Lars Iyer's Blog, page 86

He has the feeling that something terrible is going to happen, W. says. The other day, he found himself weeping without reason. He felt overwhelmed by an unaccountable sadness, by a total melancholy that seemed to be without cause. W. felt drawn to watch his saddest films, he says, and listen to his saddest music.

Is this what Kierkegaard meant by dread?, W. wonders. Is this what Kierkegaard means by anxiety? But he’s not anxious about himself, W. says. It’s not his own existence which worries him, his own soul. Something’s changed in the world, he's sure of it. Any minute now, and will become clear to everyone. At any moment, it will be there for all to discern.

The train to Edinburgh, up the east coast.

He doesn't really know the North Sea, W. says. He doesn't really feel it. What lies across the water, for instance? He doesn't even know that ... Denmark, I tell him. Travel east, and we'd reach Jutland, and the port of Esbjerg. Denmark! That's where the Vikings came from, W. says. — 'Your people, pillaging and marauding ...'

Of course, I’ve always maintained that the Vikings have been misunderstood by history, W. says. They were a melancholy people, first and foremost, I’ve told him. A people of tungsing, of heavy-souledness, I’ve insisted.

The Vikings knew their time was over, I’ve told W. They knew that their Ragnarok was coming; that a new religion was coming that would sweep the old one away. It was because Christianity was coming to their northlands that they sailed to Holy Island and smashed the Abbey, I said to W. And it was a sense of their own posthumousness that drove them to pillage and maraud their way across Christian Europe.

And wasn’t it the same soul-heaviness which drove them to the New World, to settle in Newfoundland? Wasn’t it Viking heavy-souledness which led them southwards, down the coast of present-day North America, all the way to what became Mexico? They wanted to escape, I told W. To escape themselves! To leave themselves behind! that's why they founded Viking settlements along the edge of East Africa, and in pockets of India where blue-eyed, heavy-souled natives claim ancestry from lost Danish colonies.

Of course, there’s a fundamental difference in our philosophy of walking, W. says. The Jewish walker walks forward, W. says. A trivial point, but one too often lost on the Hindu. Because the Hindu walks in circles, W. says. The Hindu only ever walks round and round!

For the Jew, W. says, every walk is an exodus, a leaving behind of the house of bondage. For the Jew, every walk is a politica act, a determined effort to found a new community in leaving behind slavery, to journey together away from Egypt. For the Hindu, however, the walk is only ever cosmological, W. says. — 'You set out to come back again! You go forth only to return!'

It's like the wheel of rebirth, W. says. It's like the turning of the Four Ages. History, for the Jew, has only one direction, even if, in the end, it points beyond history. Only one direction — and so, for the Jewish walker, we are always walking towards Canaan.

Dogma reviewed at The Answer is Probably No.

The fundamental charm of Withnail & I lies in the dialogue, whose wit and eloquence have a redemptive capacity: we maintain dignity within ruin through the grace of our rhetoric. Perhaps this is the only way open to us when we are left with nothing but language. The pathos of the final scene hinges upon this idea. Withnail is utterly destitute, forsaken by everything but one of the most beautiful passages in Hamlet, which he bellows to the wolves. There’s a kind of dignity here very similar to Vladimir and Estragon’s, to Hamm and Clov’s. It’s also very similar to that of Lars and W on their inebriated lecture tour. However much they might fail as thinkers or writers, they can nonetheless acknowledge their inferiority with a crystalline deadpan humour; they have still encountered great beauty and flashes of truth, discussing Rosenzweig over a dive bar’s pooltable. W’s glorious insults of Lars are also a perverse form of esteem, as well as self-assertion. In this sense, the books seem to me as much about dignity as they are about friendship. Dignity achieved by a certain poise.

Fascinating meditation at Lexipenia on Spurious, Dogma, interviews I've done, taking in Withnail and I, Beckett, the question of non-male friendships, etc. ... 

