Samuel Beckett,”Dante…Bruno. Vico…Joyce,” 1929
[Apropos of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake] Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read — or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself. [More.]
Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death”
My hope lies in the materiality of language, in the fact that words are things, too, are a kind of nature — this is given to me and gives me more than I can understand. Just now the reality of words was an obstacle. Now, it is my only chance. A name ceases to be the ephemeral passing of nonexistence and becomes a concrete ball, a solid mass of existence; language, abandoning the sense, the meaning which was all it wanted to be, tries to become senseless. Everything physical takes precedence: rhythm, weight, mass, shape, and then the paper on which one writes, the trail of the ink, the book. Yes, happily language is a thing: it is a written thing, a bit of bark, a sliver of rock, a fragment of clay in which the reality of the earth continues to exist.
Jeff Noon, Tweet, 31 January 2013
The ghost book haunts the real book. Its text hovers above the real text, quite invisible; unless you’re drunk, stoned, or a ghost yourself.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, letter to William Godwin, 1800
Is thinking impossible without arbitrary signs? and—how far is the word ‘arbitrary’ a misnomer? Are not words etc parts and germinations of the Plant? And what is the law of their Growth?—In something of this order I would endeavor to destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things, elevating, as it were, words into Things, and living Things too. [Via]
Stig Sæterbakken, “Why I Always Listen to Such Sad Music,” Music & Literature 1, 2012
Stillness, silence, is art taken to its most extreme consequence.
Maurice Blanchot, letter to Georges Bataille, 1962
For my part I can see […] that I must always respond to a double movement, both aspects of which are necessary but nevertheless irreconcilable. One (to express myself in an extremely crude and simplistic fashion) is passion, the realization and the expression of totality, in a dialectical process; the other is essentially non-dialectical, does not concern itself at all with unity and does not tend towards power (towards the possible). This double movement necessitates a double language in response, and, as for any language, a double intensity: the first is a language of confrontation, of opposition, of negation, so as to reduce any opposition and so as to affirm the truth in the end, in its generality, as a silent measure (through which the demand of thought passes). But the other is a language which above all speaks, which speaks above all else and outside anything else; it is a language which comes first, is without agreement, without confrontation, and ready to welcome the unknown, the stranger (the poetic demand passes through this language). The first names the possible and wants the possible. The other responds to the impossible. Between these two movements, which are at the same time necessary and incompatible, there is a constant tension often very difficult to sustain and, in truth, it is unsustainable. But one cannot give up, through prejudice, on one or the other, nor on the unmeasurable search that necessity, and the necessity of uniting the incompatible, demands of men. [via]
Jacques Derrida, interview by Peggy Kamuf
If there’s one dream that never left me, whatever I’ve written, it’s the dream of writing something that has the form of a diary. Deep down, my desire to write is the desire for an exhaustive chronicle. What’s going through my head? How can I write fast enough to preserve everything that’s going through my head? I’ve sometimes started keeping notebooks, diaries again, but each time I abandoned them […]. But it’s the biggest regret of my life, since the thing I’d like to have written is just that: a ‘total’ diary. [via]
W. B. Yeats, The King’s Threshold
And I would have all know that when all falls / In ruin, poetry calls out in joy…
Franz Kafka, “The Silence of the Sirens,” 1917
Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing never happened, it is still conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
I’m astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will’s surrender. I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.
ANDREW GALLIX 