Lars Iyer's Blog, page 18

The idea of becomings as encounters we have with partial deaths while still alive takes us back to Deleuze and Guattari's notion that 'the experience of death ... occurs in life and for life ... in every intensity as passage or becoming'. From this stanspoint, processes of becoming, in which we undergo continuous small deaths, can put us in the path of a more impersonal more sober relation to our own death. if we are successful at confronting and sustaining their intensity, processes of becoming can soften the rigidity of our selves, weaken our grasp of permanent realities and identities, and mitigate our fears and anxieties toward change. In fulfilling the immanence of death to life - offering us rudimentary but real instances of the experience of death-in-life - processes of becoming help us accept the idea of life continuing beyond 'me'.

Elena del Rio, The Grace of Destruction

Life itself is eternal ... when it is lived with maximum intensity, or when the extrinsic and durational existence of a mode is brought into line as closely as possible to its essence's 'force of existing' ... its elan vital, or 'life-force'. 

Bruce Baugh, 'Death and Temporality in Deleuze and Derrida', on Spinoza

Thought today about what I, an old man, should do.... Several times in my life I've considered myself close to death. And - how foolishly! - I would forget, or try to forget it.... And now, because of my years, I naturally consider myself close to death, and there's no point in trying to forget it, and I can't forget it. But what should I, an old feeble person, so?, I asked myself. and it seemed that there was nothing to do, that I had no strength for anything. But today I realised so clearly the clear and joyful answer. What should I do? it's already been revealed - I must die. This is my task now, as it always has been. And I must die. This is my task now, as it always has been. And I must perform this task as well as possible: die, and die well. the task is before you, a noble and inevitable task.... This made me very glad. I'm beginning to get used to regarding death and dying not as the end of my task, but as the task itself.

Tolstoy, Diaries, 1906

Getting closer to death.... How fortunate that memory that disappears with death and only consciousness remains.... Death is a window through which one observed the world, and which has been slammed shut, or lowered eyelids and sleep, or a walk from one window to another.... Death is becoming more and more simple, more and more natural.... Living is dying. To live well means to die well. Try to die well.... the whole difference between a man and an animal is that a man knows he will die, but an animal doesn't ... Death is the only place one can really go away to.... I feel death approaching nearer and nearer.

Tolstoy, Diaries, 1902-1910 (cited)

Proust says that Dostoevsky is original in composition above all. It is an extraordinarily complex and close-meshed whole, purely inward, with currents and counter-currents like those of the sea.

Robert Bresson

Style is ... all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here I am sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas and visions ... and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A slight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing ... one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has noting apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.

Woolf to Sackville-West, 1926

... one must live without time, in the present alone.

Tolstoy, The Gospel in Brief

If we take eternity to mean not indefinite temporal duration but timelessness, the eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

Wittgenstein, Tractatus

I met this guy named Ding Dong. He told me the whole earth is going up in flames. Flames will come out of here and there ... and they'll just rise up. The mountains are gonna go up in big flames. The water's gonna rise in flames. There's gonna be creatures running every which way ... some of them burned, half their wings burning.

People are gonna be screaming and hollering for help. See, the people that have been good, they're gonna go to heaven ... and escape all that fire. But if you've been bad, God don't even hear you. He don't even hear you talking.

Linda, Days of Heaven

I met this guy named Ding Dong. He told me the whole earth is going up in flames. Flames will come out of here and there ... and they'll just rise up. The mountains are gonna go up in big flames. The water's gonna rise in flames. There's gonna be creatures running every which way ... some of them burned, half their wings burning.

People are gonna be screaming and hollering for help. See, the people that have been good, they're gonna go to heaven ... and escape all that fire. But if you've been bad, God don't even hear you. He don't even hear you talking.

Linda, Days of Heaven

Nietzsche and the Burbs, my next novel, out December 3rd. A draft blurb here.