Lars Iyer's Blog, page 70

In Scetis a brother went to Moses to ask for advice. He said to him, 'Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything'.

A hermit was asked, 'How is it that some struggle in their religious life, but do not receive grace like our predecessors?' He replied, 'Because then love was the rule, and each one drew his neighbour upward. Now love is growing cold, and each of us draws his neighbour downward, and so we do not deserve grace'.

Hilarion once came from Palestine to Antony on the mountain: and Antony said to him, 'Welcome, morning star, for you rise at break of day'. Hilarion said, 'Peace be unto you, pillar of light, for you sustain the world'.

The hermits said, 'If an angel really appears to you, do not accept it as a matter of course, but humble yourself, and say, 'I live in my sins and am not worthy to see an angel'.

Hyperchius said, 'The tree of life is high, and humility climbs it'.

[Poemen] said, 'A brother asked Alonius, "What is humility?" The hermit said, 'To be lower than brute beasts and to know that they are not condemned'.

[Poemen] said, 'Humility is the ground on which the Lord ordered the sacrifice to be offered'.

Mathois said, 'The nearer a man comes to God, the more he sees himself to be a sinner. Isaiah the prophet saw the Lord and knew himself to be wretched and unclean'.

Theophilus of holy memory, the bishop of Alexandria, once went to the mount of Nitria, and a hermit of Nitria came to see him. The bishop asked, 'What have you discovered in your life, abba?' The hermit answered, 'To blame myself unceasingly'. The bishop said, 'That is the only way to follow'.

... Zacharias took his cowl from his head, and put it beneath his feet and stamped on it, and said, 'Unless a man stamps upon self like that, he cannot be a monk'.

Evagrius said, 'To go against self is the beginning of salvation'.

They used to say of Arsenius that no one could understand the depths of his monastic life. [...]

[Antony] said, 'I saw the devil's snares set all over the earth, and I groaned and said, "What can pass through them?" I heard a voice saying, "Humility".'

[Allois] said, 'Until you can say in your heart, "Only I and God are in the world", you will not be at peace'.

[Allois] said, 'If you really want to, by the evening of one day you can reach a measure of godliness'.

A hermit said, 'Anyone who wants to live in the desert ought to be a teacher and not a learner. If he still needs teaching, he will come to harm'.

Hyperichius said, 'He who teaches others by his life and not his speech is truly wise'.

A brother sinned and the presbyter ordered him to go out of church. But Bessarion got up and went out with him, saying, 'I, too, am a sinner'.

A hermit said, 'When you flee from the company of other people, or when you despise the world and worldlings, take care to do so as if it were you who was being idiotic'.

A hermit said, 'The monk's cell is the furnace in Babylon in which the three children found the Son of God. It is the pillar of cloud out of which God spoke to Moses'.

Poemen said, 'The character of the genuine monk only appears when he is tempted'.

They said of Helladius that he lived twenty years in his cell, and did not once raise his eyes to look at the roof.

A hermit saw someone laughing, and said to him 'We have to render an account of our whole life before heaven and death, and you can laugh?'

A hermit said, 'As the shadow goes everywhere with the body, so we ought to carry penitence and weeping with us everywhere we go'.

A brother asked a hermit, 'I hear the hermits weeping, and my soul longs for tears, but they do not come, and I am worried about it'. He replied, 'The children of Israel entered the promised land after forty years in the wilderness. Tears are the promised land. When you reach them you will no longer be afraid of the conflict. For it is the will of God that we should be afflicted, so we may always be longing to enter that country'.

In Egypt once when Poemen was going somewhere he saw a woman sitting by a gravfe and weeping bitterly. He said, 'If all the delights of this world should come to her, they would not bring her out of sorrow. Just so should the monk always be weeping in his heart'.

A hermit, who had an experienced disciple, once turned him out in a fit of irritation. The disciple sat down outside to wait and the hermit found him there where he opened the door. So he did penance to him, saying, 'You are my abba now, because your humility and patience have overcome my weakness. Come inside, now you are the old abba, and I am the young disciple; my age must give way to your conduct'.

