Lars Iyer's Blog, page 36

To get back to how I go about writing my books: I’d say that it’s a question of rhythm and has a lot to do with music. Indeed, you can understand what I write only if you realize that the musical component is of uppermost importance, and that what I’m writing about only comes in secondarily. Once that musical component is in place, I can begin to describe things and occurrences. The problem lies in the How. Unfortunately, critics in Germany have no ear for music, which is so essential to a writer. I derive as much satisfaction from the musical element as from anything else; indeed, my enjoyment of the music is equal to my enjoyment of whatever idea it is I’m trying to express.

Not long after An Indication of the Cause came out, the German critic Jean Améry took me aside and said to me, “You can’t talk like that about Salzburg. You’re forgetting it’s one of the most beautiful cities in the world.” A few days later, after I’d read his review of my book in the Merkur, which I was still fuming over, because he’d understood absolutely nothing, I heard a piece of news over the television: the previous day Améry had killed himself, and in Salzburg of all places. That’s no coincidence. Just yesterday three people threw themselves into the Salzach. Everybody blamed it on the föhn. But I’m certain that there’s something about that town that physically weighs down on people and ultimately destroys them.

Thomas Bernhard, interviewed (translated by Douglas Robertson)

Sometimes, in April, there are limpid mornings, with a gentle, very fragile grace. It seems as if the universe has just been born, that it has just emerged from the original, boundless water, that it is still damp, that it retains something of the transparency of lakes. The world seems all pure and new, its light intact. All is light and water.

It is the first day. The world has just emerged, it is still unreal, everything is still only an assemblage of colours, the outlines of its forms stand out, ready to be blurred. The world makes its appearance. Flowers grow out of the asphalt; fountains suddenly well up in the deserts. All the people are young, the girls walk without touching the ground. The universe becomes completely transparent, like a bride's veil. The air stirs like gentle waves. 

The event will perhaps occur. The only event for which the world is created. Everything is no more than an expectation, a Sunday, and this light that is at once glorious and soft looks like a party dress. The great hope. A calm comes into being in the light and one hears the vibrations of the bells that are about to ring, organs barely hold back their sounds, the bows of violins are about to play. All the voices await the signal to sing the triumphal hymn. But the waiting is prolonged and the whole universe is now only arms stretched out.

The white bird is as motionless as the sky, the trees by the houses hold their breath to hear the announcement of the event. Will there be an outburst of joy? All eyes are fixed on the horizon to catch the moment when the light will melt into a greater light ...

From Ionesco's Present Past, Past Present

Fernando Hernández Urias interviews José Luis Amores, of the Spanish publishing house, Pálido Fuego, which brought out Spurious in Spanish translation a couple of years ago (as Magma). Dogma to follow soon. 

Neil Stewart reviews Wittgenstein Jr at The Salt House.

I like this little post from Absolute Write Water Cooler.

All I do is lose my way. But I have a chance to find myself again if I keep retracing my footsteps, instead of taking the first step, if I return to the explosion of the first image, there where words express nothing but light. I find myself again, and understand myself only were words, faces, figures, walls, myself are no longer to be understood, where sounds are strangers and strange, with meanings dislocated by a very powerful light in which definitions and forms melt, like the shadow that makes light disappear. it is from this silence that speech is born again.

Ionesco, Present Past, Past Present: A Personal Memoir

I often have insomnia. I open my eyes in the shadows. But these shadows are like a different kind of clarity, a negative light. It is in this black light that the revelation of 'disaster', of 'catastrophe', of the 'irremediable', of 'absolute failure' comes to me, with the undeniable evidence of fact. Everything seems lost to me.

[...] I have been tortured, and still am, both by the fear of death, the horror of emptiness, and by the ardent, impatient, pressing desire to live. Why does one want to live, what does 'living' mean? I have waited to live. When one wants to live, it is no longer a sense of wonder that one is seeking but in its stead, since only childhood or a simple and superior lucidity can attain it, what one seeks is to be sated. One never is; one cannot be. Material things are not life. One can't manage to live. This 'will to life' means nothing.

I had sought a false path to salvation, I gave myself bad directions.

Ionesco, Present Past, Past Present: A Personal Memoir

John Yargo discusses Wittgenstein Jr at The Millions.

Most gamblers are bad players who want to control chance. They throw the dice and only affirm the outcome that they like. If they shoot craps, they roll again in an effort to overcome the unlucky roll and erase its consequences. Nietzsche's good players, by contrast, roll only once, and whatever the result, they affirm the result and will its eternal return. In this way, good players avoid the ressentiment of finding the world guilty of frustrating their desires, and thereby genuinely affirm the play of the world.

Bogue, Deleuze's Way

To write is perhaps to ... select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call my Self ... A schizophrenic said: 'I heard voices say: he is conscious of life'. In this sense, there is indeed a schizophrenic cogito, but it is a cogito that makes self-consciousness ... a result of indirect discourse. My direct discourse is still the free indirect discourse running through me, coming from other worlds or other planets. that is why so many artists and writers have been tempted by the seance table.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

[Artaud] knows that thinking is not innate, but must be engendered in thought. He knows that the problem is not to direct or methodically apply a thought which pre-exists in principle and in nature, but to bring into being that which does not yet exist (there is no other work, all the rest is arbitrary, mere decoration). 

To think is to create - there is no other creation - but to create is first of all to engender 'thinking' in thought.

Artaud said the problem (for him) was not to orientate his thought or to perfect the expression of what he thought, or to acquire application and method or to perfect his poems, but simply to manage to think something.

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

Each one risked something and went as far as possible in taking this risk; each one drew from it an irrepressible right. What is left for the abstract speaker once she has given advice of wisdom and distinction? Well then, are we to speak always about ... Fitzgerald and Lowry's alcoholism, Nietzsche and Artaud's madness, while remaining on the shore?  Are we to become the professionals who give talks on these topics? 

Deleuze, Logic of Sense