Short review of Dogma by Alice at Moving Under Skies.

Fascinating meditation at Lexipenia on Spurious, Dogma, interviews I've done, taking in Withnail and I, Beckett, the question of non-male friendships, etc. ... 

Short review of Dogma by Alice at Moving Under Skies.

I will be contributing to the following events at the HowTheLightGetsIn Philosophy and Music festrival at Hay-on-Wye:

Wednesday 6th June at 5PM

Reading event: Dialogue, Fiction and Philosophy. I will be reading from and discussing Dogma.

On Thursday 7th June at 10.30am

Authors in the Age of Celebrity - a discussion about writers as gods, asking whether punditry and promotion are as important to the figure of a writer as their books, or whether authors should be heard but not seen.

With Scott Pack (Harper Collins publicist), Elaine Feinstein (poet and novelist), with Gabriel Gbadamosi in the chair.

On Thursday 7th June at 5.30pm.

Tomorrow's Word - a discussion about the future of the novel
With Leo Robson and Joanna Kavenna.

W. has discovered absolute despair, he says on the phone. His module on philosophical poetry isn’t going well. The athletes just aren’t interested in Paul Celan, he says. Mandelstam means nothing to them. It’s even worse with his module on the phenomenology of suffering, he says. Sports science students are too cheerful for Cioran, he says.

He’s sure I bought my pink notebook just to annoy him, W. says. A pink notebook, with a pink ribbon as a bookmark, in which I write with a violet pen in violet ink, like a Japanese schoolgirl.

What have I been writing? ‘Cynothoglys’, W. reads. ‘Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. Zvilpogghua – tentacles instead of a face’. What is this?, W. wonders. A made up language? And then, ‘Shathak – Death Reborn. Volga-Gath – Keeper of Secrets’. What are these?, W. asks. Norwegian death metal bands?

‘My name is legion’, W. reads. The ‘nihil negativum’, W. reads.

Then a drawing. A kind of goat with wings and a star on its forehead. A goat with breasts, W. says. And what’s this: a head with three faces?

Then pages of minute writing, almost too small for the eye to see. It’s a bit like Walser’s Microscripts, W. says. It’s a bit like the work of one of those outsider writers, which is discovered in mouldering piles in a flat. Ten thousand manuscript pages full of ravings, full of wild new mythologies ...

 I suspect that these long ecstatic sentences have no relation to theory or to any idea I might have about the Hungarian language, or indeed any language, but are the direct products of the “ecstatic” heroes of my books, that they proceed directly from them. It is not me but they who serve as narratorsbehind the book. I myself am silent, utterly silent in fact. And since that is the case I can hear what these heroic figures are saying, my task then being simply to transcribe them. So the sentences in question are really not mine but are uttered by those in whom some wild desire is working, the desire being that those to whom they address their sentences should understand them correctly and unconditionally. That desire lends their speeches a mad urgency. The urgency is the style. And one more thing: the speeches these heroes are so desperate to rattle off are not the book, not in the least! The book is a medium, a vehicle for their speeches. They are so convinced of the overwhelming importance of what they have to say, that their language is intended to produce a magical effect without necessarily carrying a concrete meaning: it is an embodiment of the ecstasy of persuasion by magic, the momentum of the desire for understanding.

[...] all I can say is that the structure isn’t something I decide but what is generated by the madness and intensity of my characters. Or rather that it is as if someone were speaking behind them, but I myself don’t know who it is. What is certain is that I am afraid of him. But it is he that speaks, and his speeches are perfectly mad. Under the circumstances it is self evident that I have no control over anything. Structure? Controlling the structure? It is he who controls everything, it is the furious speed of his madness that decides it all. And given this fury and madness it is not only impossible to remember anything or even think — the only recourse is forgetting.

I write my texts, my sentences, in my head — outside there is a terrible, almost unbearable noise, inside there is a terrible, almost unbearable, pounding silence.

Krasznahorkai, interviewed