January 2010
29 posts
“Confess you’re not the man you were, you’ll end up riding a bicycle. That’s the accountants’ chorus, opining like a single man, and there are more to come, all the peoples of the earth would not suffice, at the end of the billions you’d need a god, unwitnessed witness of witnesses, what a blessing it’s all down the drain, nothing ever as much as begun,...
“I’ve given myself up for dead all over the place, of hunger, of old age, murdered, drowned, and then for no reason, of tedium, nothing like breathing your last to put new life in you, and then the rooms, natural death, tucked up in bed, smothered in household gods, and always muttering, the same old mutterings, the same old stories, the same old questions and answers, no malice in me,...
“He was beleaguered by an anger and a darkness, and fury and fits and frenzy and fright-fraught fear, and he was filled with a restless tottering unquiet and with a disgust for the places that he knew and with a desire to be where he never was, so that he was palsied out of hand and foot and eye-mad and heart-quick and went from the curse of Ronan bird-quick in craze and madness from the...
“I don’t know when I died. It always seemed to me I died old…But this evening, alone in my icy bed, I have the feeling I’ll be older than the day, the night, when the sky with all its lights fell upon me, the same I had so often gazed on since my first stumblings on this distant earth. For I’m too frightened this evening to listen to myself rot, waiting for the great red lapses of the heart…for...
“I feel the only line is to refuse to be involved in exegesis of any kind. And to insist on the extreme simplicity of dramatic situation and issue. If that’s not enough for them, and it obviously isn’t, it’s enough for us, and we have no elucidations to offer of mysteries that are all of our making. My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully...
“The difference is that Joyce was a superb manipulator of material—perhaps the greatest. He was making words do the absolute maximum work. There isn’t a syllable that was superfluous. The kind of work I do is one in which I’m not master of my material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. He’s tending towards omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence,...
And so, admitted through black swollen gates That must arrest all distance otherwise, Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments, Light wrestling there incessantly with light, Star kissing star through wave on wave unto Your body rocking!
and where death, if shed, Presumes no carnage, but this single change,- Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn The silken skilled transmemberment...
-“The peasants are drunk, the mothers are drunk, the children are drunk, the churches are empty…When it’s in our hands, maybe we’ll mend things; if need be we’ll drive them for forty years into the wilderness.”
-Dostoevsky, Devils
“To my thinking there’s no reason to be offended in being threatened with danger by fools; their brains don’t affect the question. They’ve raised their hand against better men than you or me.”
-Dostoevsky, Devils
“Kirillov, in the greatness of his soul, could not compromise with an idea, and shot himself; but I see, of course, that he was great-souled because he had lost his reason. I can never lose my reason, and I can never believe in an idea to such a degree as he did. I cannot even be interested in an idea to such a degree.”
-Dostoevsky, Devils
“Come, that’s enough, that’s enough. I am no good for anything and you are no good for anything; it’s as bad for both of us, so let’s comfort ourselves with that. Anyway, it eases our vanity.”
-Dostoevsky, Devils
“You are a scoundrel and a false intellect. But I am just the same as you are, and I will shoot myself while you will remain living.”
-Dostoevsky, Devils
“Scoundrels.”
“Yes, scoundrels if you like. But you know that that’s only words.”
“All my life I wanted it not to be only words. I lived because I did not want it to be. Even now every day I want it to be not words.”
-Dostoevsky, Devils
“I always fancied that you would take me to some place where there was a huge wicked spider, big as a man, and we should spend our lives looking at it and being afraid of it. That’s how our love would spend itself.”
-Dostoevsky, Devils
Then it will be over, thanks to me all will be over, and they’ll depart, one by one, or they’ll drop, they’ll let themselves drop, where they stand, and never move again, thanks to me, who could understand nothing, of all they deemed it their duty to tell me, do nothing, of all they deemed it their duty to tell me to do, and upon us all the silence will fall again, and settle,...
This tangle of grey bodies is they. Silent, dim, perhaps clinging to one another, their heads buried in their cloaks, they lie together in a heap, in the night. They are far out in the bay. Lemuel has shipped his oars, the oars trail in the water. The night is strewn with absurd
absurd lights, the stars, the beacons, the buoys, the lights of earth and in the hills the faint fires of the...
In sleep, of a heart attack, let Henry go. The end of tennis. The beginning of the dark. The beginning of the wagon. It is the onward coming terrifies. Now at last the effort to make him kill himself has failed.
Take down the thing then to which he was nailed. I am a boat was moored on the wrong shelf. Love has wings & flies. Amazed it could engineer such agony, Henry tried the world again ...
I can’t go into the meaning of the dream except to say a sense of total LOSS afflicted me thereof: an absolute disappearance of continuity & love and children away at school, the weight of the cross, and everything is what it seems.
-Berryman
But never did Henry, as he thought he did, end anyone and hacks her body up and hide the pieces, where they may be found. He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing. Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing.
-Berryman
—Henry is tired of the winter, & haircuts, & a squeamish comfy ruin-prone proud national mind, & Spring (in the city so called). Henry likes Fall. He would be prepared to live in a world of Fall for ever, impenitent Henry. But the snows and summers grieve & dream;
these fierce & airy occupations, and love, raved away so many of Henry’s years it is a wonder that,...
You are trying to settle the problem of free will in one sentence. I’m afraid that you are drunk with power.
-Cocteau, The Infernal Machine
Now there is a difficulty with the light:
I am obliged to perform in complete darkness operations of great delicacy on my self.
-Berryman
In a motion of night they massed nearer my post. I hummed a short blues. When the stars went out I studied my weapons system. Grenades, the portable rack, the yellow spout of the anthrax-ray: in order. Yes, and most of my pencils were sharp.
-John Berryman, The Dream Songs
Here come I, the death-watch beetle Chewing away at the great cathedral;
Gnawing the medieval beams And the magnificent carved rood screen
Gorging on gospels and epistles From the illuminated missals;
As once I ate the odes of Sappho And the histories of Manetho,
The lost plays of Euripides And all the thought of Parmenides.
The Sibyl’s leaves which the wind scattered, And great aunt...
ARTHUR: And I, Sir Galahad? What will become of me?
GALAHAD: You? You will efface yourself, you will endure everything, you will pay. For one must always pay, pay, pay. The old life is dead, long live the new.
-Cocteau, The Knights of the Round Table
“It’s your phrase altogether, not mine. Your own, not simply the sequel of our conversation. ‘Our’ conversation it was not at all. It was a teacher uttering weighty words, and a pupil who was raised from the dead. I was that pupil and you were the teacher…I wrote to you from America about that. I wrote to you about everything. Yes, I could not at once tear my bleeding...
ORPHEUS: Who’s to say who’s talking—him, me, or nobody at all. We bump into each other in the dark; we’re up to our necks in the supernatural, playing hide-and-seek with the gods. Who really knows anything at all?
-Cocteau, Orpheus
SPHINX: But here on earth it is so difficult to remember what we planned when we were gods. Here the dead really die—I kill them.
-Jean Cocteau, The Infernal Machine