1) At this moment the cascade of the page begins; later it will be turned.
“The horror — the honor — of the name, which always threatens to become a title. In vain the movement of anonymity remonstrates with this supernumerary appellation — this fact of being identified, unified, fixed, arrested in the present. The commentator says (be it to criticize or to praise): this is what you are, what you think; and thus the thought of writing — the ever-dissuaded thought which disaster awaits — is made explicit in the name; it receives a title and is ennobled thereby; indeed, it is as if saved — and yet, given up. It is surrendered to praise or to criticism (these amount to the same): it is, in other words, promised to a life surpassing death, survival. Boneyard of names, heads never empty.”
“Schleirmacher: By producing a work, I renounce the idea of my producing and formulating myself; I fulfill myself in something exterior and inscribe myself in the anonymous continuity of humanity — whence the relation between the work of art and the encounter with death: in both cases, we approach a perilous threshold, a crucial point where we are abruptly turned back. Likewise, Friedrich Schlegel on the aspiration to dissolve in death: “The human is everywhere the highest, even higher than the divine.” The human movement is the one that goes right to the limit. Still, it is possible that as soon as we write, and however little we write (the little is only too much), we know we are approaching the limit — the perilous threshold — the chance of being turned back.
For Novalis, the mind is not agitation, disquietude, but repose (the neutral point without any contradictions). It is weight, heaviness. For God is “an infinitely compact metal, the heaviest and most bodily of all beings.” “The artist in immortality” must work at reaching the zero where would and body become mutually insensitive. “Apathy” was Sade’s term.”
“Not to write — what a long way there is to go before arriving at that point, and it is never sure; it is never either a recompense or a punishment. One must write, in uncertainty and in necessity. Not writing is among the effects of writing; it is something like a sign of passivity, a means of expression at grief’s disposal. How many efforts are required in order not to write — in order that, writing, I not write, in spite of everything. And finally I cease writing, in an ultimate moment of concession — not in despair, but as if this were the unhoped for: the favor the disaster grants. Unsatisfied and unsatisfiable desire, yet by no means negative. There is nothing negative in “not to write”; it is intensity without mastery without sovereignty, the obsessiveness of the utterly passive.”
“To want to write: what an absurdity. Writing is the decay of the will, just as it is the loss of power, and the fall of the regular fall of the beat, the disaster again.”
“Not to write: negligence, carelessness do not suffice; the intensity of a desire beyond sovereignty, perhaps — a relation of submersion with the outside, passivity which permits one to keep in the disaster’s fellowship. He devotes all his energy to not writing, so that, writing, he should write out of failure, in failure’s intensity.”
2) My brother spent his whole life raising the pig. They were born at the same time. They drank milk together and played in the mud and shit together. When the pig was a piglet, it was very little. It was smaller than my brother, who was very small at the time, and is still small to this day.
The pig grew fatter and fatter and fatter. My brother kept on feeding it. And then my brother passed away. He didn’t have children to inherit the pig. His pig became my pig. He told me that we would drink milk together and play in the mud and shit together. But I couldn’t take this pig with me where I was going. I was not my brother and my brother was not me.
My brother was not me, he was dead. My brother died. How did that happen? He was climbing a ladder and the ladder kept growing and he needed to reach the top. Eventually he climbed so high and it got so cold in the sky and it got so dark in the clouds and eventually he climbed so high and it got so loud in the wind and it got so thin in the air and eventually he climbed so high and it got so electric in the world and it got so conductive in his ladder. He was fried. He was climbing a ladder and he got fried.
I was not my brother, he was dead. My brother died and I was digging a hole in the ground. I had found a plot of land not far from our farm and I was waiting for it to rain. Eventually it rained and the ground was soft and I swung my shovel into the ground. The hole was supposed to be six feet deep, six feet wide, six feet across. But as my brother died I had a vision of the demiurge and I continued to dig, making the hole deeper, wider, longer. I continued to dig until I was alone in the hole and there was no light left. I continued to dig. Eventually I would dig myself out at the bottom of the hole. This was my presupposition. I expected the hole to act like a black hole, where all points contain the possibility of exit and entry. All that is necessary is for one to move at the right speed.
I did not spend my whole life raising the pig. He was my brother’s and now he was mine. But I couldn’t take this pig with me where I was going. I continued to dig. My brother and I were born at the same time. He was climbing the ladder and I was digging a hole in the ground. I was in the dark of the ground and he was in the dark of the sky. I was trying to dig myself out of the dark, out of the bottom of the bottom of the hole. I was trying to dig myself out of a hole, and it was not a hole, it was the hole. My presupposition was that such a thing could be achieved by moving at the right speed.
My brother had spent his whole life raising the pig but perhaps the pig had been raised. Perhaps that is why he was climbing the ladder, in order to raise the pig. And I was digging myself deeper into the hole because I was not raising the pig. But my brother died in the sky and I was in the hole. I couldn’t reach the pig and I couldn’t take it with me where I was going. I was not my brother and my brother was not me.
The pig was slaughtered and I wasn’t there. It had been raised well and it was fat. They lathered it with spices and heated the oven. The table was set with plates and knives and forks. Other preparations were in order and they waited for it to be served.
4) “When all is said, what remains to be said is the disaster. Ruin of words, demise writing, faintness faintly murmuring: what remains without remains (the fragmentary).”
“This is the era destined to the intermittence of a language unburdened of words and dispossessed, the silent halt of that to which without obligation one must nonetheless answer. And such is the responsibility of writing — writing which distinguishes itself by deleting from itself all distinguishing marks, which is to say perhaps, ultimately, by effacing itself (right away and at length: this takes all of time), for it seems to leave indelible or indiscernible traces.
“Fragment: beyond fracturing, or bursting, the patience of pure impatience, the little by little suddenly.”
“The writer, his biography: he died; lived and died.”
“If the book could for a first time really begin, it would, for one last time, long since have ended.”
5) It isn't possible for things to flow as they used to. The impossibility of writing. Of writing text. The matter of inscription is different. And after such a long time without wounds, bleeding is remembered.
It's easy to decide upon the gutter as a resting place. Many things happened. We will be swept away.
Refusing to write; in relation to getting high such that one cannot write the things that one would write otherwise.
The matter of the accent. 10 years of lunch with Peter Sloterdijk. Atlanta disappears. A placeless sound. The sad reality of flight attendants.
And the overwhelming feeling — this is not my world, this is not my homeland, I walk without a mother tongue or a fatherland, and I slurred too much tonight. I wanted to fight this I. I will fight this I. The I becomes the many. The warp and the weft, intermezzo.
