mine come unintelligible noises. Onomatopoeic noises, syllables of rage or of seduction or maybe just murmurs and whispers and moans. The point is, no one sees, really sees, the mouth of the mine. Stage machinery, the play of light and shadows, a trick of time, hides the real shape of the opening from the gaze of the audience. In fact, only the spectators who are closest to the stage, right up against the orchestra pit, can see the shape of something behind the dense veil of camouflage, not the real shape, but at any rate it's the shape of something. The other spectators can't see anything beyond the proscenium, and it's fair to say they'd rather not. Meanwhile, the shadowless intellectuals are always facing the audience, so unless they have eyes in the backs of their heads, they can't see anything. They only hear the sounds that come from deep in the mine. And they translate or reinterpret or re-create them. Their work, it goes without saying, is of a very low standard. They employ rhetoric where they sense a hurricane, they try to be eloquent where they sense fury unleashed, they strive to maintain the discipline of meter where there is only deafening and hopeless silence. They say cheep cheep, bowwow, meow meow, because they are incapable of an animal of colossal proportions, or the absence of such an animal. Meanwhile, the stage they work on is very pretty, very well designed, very charming, but it grows smaller and smaller with the passage of time. The shrinking of the stage doesn't spoil it in any way. It simply gets smaller and smaller and the hall gets smaller to, and naturally there are fewer and fewer people watching. Next to this stage are others, of course. New stages have sprung up over time. There's the painting stage, which is enormous, and the audience is tiny, though all elegant, for lack of a better word. There's the film stage and the television stage. Here the capacity is huge, the hall is always full, and year after year the proscenium grows by leaps and bounds. Sometimes the performers from the stage where the intellectuals give their talks are invited to perform on the television stage. On this stage, the opening of the mine is the same, the perspective slightly altered, although maybe the camouflage is denser and, paradoxically, bespeaks a mysterious sense of humour, but it still stinks. This humorous camouflage, naturally, lends itself to many interpretations, which are finally reduced to two for the public's convenience or for the convenience of the public's collective eye. Sometimes intellectuals take up permanent residence on the television proscenium. The roars keep coming up from the opening of the mine and the intellectuals keep misinterpreting them. In fact, they, in theory the masters of language can't even enrich themselves. Their best words are borrowings they hear spoken by the spectators in the front row. These spectators are called flagellants. They're sick, and from time to time they invent hideous words and there's a spike in their mortality rate. When the workday ends and the theatres are closed and they cover up the opening of the mines with big sheets of steel. The intellectuals retire for the night.

• From 2666 by Roberto Bolano, p121 – 123

depth

"like wind, far away, but with a depth like a rumbling of the earth."

• From The Sound of the Mountain by Yusanari Kawabata

Freedom

Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

- V.I. Lenin

Beginning

"Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... like books that are written in a foreign language. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now... Resolve to be always beginning - to be a beginner."

• Rainer Maria Rilke

Light / Darkness

"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being."

- Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Karl Jung

High Places

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places"

• Ephesians 6:12 KJB

Becoming

"In the beginning I used to imagine that if I were to succeed in describing with any accuracy some thing, this little cone of light with the blurry edges, for instance, or this common pannikin, then I would be expressing all truth. But I could not my whole life has been a failure, lived at the most humiliating level, always purposeless, frequently degrading. Until I became aware of my power. The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming"

• Voss by Patrick White, p271