From The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks

I had now reached that phase of the disorder where all sense of hope had vanished, along with the idea of a futurity; my brain, in thrall to its outlaw hormones, had become less an organ of thought than an instrument registering, minute by minute, varying degrees of its own suffering. [...]

In depression [the] faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. [...]

Then, after dinner, sitting in the living room, I felt a curious inner convulsion that I can describe only as despair beyond despair. It came out of the cold night; I did not think such anguish possible.

from William Styron, Darkness Visible

There were also dreadful, pouncing, seizures of anxiety. One bright day on a walk through the woods with my dog I heard a flock of Canada geese honking high above the trees ablaze with foilage; ordinarily a sight and sound that would have exhilarated me, the flight of birds caused me to stop, riveted with fear, and I stood stranded there, helpless, shivering, aware for the first time that I had been stricken by no mere pangs of withdrawal but by a serious illness whose name and actuality I was able finally to acknowledge. Going home, I couldn't rid my mind of the line of Baudelaire's, dredged up from the distant past, that for several days had been skittering around at the edge of my consciousness: 'I have felt the wind of the wing of madness'.

from William Styron, Darkness Visible

What is Poland? It is a country between the East and the West, where Europe starts to draw to an end, a border country where the East and the West soften into each other. A country of weakened forms... None of the great movements of European culture has ever really penetrated Poland, not the Renaissance, not the wars of religion, not the French Revolution, not the Industrial Revolution. Of all these phenomenon Poland has felt no more than a muted echo[....] So these plains, open to every wind, had long been the scene of a great compromise between Form and its Degradation. Everything was effaced, disintegrated...

[...] Against the Polish sky, against the sky of a paling, waning Europe, one can see why so much paper coming from the West falls to the ground, into the mud, onto the sand, so that little boys grazing their cows can make the usual use of it.

Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament

Ever since my childhood, the falsity of my easy, bourgeois life had been a nightmare for me. This feeling of unreality never left me. Always 'between' and never 'in', I was like a shade, a chimera. And I would not be lying if I said that it was reality for which I searched in the simplicity and the brute health of the lowest social classes, during those expeditions into the slums of Warsaw. But I also looked for that reality inside myself, in those vague internal areas, deserted, peripheral, inhuman, where anomalies flourish together with Formlessness, Disease, Abjection. For one can find reality in all that is most ordinary, most primitive, and most healthy, as well as in what is most twisted and demented. Man's reality is the reality both of health and of disease.

Yet these invesitgations did not go so far as to make me touch the depths of things. So I wasn't entitled to write a 'real' book. I was capable of no more than parody. Here style was the parody of style. Art mimicked and mocked art. The logic of nonsense was a parody of sense and of logic. And my so-called success was a parody of success.

Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament

Tyler on the recipe for Spurious.

Lots of reviews of Spurious.

Spurious gives Bluestocking Russian Novel Depression Disorder.

Mad Dog gives Spurious zero stars.

Exodus, at Amazon UK, now has a blurb. Release date: 14th Feb UK, 29th Jan USA.

Planning a book tour of New York and Boston in mid Feb.

The Student Union bar. This is where he used to drink as a postgraduate student, W. says. It's where he learned to drink, he who had been near-teetotal before - and to smoke, he who had never smoked a cigarette in his life, with his fellow postgraduates.

Do I have any sense of what was like to feel part of a generation?, W. says. Can I understand what it was to have something expected of you, to have faith placed in you? How can I grasp what it meant to have a sense that what was happening could have done so onlythere and then - that the conditions were right for something to begin, really to begin?

Did they think they could change the world?, I ask him. Not the world, but thought, W. says. They thought they could change thinking. Thought they were the beginning of something, a new movement. Thought they augured what Britain might become: a thinking country, just as France is a thinking-country, just as Germany was a thinking-country.

This is where they spoke, and of great things. This is where theyspoke - can I even understand what that means? To speak, to be swept along by great currents. To be borne along, part of something, some ongoing debate. And for that debate to have stakes, to matter. For thought to become personal, a matter of where you stood in the most intimate details of your life. Ah, how can he convey it to me, who has never known intellectual life, intellectual friendship? How to one who barely knows what friendship means, let alone the intellect?

A life of the mind, that's what they'd chosen. A life of the mind for postgraduate students from all over Britain, and therefore a kind of internal exile. Because that's what it means to be a thinker in Britain: a kind of internal exile. They turned their backs on their families, on old friends. On the places of their birth. They'd turned from their old life, their old jobs, old partners. They'd travelled from the four corners of the country to be here, to arrive here, to be reborn here. Essex, Essex: what joy it was in that dawn to be alive ...

This is where they spoke, says W. very insistently. Do I know what it means to speak? This is where they argued. Do I know what it means to argue? This is where they fought in thought. This is where they loved, too. The Student Union Bar: this is where thought was alive, thought was life, thought was a matter of life and death ...

This is where they spoke. Voices trembled. Voices were raised. They laughed, and the laughter died away. Did they weep? No doubt there was weeping. No doubt some wept. This is where they promised themselves to thought. This is where they signed the covenant ...

It was like serving together in a secret army. Even now, when he meets them, the former postgraduates of Essex, he sees the sign. Even now, it's clear; they are marked - they were marked then. Thought was life. Thought was their lives. They were remade in thought's crucible. They flared up from thought's fire. 

They learned to read French thought in French, German thought in German. They studied Latin and ancient Greek. Imagine it: a British person reading ancient Greek! They crossed the channel and studied in Paris. They plunged into Europe and studied in Rome. They visited great archives. They read in great libraries.  

They were becoming European, W. says. Do I have any idea what it meant: to become European. Some of them even learned tospeak other languages. Imagine it: a British person speaking French. Imagine it: an Englander in Berlin, conversing in German ...

They went en masse to a two-week conference in Italy. Imagine it: en masse, British postgraduates at a two-week conference in Italy. They played chess in the sun, and drank wine until their teeth turned red. Italy! The Mediterranean! Who among them had any idea of Italy, of the Mediterranean? Who who had ever been to Italy, or to the Mediterranean?

The sun burned them brown. Their pallid British bodies: brown. Their teeth red. The sun turned them mad. They thought as Van Gogh painted: without a hat. Hatless, in the full sun, they became madmen and madwomen of thought.

Essex broke them. Essex rebuilt them. Essex broke their Britishness, their provincialness. Essex gave them philosophy. It gave them politics. It gave them friendship, and by way of philosophy, by way of politics. They were close to Europe, terribly close. Like Hoelderlin's Greece, Europe was the fire from heaven. Like Hoelderlin's Germany, Britain was to be set on fire by heaven.

Ah, what happened to them all, the postgraduates of Essex? What, to the last generation - the last generation of Essex postgraduates? Some got jobs. Some found work in obscure corners of Britain (where else could they find work but in obscure corners?). Some went abroad, back to Europe, back to the heavenly fire.

Some fell back into Britishness - fell into the drowning pool of Britishness. Some drowned, gasping for air, finding no air, in Britain. Hadn't they seen too much? Hadn't they learnt what they lacked? Hadn't they a sense now of great thought, of great politics? Hadn't their skies been full of light, of the heavenly fire?

He must not perform the role of the philosopher. But that's all he does: perform the role of the philosopher.

Of course, the wish to discard performance is itself a kind of performance. The wish to leave philosophy behind is itself a kind of philosophy.

The move to give up philosophy is part of philosophy, he says. In the move to step outside philosophy, philosophy itself is waiting.

Philosophy is more cunning than he is, that's the trouble. Where ever he turns: philosophy. And even when he attempts to turn away from philosophy: philosophy.

You shall live so that you can withstand in the face of madness when I comes. And you shall not  flee insanity. It is luck when it isn’t there, but  flee it you shall not.

Insanity … is the most severe judge (the most severe court) of whether my life is right or wrong.

But madness does not sully reason. Even though it does not guard it.

Respect of madness – that is really all I am saying.

Assorted remarks from Wittgenstein's Diaries