Talking out loud in an empty room. At a certain point who knows what will happen. The delusions that God willed it in such a way. A belief structure. Elsewhere bodies are maimed like corpses, flesh is revealed as exceptionally malleable. Like reality. Space-time is the only exit from the stench. God willed it in such a way. The horrors and the brutality. Belief remains the same whether at base camp or the summit — the shifting architectonics of the bloodspill culpability index project. It became so difficult to answer the seemingly simple questions, like what happened?
Things passed, they were meant to be read. Forgotten. Ember collapse.
7) I need noise to drown out the other noise. A quiet by virtue of negation. Inaccessible silence.
Narration is a farce, as is the intention occlusion of perception. The world squeezes, breaks, dust collapses.
He was repeating the same story as the last time, the repetition shorter than the original. Perhaps as he spoke that sliver of memory reemerged with his utterances, perhaps he sought to gain something through this repetition, to hammer home this point. In the two tellings the scene was different, the details were different, the narration, the set, the setting had all changed. Two pictures, with different exposures and varying blurs. Recollection's lens. There were two of him, and then he remembered that he was a third. And he remembered all that he owed.
He moved along, aware that he was progressing from this moment back into a series of points. There were ideas of how these points could be reconstructed, how a railroad track could be remodeled into a highrise. Earlier there was the novelty of the Leica RTC360, a 3D laser scanner which would assembled point clouds. Physical environments would be rendered as data, maps could form. Earlier there was the novelty of new maps, maps of Paris to be explored. Photographs of statues that appear in Duras and Godard films, lists of sites from Rivette films. The same sort of way a girl learning to ride a bike is spatialized into the memory of Manhattan's parks.
It could go on, and it would continue, to go on. A point was assembled. A cloud was mapped. Pages were turned. Books open, shut, emptied. He dragged language through the mud. The rope cut against his hands — he remembered dragging in relation to cranking, mud in relation to his cup. It was also something to get it out of. He would have to get it out of it, in order for it to go on, for it to continue.
8) Efforts to re-write in the manner of the past seem fraught. How to write again anew? If the past was brief:
I got coffee, I worked and I read. I got a bagel, I read and I worked. C texts me and A, we met for beers and wurst. O and M and O2 and F and E arrived. I got cigarettes, smoked outside with C and A. N walked past with two friends, they sat at the opposite end of the bar. C and A left. O talked about staying over at N's place. But we went back to my place and listened to music. M2 arrived about an hour later. There were two other guys, one of them would've been M3, and I can't remember the other's name. They would leave shortly after, but everyone else would stay for a couple of hours. We listened to music and talked and used the computer. We made music and talked and used the computer. O showed me clothing and designs. O2 was on the edge of the couch, didn't talk much, just observed. I talked to M a lot. F talked to M2 a lot. I realized that dealing with people talking a lot is part of M2's job. Like an analyst. With a traveling couch.
There was no grand epiphany, no incredible realization by the end. The end wasn't the end, it was simply a departure. Plans were made for the near future, both firm and loose. Handshakes were exchanged. Deliberations were conducted. The night ended at a certain point, but the task that remains is to ascertain when. Paris Belongs To Us was playing in the theater of The 400 Blows, or so said M. Lack. The name was striking. It recalled cigarettes and absences. When the room was empty, I played a song I had written earlier, about picking things up and putting them down. I sent O and M my film, from when my voice was different, from when the world was different, but the same. The world was always different, the change was always constant. I don't have hope, nor do I have the absence of it. And I recognize the role that time will play, in this future to come. It will come and things will be different, the change will be continue to be constant, I will continue to live, to die, to pick up, and put down.
An exercise emerges: How long can I hold a pose? And does holding a pose change the nature of time's length? If the past was brief, then that was a matter of memory. If a recollection was brief, then that was the nature of what the two parties felt was owed. He was talking, he was talking and repeating himself outside inside common knowledge, thinking of all the games to be played. Traincars turned to dominoes. Factories on the horizon signified an exit. So much of it was gone now, the glowing sign was neither haven nor solace. Eventually: 1610s, "pertaining to events," from French éventuel, from Latin event-, stem of evenire "to come out, happen, result" (see event). Meaning "ultimately resulting" is by 1823. Perhaps that was the signal. He stumbled into an old habit, realized it was best to wait, that he could wait while taking action.
9) The first question was that of volume. What purpose it would serve, and how much was necessary? The nose was whistling like a tea kettle. The body was disintegrating. There was a lamp on the floor. It was designed for tables but it was on the floor. The ceiling light did not work. In the summer the room would get hot. In the winter the room would get cold. In the summer the ceiling fan would spin. It didn't help.
The second question: that of mimesis, of imitation. A comment reads: this feels like destiny. He couldn't grasp the essence of time. Everything appeared to be in freefall; diligent, arduous labor was to be put towards a number of tasks. But it hadn't been applied yet. Stacks of books, piles of clothing, scraps of paper remained. The purpose of the volume was volume. To have a mountain to have climbed. Already, the form amateur, unfit for publishing. Quotations lept to mind, or rather sources of quotations, the words themselves dancing outside memory. The commitment to recollection absent, only a reliance of the prosthetic. The realization of what one territory could be, and the need for others. To write a map for the sake of adaptation.
10) My main urge at the moment is to withdraw. To attempt to stop the production of so many things, to concentrate my volume into only a couple of places. I feel like the Hotel Splendid. Falling apart, riddled with debt, one thing after another needed to be tended to, to be fixed, only I am also the weather, I am the swamp, I am the mislaid pipes, I am flooding, I play piano in the lobby and I get ill, wither, wait for health to return. I put my I everywhere, on top of the entire thing. I am attempting to reconfigure this I, to rewrite this I, such that I do not flood, such that the weather is predictable, such that I play piano at the proper hours, such that the bouts of poor health are manageable, such that I can take care of my debts. Yet this weekend I have failed in that. The time has passed by, there are things I should have quit, addictions I should've resisted, and instead money left my balance, I've ignored my debtors, ignored the phone calls that I am to make, the messages I am to send, and I am dealing with who I am, who I was, in relation to who I am trying to be, who I am trying to become. Noctilucents: "neither being nor becoming, substance nor process, but rhythm: a flow of interruptions" — a cascade:
It is as if she were waiting for something that never comes... The work isn't going anywhere. There are unforeseen complications. That is the way it always is with construction... I am the only one who comes and goes. I am acclimated to the swawmp... No matter how hard I work to take care of it, I can see it is falling apart... Now the Splendid is showing the flaws in its construction, now that it is too late and the harm has been done... The Splendid is quiet all of a sudden... Apparently the project was badly designed and they have to start over. The heat broke all of a sudden... They don't care that it is falling apart. As long as they are waited on and never have to do anything. It is as if they were on vacation here, an endless vacation... She would have liked the grave to stay new forever, like the Hotel Splendid... This is the first time there has been such an invasion of cockroaches during the cold. The hygiene must leave something to be desired, or else there would not be so many cockroaches... I understand grandmother. The Hotel Splendid was her life. And me too, without the Splendid, what would become of me... Without the neon lights blinking in the night, the Splendid would no longer be the Splendid... I have always thought the swamp was an inexhaustible natural resource. If that turns out to be true, it should not be long before the railways is built... I am never completely prepared for things. I wasn't ready for the cold weather... She never plays the piano anymore, she never rehearses her lines. But if she doesn't rehearse, she will not be able to act anymore. She will forget everything. That is the worst thing that can happen to an actress, to forget her lines... Far from making a profit from the prospectors, I have lost money. All that because of the freeze and all the firewood I had to burn... The rooms are freezing. There are no guests. And yet every evening, when night falls, I turn on the neon lights... All of a sudden she no longer believes in anything. She is gloomy. It's her age. There is nothing worse than getting old for an actress. She thinks with regret of all the parts she never played. She never made any kind of name for herself. She was always unknown. The idea of ending her days at the Hotel Splendid eats away at her... I don't think about the future. The present is all that counts... They are gracious guests, and they know how life is... But maybe their life at the hotel is what changed their personalities... I don't like to have debts. But what else can I do? It's either debt or the end of the Splendid. I have no choice... Ada and Adel live in a dream... Adel cannot bear solitude... I don't even dare go up to the attic anymore, for fear of finding some more serious kind of damage... The swamp is swallowing up the cemetary. Ada says soon there will be nothing left of the cemetary, because there will be nothing but the swamp... And at any rate, the cemetary scarcely exists anymore. Only a few of the gravestones are still above water, and soon they will disappear as well... Like grandmother, my sisters have seen a lot of htoels. I am the only one who was known nothing but the Splendid... She drew on all her experiences to create the Hotel Splendid... she says the garden isn't the garden anymore, but the beginning of the swamp instead. She is not completely wrong. The garden is beginning to look like the swamp... They are conviced the company is doing the right thing in trying to put a railway line through the swamp. They say that will give it life. But the swamp does not need the railway to live. It isn't dead like they think... They believe in what they are doing... Adel has become friendly again. She has taken a new interest in the swamp all of a sudden, thanks to the geologists' maps of it. It is as if it was all new to her... They are unhappy with her. She has no more stories to read, she was read them all to us... The swamp might be a blessing... I have to think about paying off my debts... Ada is shapeless. At night, she dreams that the railroad tracks run through the hotel... When I said grandmother was a pioneer, I did not know how right I was. If I hadn't built the Hotel Splendid on the edge of the swamp, the railway would probably never have come here. You can't see the swamp from the rooms just now because of the fog. The foggy season has begun... When the fog comes, you never know how long it will stay. You can scarcely make out the signs of the Hotel Splendid anymore. The hotel disappears in the fog, and the swamp as well. You can no longer tell where the swamp is, or where the Splendid is. You have to know your way along to not get lost... The plumber covered them with a special compound to protect them. But he knows as well as I do that no compound, not even a special compound will fix everything... Ever since the fog began, there have been no more flies... My sisters really have no memory... Her favorite movie, one that she saw several times when she was young, was Hotel Splendid. That was what gave her the idea of naming her hotel the Hotel Splendid. In the movie, the hotel was not on the edge of a swamp, it was in an oasis in the middle of the desert. The wind never stopped blowing. The oasis was slowly becoming choked with sand, and so was the hotel. Grandmother often told me the story of the Hotel Splendid buried under the desert sand. There is no danger of that happening at the edge of the swamp. That's what grandmother must have said to herself when she chose this spot for her hotel... For me things are less glamorous, spending all my time unblocking the lavatories... The workmen think Adel is someone... The workmen do not really understand who she is. They think she is a former movie actress... Every day, some new problem comes up. The geologists could not foresee all the problems. Their studies were very superficial. I was right to think they didn't understand anything about the swamp... The swamp is unrecognizable. It looks as though it's on fire, especially at night... It smells more like fire than like the swamp... Nothing looks familiar to me anymore... She took down all her photographs of actresses. She has begun to doubt the movies all of a sudden. She is disoriented. She says everything is phony in the movies. Only in the theater can an actress really perform to the fullest. Movies are false. She no longer knows what her calling was. She is lost... He agreed to make some repairs, but only on the understanding that he took no responsibility for the results... Little by lttle, she even stopped thinking about the movies. In the end, she never paged through her magazines anymore. The Splendid was the only thing left. She succeeded in life... I am feeling strong at the moment. The Splendid is holding up. It's the embankment that is not holding up... Where the cemetary used to be, now there is the embankment, It encourages the workmen to see the embankment moving forward. What he doesn't know is that in certain places the swamp exerts suction. That is where the embankment is sinking... I spend all day in the office sorting through grandmother's papers. Everything is out of order and unintelligible. The Splendid is no longer making money... The construction is over. The men have left. The garden seems empty all of a sudden. I walked along the embankment and the tracks. The entire company will be there for the opening ceremonies. The first train will cross the swamp. The shutters are closed in Ada and Adel's room. It's the only room that still has shutters. My sisters never touch their food anymore. What can be going on... She says the sand is swallowing up the Hotel Splendid. She is delirious. She thinks she is at the movies... She says death is worse than life... She must think she is already dead... Adel called me Ada. And then she died. My sisters died of the same illness. I prepared Adel's body. I also covered her face with a lace veil that belonged to grandmother. I laid Ada next to Adel. I no longer have any sisters. I only have the Splendid... Who knows where grandmother's coffin is now that the swamp has swallowed up the cemetary? Apparently there are underground currents that slowly suck you in, and as soon as you are caught in one it carries you away... Grandmother knew all about the dangers of flooding. She did not want the Hotel Splendid to be cut off from the world. She had it built just where the pathway is, where it never really floods. That says a lot about her perfect knowledge of the swamp, to have found the only spot that stays dry... They don't make outhouses of that type nowadays. They only make lavatories, with all the problems they bring. Lavatories are my eternal overriding concern, along with the Splendid, of course... It's a miracle tha thtey Splendid has never been flooded. The water always stops a few yards away. If the hotel were flooded, in its condition, that would be the end of it... The debts are starting up again, I will never be free of them... No matter how often I go over my accounts, I cannot manage to balance my budget. I still have a lot of debts. That's not good for the reputation of the hotel. Debts do not inspire confidence... I am already beginning to forget my sisters. I have a bad memory too. The grass is beginning to cover up the graves. I like coming back to the hotel... I see it from far away... The signs are on day and night now. That is my one luxury... The hotel is returning to its old clientele. Travelers are very happy to be able to stop at the Splendid before continuing their long voyage through the swamp... All I need to live is for a few rooms to be taken... Ada and Adel never saw the swamp covered with snow. The swamp is all white. The Splendid is also all white... The hotel looks brand-new under the snow. You can no longer see its flaws... The whole embankment is sinking. My hopes were in vain. The embankment is going to be swallowed up like the cemetary. My sisters' graves will disappear. And their beautiful wooden coffins will fill up with water. Ada and Adel will never escape from the swamp. They are going to join grandmother somewhere on the bottom. I did not succeed in sparing my sisters an uncertain fate at the bottom of the swamp... Nothing can resist the swamp. All it took was the weight of the snow to make what remains of the embankment disappear little by little. Only the Splendid resists the swamp, because grandmother found the right place to build it... I still have debts, but fortunately they are not growing... When night falls and I turn them on, only one word is lit up, the second one, Splendid. That word stands out against the sky. Travelers cannot help but see it. But since the word Hotel isn't lit up, the travelers cannot know that the Splendid is a hotel... From far away, the Splendid must look like a boat that has run aground there on the snow, with its wooden hull half rotted away. There is no chance of it sinking, since it has run aground... The swamp is still the swamp, even covered with snow. Thanks to grandmother's enterprising spirit, this is the only swamp with a hotel in the entire region. The Splendid is visible from everywhere in the swamp. Its signs shine at night, they are visible from a great distance. There are two bright spots in the sky and on the snow. They are the reflections of the Splendid's signs..
11) This tendency to put so much in front of myself. Ambition in relation to one's ability, the pressure that accompanies that. It isn't the inability to recognize one's limits but the rejection of said limits, and accompanying this a certain acceptance of inevitable failures given this recurrent impulse to accept impossible tasks. Of course, I've completed the impossible tasks from time to time, and when the tasks are completed, I move into a state of megalomania. Is that last part true? In some ways, perhaps it's more akin to the narcissistic feedback loop enveloping me, getting high off the high.
12) I finished Nevermore today. There is only one more Marie Redonnet novel with an English translation left for me. Candy Story. Once I read Candy Story, I will either have to learn French or wait for translations to be published. Jordan Stump wrote the translations for all of the books I've read. He is still writing translations. I started to watch another Rivette today but decided to save it. I was very tired. I went back to sleep. Most of the day went away. I didn't do what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was unclear. As far as the short immediate steps. Now I remember what I wanted to do, and the steps were clear. But it is too late to do that now. I must wait. I still don't have a cellphone that works. I turned Instagram off. I suppose this text production is evidence of that. I am changing myself in the ways that I usually change myself, which leads me to question if there is a change occurring. O reminded me of my resolutions on Friday. The ones I brought up were new to her. I have many resolutions and they are all difficult. Somewhere else I will start to write my first novella of the year. The month is waning. I lost weight from not eating enough. And from being sick. I am trying to be better in a number of ways. Time feels as though it shrinking. It felt right to finish Nevermore today. The president was inaugurated. In the book a man becomes the President. In the book there are people fighting for power. In the book people have sex and try to love. But the love feels hard to reach, just behind a veil. On New Year's, O and O2 came over after the party. O2 and I finished his bag of coke, talked about Africa, the horrors of the world, what we've inherited, what will happen. He doesn't remember it but I'm glad for the conversation. I've started praying again and I hope to pray more. I feel bad for not going to the temple today. I've been putting off going to the temple for two weeks. It is in Flushing and now I don't have a phone. But I think if I go there and I pray, it will help with change. It is snowy and icy and cold outside. But I am inside. My laptop is hot. I recall "whoever anywhere will read these written words". I decide to write words from Nevermore.
Translator's Introduction:
"...an outsider's construction of the American West: a West where accounts are settled in francs, a West marked by both volcanoes and disused concentration camps, a West in which one finds such quintessentially French conveniences as the buvette (a small, modest, but not inelegant sort of cafe, common at French tourist sites) and the pissotière (a rather rudimentary public urinal, now vanished from the streets of Paris)."
Readers familiar with the novels of Marie Redonnet will find in Nevermore all the hallmarks of her unique vision: an insistence on repetition, duality, and duplicity, a meditation of the dangers of identification, an examination of the perils and the possibilities of writing, a style of bewildering simplicity, understated power, and offhanded humor, and most important of all, perhaps, a faith in the rare, frail, but incalculably precious ability to transcend the omnipresent darkness and to start anew. Nevermore — the novel or the word itself — implies an end, perhaps a death, but also (or therefore) a beginning and a rebirth.
Words from Nevermore:
...he wants to forget what he had dreamt of, just as he wants to forget the past... It is forbidden to remember the past. It is forbidden to compare the present with what I had dreamt of... Seeing her emerge from her coupe in her white poplin dress, he would never have thought that she was going to San Rosa to sing at the Babylon... he became used to being alone, and even came to like it. How could he have imagined when he arrived in San Rosa that he would still be here after all this time, and that his only desire would be to stay here forever? It will be San Rosa right up to the end for him... The files, already yellowing, were put together by his predecessor, who was obsessed with files and wanted to leave some mark of his existence behind him... Why did his predecessor keep all those files? No one has ever read them... Everyone is taking advantage of the lull, as if it were going to last forever... That is how she sees her life up to now, as a larger and larger wheel which, after having turned faster and faster, suddenly stopped... She asks Willy Bost who he is and where he comes from. But he does not want to talk about himself. The only thing he wants is to move into his room... Only one thing matters, what I came to San Rosa to do. What did I come here to do?... Concentrate on that question alone... Write everything down right away as soon as he feels the need. What would he do without his notebook?... he did not renta. room at the Gold House just to jerk off all alone with no hope of ejaculation! That is out of the question... it never occurs to her that he might be a maniac or a madman... Old images come back to her before she can chase them away. She jumps up and runs to the ocean... No matter how she tries to chase away the old images, she still has the same body, and therefore still the same atavisms. That is what she repeats to herself: the same atavisms. It is aprt of the inevitability she must live with. Is Willy Bost to be the new face of the inevitable for her?... he thinks that he must look like a novelist taking notes for his next novel. That idea pleases him. But there is no question of his becoming a novelist even if he enjoys looking like one. He takes out his notebook again and adds: Don't try to be what you are not. Be what you must be... The words of her songs are very simple. They are about the bombs that never stop falling on Alejo, women from faraway places being sold from one whorehouse to the next up and down the west coast, a little girl crying in the snow because her dog has died, an old man freezing to death under a bridge as he watched a fireworks display lighting up the city, a woman who looks for love without ever finding it and finally gives birth all alone on a desert island, a poet who kills God as if he were His executioner, a priest somewhere in the middle of a desert who gives food to a dead man without noticing that he is dead... How could she have lived all this time forgetting the pleasure that she had felt only once, in suite 103 of the Eden Palace, when she played the first role of her life?... particularly terrible because there is no explosion... But where will she go then? She has nowhere to go. She would rather sing at the Babylon than leave for nowhere in her coupe... She answers that she has nothing to tell him because there is nothing to know... But to go where? With her CV, no one would hire her. She has just come to understand this evening what it means to have been hired only on the strength of her cassette, without being asked for her CV... Even though they are inseparable, they do not tell each other their secrets... It is as if she had loved a dream... Yesterday seems long ago, almost unreal. A new life is beginning for him with this new position... How could he have been so careless as to let it turn into a diary?... He has never tried to find out who she really is... From now on, he wants to do as his predecessors did, write everything down so that there will be some trace of what they discover... What is essential in an investigationof this importance, one concerning the city's most prominent figure, is determining whom to question and how... She is relieved that he is behaving toward her as though nothing had happened. That is the best solution for both of them... That is good news, it proves that everything is going in the right direction... Why isn't love always this simple? Why does passion come along and spoil everything? He pays the girl and gives her a tip, for the music, he says with a smile. When she leaves, he falls asleep, thinking of nothing... why does he find it impossible to give it to her as he had intended?... What must be done is not to destroy the city center, but to save it, in order to make of it the city of God... He does not want to be a man of God only in the house of God. He wants to be a man of God in the city of men in order to defend the word of God there. God visited him in the night as he slept and gave him this mission... She talks to the hummingbird as if it understood everything. She calls it the philosopher... Down at the bottom of Angel Cove there is a submerged grotto whose wonders Mattie wanted to show her. Cassy told her that every time she dives she is afraid the sea will swallow her forever. Mattie laughed. They would dive together, and they would go to the grotto... Here, atop the volcano, she forgets everything that is happening below. The buzzard glides above the crater, then dives... In his opinion, it won't be long before the volcano erupts. He hopes it will be a splendid eruption and that he will be able to film it... She thinks that he knows how to charm and that he enjoys love. She finds him attractive, even if he is not for her... Anything can happen, thinks the commander, even when you think that nothing can ever happen again... He realizes by the pain that he feels how attached he was to her. But he had never wanted to know anything about that either... Why did she not start her life over again?... She used to care about and listen to everyone, but she became withdrawn, never speaking ot anyone anymore... They will behave as if nothing had happened, as usual... "Lacl of logical thought. Impulsive and undisciplined mind. Mistakes his dreams for reality."... The first thing Willy Bost does when he is alone in his room is to write down in his notebook everything that has happened... Now he needs a notebook to write down everything that happens. The threads become untangled as he writes. Willy Bost feels great pleasure in writing. His style is growing more sure. he is learning to master his style... The reason he came to San Rosa, and he trembles to think of it, might be finally to become the master, rather than remaining the slave who rebels because no one respects his merits and no one takes account of him. And he is becoming the master through this notebook, which he can no longer do without... When he goes back to the shooting range, it will be to erase his shame. He has not given up... He has only one desire, to take her like he took her in the cabin on the Moby Dick. He moans even louder inside her. It is so intense that he can't leave without starting over again, until he can't anymore. Gina Koll is one of those women he can't resist because they predict his desires and fulfill them without holding back. But when he leaves her he has learned nothing. What she knows she won't tell. Now that he has had all he desired of her, to the point of feeling an emptiness worse than any nausea, he is determined to never see her again... Like an innocent child, he has fallen into her trap... They had never spoken of the past, as if it did not exist... In memory of Mattie and their meeting at Angel Cove, she swears to do everything in her power never again to be the victim of the past and never again to be the victim of her enemies... Of all of them, he is the greatest victim, because he had to live in pain and remorse, with no hope of salvation... She no longer feels anything of the great love she once had for him. How everything has changed!... Her songs are the weapons she made for herself, all alone, so that she would no longer be afraid... They are willing to be moved, but they don't want to hear about what they don't want to know... He is as talkative about his film as about the volcano. He will show San Rosa as it has never before been sen. There will be no professional actors and no script in his film. The actors will be the people of san Rosa and the story will be their stories. But because of the way the film is shot and edited, no one will recognize them. He does not tell Cassy Mac Key about the films he as already made. She thinks that he doesn't talk about them because he wants to forget them... It is as if he were waiting for her. She undresses without a word. She is trembling she is so afraid... The next morning, when she wakes up in her room, she tries to remember what happened during the night with Willy Bost. Because of the marks on her body, she is sure she wasn't dreaming... Why didn't he simply love her instead of feeling this devouring passion for her?... It is a message of love. On the way back to San Rosa, he understands that his passion prevented him from loving, and that passion is love's greatest enemy... He has suddenly developed a personal ambition and wants to have a destiny... He does not want the force of logic to replace the truth of facts... Locked in his office, he writes as if he has never written before, in a constant stream, without taking his eyes off the paper. For the first time, he is writing an article, and he will sign it with his own name. He has finally become Commander Roney Burke... Then he will love her as he was never able to love her, as if it were the first time... For the people of San Rosa, overwhelmed by what they have just seen and heard, it is as if the earth were opening up before them... To Stive Lenz, who has been filming all of this first night of the campaign, it is a historic evening... What hope is left?... Willy Bost has nothing left to wait for... By stealing his notebook, Gina Koll has forced him to write the book that he never wanted to write, for fear that it would take him where he never wanted to go, the Santa Flor camp where his parents had disappeared forever... Since the other night, she has been haunted by Willy Bost and can no longer sleep... Now he understands what he had not understood... They no longer believe that anything will ever change for the better. They see only the worst before them... What makes his book so difficult to write is that it is a book of memories written in the absence of memories. He invents his memories as he writes. But the more he writes, the more he discovers that he knows nothing... Each time he throws away what he has written, he doubts that he can go on. But he starts again. He sees no other meaning he might give to his life than to bear witness to what no one wants to know... They could love each other there at the edge of the volcano, but something keeps them from it. They stayed for a long time pressed up against each other looking at the crater, thinking of nothing...
Now it has a name, the Nevermore. It was Willy Bost who came up with the idea, from the title he wants to give his book, if he ever manages to write it: Nevermore. Work has begun on the Nevermore... Willy Bost is sitting alone, in the last row. Everything seems unreal to him, even the Nevermore. As if he were deaf, he can't listen to Cassy Mac Key's new songs, and he has a dark veil over his eyes when Lizzie Malik does her act with Livio. He is thinking about his book, which he no longer believes in. The truth about San Rosa, like the trust about Santa Flor, escapes him. He has the impression that his words lead to nothing but a black hole in which he is lost. How could he have hoped he would succeed, when he has never been able to finish what he began? Now he knows that it is not only the fault of those in High Places. It is the fault of his central collapse, into which he sinks every time... It is as if the end of the world had come... At the same moment, the volcano finally reawakes and launches is own fireworks toward the heavens, while lava flows down the slopes of the volcano, burning everything in its path... Stive Lenz is running from place to place filming everything he sees, as if this were one of Tony Landry's blockbusters. Sirens from fire trucks and special service cars are blaring everywhere... He has given up on finishing his book and wants to forget everything... Even if she sings to a very small crowd, it is a real crowd... For the first time since she was released from prison, she is not ashamed, and she feels freed from the past. She is keeping the promise she made the day Mattie was buried. The hardest thing for her is not to think about Willy Bost, from whom she has heard nothing. His absence possesses her despite herself, even when she is singing... Culture... will be a decisive weapon in this combat. Culture must be a duty for each of us and the right of all... A new career is beginning for him... For her, it is not so easy to begin life anew... What she herself is lacking is an inheritance and a memory. That was what brought her so close to Willy Bost. He has no inheritance either, and his memory is the lsot memory of the Santa Flor Camp. Singing every night at the Nevermore is her only reason to live, and yet it is no longer enough...
At the very end of this very deep grotto, there is an extraordinary sight, the complete skeleton of an enormous whale. The whale must have come there to die, as if that were the cemetary it had chosen... Some days when she feels very sad, she tells herself that she could go to sleep there near the whale, and never wake up... Cassy Mac Key is the first to break the silence. She tells Willy Bost that she has something to show him. They dive together down to the grotto. She leads him to the very end, to the skeleto of the whale. They stay for a long time, motionless and silent, looking at it.
A few days later, the Mangor was discovered drifting in the middle of the reefs. There was no one on board. As for Cassy Mac Key, she never reappeared at the Nevermore. We will never know what happened between Cassy Mac Key and Willy Bost in the grotto. Ever since Mattie's death, Angel Cove has become a cursed place, which everyone wants to forget, and where no one ever goes.
14) Tonight I talked about the writing machine with O and O2 and M. We went back to my place after the opening and did coke, drank beer and wine. The coke is better right now because of the service K referred me to. Tomorrow, I'll refer O and we'll mutually benefit from it, while opening up the risk of possible externalities. I've been doing a lot of drugs lately. Partially because of my supply, partially because of the circumstances of life. I was explaining it tonight, the lump in my neck that the doctor told me not to worry about, that I was quite worried about before, where I was constantly thinking of death. The situation with P, the most minor of heartbreaks that wasn't so much about her but about the opening of the heart, or rather the attempt to do so, but also the vicissitudes that accompany a crush, the sort of return to a steadier state once it's ceased — the heartbreak of the general inability to form crushes without the crutch of text and distance. I talked about N telling me I need someone on my level. I'm still ghosting C because I don't know what we'd talk about if we got drinks and I don't want to play the character of interesting artist type. There is the trap of my job, what it does to my head, how I have to perform a role there. The world at large. On Wednesday I will play a DJ set as Classic Selena to celebrate the release of L's album I Don't Have That Problem. I suppose these are my problems right now. There is also the problem of the machine, and the problems of art — the problems of the text to work through. My inclination is to call that a different set of problems. Another inclination follows, to investigate this idea of sets. Set Theory remains a signifier to me, I cannot do math Like That.
But tonight I did coke with O and M, I don't think O2 did any of the coke. We talked a lot. It was a good conversation. I talked about the walls I feel while trying to talk to N about certain things, how those things bleed into art, and our mutual understandings of our respective projects. But we talked about the good in his work, and in T's work, and now I am listening to a piece from 2 years ago which I haven't listened to in some time. It is tremendously beautiful, and I think the issues I have are justified and make sense, and I think this tension is good. I believe O said as much too. I talked a lot. O talked a lot. M didn't talk as much. O2 talked some. Talk about hope. Talk about suicide. Talk about purpose. Talk about the present. Talk about the future. Songs called Talk in my library — Unpacking my Library (O said N2 had never heard of The Arcades Project; I was talking about The Arcades Project and Balzac to H at the opening and she told me to swing by the bookstore she works at tomorrow, while I go to galleries in Chelsea — the ease of the tangent, the prison of linear language, the stalled plan to map the Arcades Project into a spatialized view, how the Mnemosyne Atlas functions, the cascade continues, I must stop this flow) — Talk by Yeat, Talk (feat. Lil Baby) by Skrilla, Talk 2 God by Yeat, Talk 2 Me by DJ Nate, Talk Facts by Dthang, Bando Gz, & T Dot, Talk is Cheap! by Autumn!, Talk by Ishhh (feat. Kobe) by Dj Crazy, Talk My Shit by Bossman Dlow, Talk My Shit by Fetty Wap, Talk My Shit by PGF Nuk, Talk of Da Ghetto by Wiley, Talk of the Town by Nino Paid & HavinMotion, Talk of the Town by RealYungPhil & Gud, Talk Shit Like a Preacher by Future, Talk That 2020 by BandGang Lonnie Bands, Talk That 2024 by BandGang Lonnie Bands (remember Lonnie Bands as one of the pre-eminent diarists in the face of so much loss and pain in that window) — N worked from that gorgeous section of Lil Keed and the piano into World of T-Shirts and O and I were talking about how we works, how he thinks about the texts, but also his restraint and his discipline in composing, his ability to sample these sorts of texts in an incredible way, how World of T-Shirts says I'm trying to figure out where the ground ends and the lake begins as the strings pick up — I don't know the sample, nor does Shazam — but there is a buried memory that is slightly excavated, of writing those words before while listening to that passage, perhaps a tweet, which pulls me into the tide of thinking of both N and I's composed works of samples, where and how we pull from, how that moment of creating such compositions has faded, transformed, how the reception of our compositions bleeds into the production of our works now — Talk This Way by EBK Jaaybo (recently freed), Talk To Da Dead by Leaf Ward (incarcerated for at least 5 years I believe), Talk To God by Chicken P (has gone Up since being freed — that one line on Bussabrick Vol. 2: Fifteen thousand dollar bond you ever pay for your freedom — and the transformation of his texts since, how Capital has shaped them), Talk To God by Super Throwed Dave, Talk to Me by Skillibeng, Talk to Me (feat. Drake) by Drakeo the Ruler (RIP), TALK TO ME NICE (feat. Quavo) by Lil Yachty, Talk to the Doctor by Randy Newman, Talk to Ya by Rich Homie Quan (RIP), Talk To You (feat. Hone$t) by Cash Cobain, Talk Trash by Landmark 205, Talk Wit God (feat. $Amaad) by Osyris Israel, A Talk with Vlad by Zelly ocho, Talkin the Hardest by Giggs, Talkin Wet by Rio Da Yung Og & RMC Mike, Talking (feat. Aidan Swank) by Tek Lintowe, Talking 2 A Ghost by OsamaSon, Talking Out (Feat. MoneyBagzBuzz) by EBK Young Joc, Talking Stage by lilic, TALKING TO A WALL (feat. Harto Falión) by evilgiane, talking to joejoe by frankie cosmos, Talking to My Dad by Lil B (something I need to do tomorrow, Talking World War III Blues by Bob Dylan. Not every Talk was named and I am trying to recall the purpose. The cascade. There were questions of purpose tonight. I tried to explain as best as I could. As best as I could, yet still incoherent, incomplete, on the verge of, not all the same, the precision of language, trying to wield it. When I would write so much, I would repeat what I had written in conversations. And then if people would read them later, they would think about how much sense it made, where the cogency stemmed from — J remarked on this when she gave the book back to me. I talked about how that time had ended, and talking about how that time had ended, along with sending this most recent iteration to O reopened the opportunity for what the machine could achieve. A call and response. A relationality of data and discourse. What will we do, in light of all that there is to be done? I scroll up and remember: I was unpacking my library.
15) I am waiting until I am tired enough to fall asleep. I am settling into the idea of this diary again, and the purpose that it can serve me. And I am thinking about what I want to inscribe in a manner that I don't think existed before. I am searching for a moment to pinpoint since the last entry, that would be helpful to probe. There's a general sequence of events but I've already inscribed those elsewhere — there doesn't seem much of a reason to inscribe them here. An alternative, short version: tonight I went to a party with my friends and we talked and played music and danced and took pictures and made a music video. It can be that simple, that short, with omission functioning in an alternative way. Not trying to be this cascade of memory, but to be a minor record of an event, that shapes a certain thing. It is the morning now, but once I sleep and wake up again I can transcribe from the Blanchot. And I can attempt to recount yesterday's dream, which surely will have faded some, and I will be recounting the recountings I told to J and I told to L. It was a dense dream. There is so much to write about.
16) One can imagine the most trivial circumstance as the starting point of a great work; nothing is compromised by that triviality: the act by which the author makes it into a crucial circumstance is enough to incorporate it into his genius and his work... Every work is an occasional work: this simply means that each work has a beginning, that it begins at a certain moment in time and that that moment in time is part of the work, since without it the work would have been only an insurmountable problem, nothing more than the impossibility of writing it.
Let us suppose that the work has been written: with it the writer is born. Before, there was no one to write it; starting from the book, an author exists and merges with his book... What is written is neither well nor badly written, neither important nor frivolous, memorable nor forgettable: it is the perfect act through which what was nothing when it was inside emerges into the monumental reality of the outside as something which is necessarily true, as a translation which is necessarily faithful, since the person it translates exists only through it and in it. One could say that this certainty is in some sense the writer's inner paradise and that automatic writing has only been one way of making this golden age real — what Hegel calls the pure joy of passing from the night of possibility into the daytime of presence...
Because the reader has no use for a work written for him, what he wants is precisely an alien work in which he can discover something unknown, a different reality, a separate mind capable of transforming him and which he can transform into himself. An author who is writing specifically for a public is not really writing: it is the public who is writing, and for this reason the public cano longer be a reader; reading only appears to exist, actually it is nothing. This is why works created to be read are meaningless: no one reads them. This is why it is dangerous to write for other people, in order to evoke the speech of others and reveal them to themselves: the fact is that other people do not want to hear their own voices; they want to hear someone else's voice, a voice that is real, profound, troubling like the truth.
17) S asked me for a link to a mix that didn't exist. It was not recorded. I sent links to sounds and images to try to reconstruct the night. A dancehall remix of Take Care was marked by the xx guitar riff for her; different memories and associations in relation to place and time. Someone commented on a Chicken P fast mix I made (Rollin), so I looked at the top listeners profiles and found a song: sturdyyoungin - Freestyle pt.2 Ft Mizz, GE3Z & Bril. It samples DJ Nate's May Be Sum Day. I've been listening to both on repeat all day — different memories and associations in relation to place and time. Chicago. New York. Paris. I Wud If I Cud But I Can’t So I Ain’t
18) After the album release moment L asked if I was interested in doing something at Earth. It was at a bar, maybe after 2, I was drunk and still a bit CK'd, and I suggested a play, The Old Masters, that I had talked with A about staging a table read of, which stalled out immediately after the idea came to be. No reason for it, too many things in our lives. I suggested other things too, but it had a sticking effect, and I voiced my other qualms, and then I got on the Ridgewood bus. He texted me the next morning and then we texted more. We made plans to talk about it at T's show on Friday but there wasn't really enough time, nor was it the space. So we hit E-Chiban on Sunday. They brought out the sushi boat. And it was a good talk, nothing super fixed, but the potentials for possibilities were opened up. More plans were made — to see the Anne Imhof piece at the Park Armory being the immediate one.
In the time since, I've gone back into the obsessive research mode that I can be prone to get into. I explained this to L and I'm sure he could already tell it would be like this, at least to some extent. It's the reason why I can be so encyclopedic to people, and also why the web of signifiers would make such a place as Earth fraught to me, whereas when I mentioned it to J he had never heard of it. Which is nice, because now I can enter into a headspace that mostly focuses on The Work being The Work, without getting as mired within the bounds of site, audience, reception, the Public. Writing as a means to manipulate reality — not in the sense of mediated dominoes, but the reality of myself as I write this writing, and the the reality of the room it takes place. I am attempting to be wary of hijacking, though I'm sure if it isn't the direction L wants he'll let me know. The music he sent me is really exciting. I've been living with it, thinking with it, writing with it — writing in a new sort of way, filming my computer with my phone, the sound playing off the computer speakers. Writing without typing, although there are words, words-as-images.
There are a number of elements I am thinking about. My reason for typing right now is to think through them, to think through their purpose. Perhaps the main thing I am thinking about is a plexiglass structure, similar to that of Dan Graham, and also works by Richter, Imhof, and Dean. I'm interested in what that sort of constructed architectural object would do to the space — familiarization/defamiliarization, opacity/transparency, boundaries. I'm interested in the parody aspects of it as well — I found the way Imhof puts graffiti on hers to be extremely funny. I wrote about graffiti in response to SR's email to me in the summer. He recently sent me some graffiti from Brazil. I don't think the piece I am trying to write is "about graffiti", nor do I think it is "about parody", though I am thinking heavily about parodying Imhof and Rivette, the former with a sense of serious humor, the latter with a sense of reverence.
As such with my obsessiveness I go down rabbit holes. Today's was about Helmut Lang in relation to Balenciaga, Austria (and Austro-Hungary) in relation to Germany, with Bernhard popping in, Richter popping in, a Celine show with a Dan Graham piece popping in, a fragment I wrote about L's performance and Hungary and Germany popping in. As I make the "writing" videos, I am thinking about them as both exercises and source material — works to be adapted into a script / set of instructions. Similar to Bruno Dumont writing novels to adapt into films. I have thought about how this might be a time to write a novella — I was thinking that while reading Blanchot's "Literature and the Right to Death" and making my underlines. That now I might have enough momentum, or rather than momentum occasion, to author such a work. As it could be incorporated into the thing. There is so much bubbling around, and almost all of it will get stripped away. There is too much, and not enough time. But small traces will be left from this process.
One of the other major texts I've been re-working through, that folds itself into these videos, is Washington, which deals with the problems of producing work and its reception. But it also seems pertinent because L also has a relation to Washington. Right now things are murky, but there are ideas. My means will probably settle much of them into place. As will more conversations with L about how he wants his music to function, more about what he's thinking, since I have dominated the Are.na, and seeing the Imhof. But now things have been thought through and typed through, in some capacity. Soon they'll be spoken through.
19) It's strange only doing C+K. My stomach is rumbling. And there is a sort of disconnect — the stimulant pushing forward text production, the dissociative making the mechanisms feel foreign. I was sober at Earth. I was sober at the River. Line of K in the Dr. Clark bathroom w/ a little C. I saw C at Earth, gave him a bump, he offered me an opening slot at a rave. Told me he'd message me on Instagram but I'm not on instagram right now. He'll forget. In the line for the bathroom with K — she was using Instagram for safari, we talked about how I deactivate, I have to deactivate because I still have other log-ins, it's not about deleting the app, it's about the flow of information. And also being tethered. I had a phone tonight and then it died. In the Uber to C2 and M's party, everyone went to Brown except me. L living in midtown godmother apartment, must be nice no stress life. This girl A overhears my conversation with I about Contemporary Art Letterboxd — I decide not to cook after talking it over with I. I wonder how drunk she was, if she'll remember or forget. If I'm cooking that with someone from Brown it's I and A2. But in any case. Institutions. The Brown Uber. The Bards of The River. People who asked for things tonight: C, was fiending for C, T, did deduction after I talked about being Berlin Sober and doing accents with him and M2, hung out in the Dr. Clark's bathroom, threw a few off the hand, N inside the barn doors of The River before I said my au revoir, too turnt, needed some more, his night, his party, good party as far as the conditions go, and I will be running into such conditions soon as well.
I suppose what I am trying to grapple with is how little happened. Even the linear approach. Saw A3 en route to N's performance which we missed. Found out after seeing O outside walking back to her place. She said M3 was there, but I saw M4 before him, eventually they got together as well. I saw H and talked to her for a bit, I met E in person for the first time, I don't know if she knew who I was online. Talked to D. Talked to N. Talked to D2. This could go on and on. It all stayed quite surface level. People were talking while the bands were playing. The music was not the primary thing, but the ritual of watching a performance was still feigned. I'm curious for what it will be like for the play A3 is in tomorrow. I feel like the only conversation I had all night was with C3 at C2's party, about hair and hairlines, images and appearances, aging and its inevitability.
In the car I was thinking about what I'm Built Like. the ways in which one can be Built Different.
20) The dominant feeling, the reason I've been getting so high, is that I feel that much of my life has been a vacancy, that where the primacy is supposed to be, there is only absence. This absence cannot and will never be filled. And thus, I preemptively empty structure the future such that it will remain as absent as the past, all the while ensuring that the absence's of the past remain both forgotten and apathetically held. The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble - not for the sake of rubble, but for that of the way leading through it. The destructive character lives from the feeling not that life is worthing living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.I put my bags inside of my bag, inside of another bag. That bag belongs in a box with a latch that I closed and placed on the top second from the top on the cart in my room. I am attempting to make a resolution. My other resolution has held steadfast.
21) I return to this cascade, to the illusion of progress it provides. Perhaps it is not progress, but volume, production. I looked at my most recent collection of watercolors and ink drawings. That is what they are, drawings. I am not attempting to paint, and the scale of these works are humble. They are within a book. They are pages that one turns. This too, this cascade, will end up a book, of words and images in a series of pages to turn. And my attention turns to scale, to attempts, to essais. To things done already, and the things that must be done. Right now I am struggling in a way that I haven't struggled before. It is an honest struggle. One that will continue. Elsewhere I wrote deciding to end the war I have been having w/ Myself — words that I must make true. There are matters of being and becoming, of wrestling with the self, but this war, this series of poisons I've been inflicting upon myself must come to a close.
At dinner with J I said I wanted to leave. That I have been here too long without leaving. I also spoke of the stagnation I feel, and there is a relation: this leaving and wandering and moving to avoid stagnation, akin to the production of text for the sake of production. Leaving would mean more text, leaving would mean an increase in production. And I tether myself to this production. There are parts of this production, of this life an artist, feeling necessary, because I do not have a world otherwise. There is no other place for me but placelessness, this is no other place for this placelessness but art. Or philosophy, