“We are here to go somewhere else.”
– Geoff Dyer, White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World, 2016
Is it Easier?
“Is it easier to surrender to death than life?”
– Deborah Levy, Hot Milk, 2016
Centring the Margins
Jeff Bursey, Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews, 2016: 14
In 2011 Andrew Gallix, in the Guardian, wrote a piece on unread difficult books, and he mentioned “an anthology of blank books [edited by Michael Gibbs] entitled All Or Nothing.”
The Not-Being I Have Already Been
“The not-being that I have already been. I whisper it to myself, like a mantra, or a lullaby.”
– Jenny Diski, In Gratitude, 2016
Lessons in Unlearning
Simon Critchley, ABC of Impossibility, 2015
The poet issues reminders for what we already know and interprets what we already understand but have not made explicit. Poetry takes things as they are and as they are understood by us, but in a way that we have covered over through force of habit, a contempt born of familiarity, or what Fernando Pessao’s heteronym Alberto Caeiro calls ‘a sickness of the eyes’. Poetry returns us to our familiarity with things through the de-familiarization of poetic saying, it provides what Careio calls ‘lessons in unlearning’ where we finally see what is under our noses. What the poet discovers is what we knew already, but had covered up: the world in its plain simplicitly and palpable presence.
A Preparation for Something that Never Happens
W. B. Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats, 1935
When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.
Disappearing Into That Nothingness
Elizabeth Sewell, Paul Valéry (1952)
Then there is Mallarmé himself, sitting, as he admitted in a letter to a close friend, in front of a mirror as he wrote, to make sure that he would not disappear into that nothingness which during the writing of Hérodiade his soul had seen and shuddered at.
It is like Mallarmé, whose poetry is so pure that it is about poetry and nothing else at all, a form commenting on a form, the content irrelevant [via].
It Is Doing Nothing
Jenny Diski, “Diary,” London Review of Books 28 May 1992
I do nothing. I get on with the new novel. Smoke. Drink coffee. Smoke. Write. Stare at ceiling. Smoke. Write. Lie on the sofa. Drink coffee. Write.
It is a kind of heaven. This is what I was made for. It is doing nothing. A fraud is being perpetrated: writing is not work, it’s doing nothing. It’s not a fraud: doing nothing is what I have to do to live. Or: doing writing is what I have to do to do nothing. Or: doing nothing is what I have to do to write. Or: writing is what I have to do to be my melancholy self. And be alone.
That Few Seconds of Silence on the Tape
Tom McCarthy, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying by Simon Critchley, 2010
Memory is always a narrative, we have this mechanism in our brains that turns ones and zeros into a narrative thread, which is memory. Interestingly, very often in cases of trauma, that part goes off to strike. So you got the data, but it has not been dealt with. And the catastrophic event keeps coming back. That gap, or absence, that few seconds of silence on the tape, become real; since everything else that is on the tape is fake, that gap must be real. This is a construct, a completely artificial construction. But it’s interesting that the event then stands in the place of authenticity.
Black with Everything
Adam Shatz, “Desire was Everywhere,” London Review of Books 16 December 2010
From [painter Gérard] Fromanger, for example, he [Gilles Deleuze] learned that the blank canvas is not white, but rather ‘black with everything every painter has painted before me’ — an idea he would explore in his book on Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation.
ANDREW GALLIX 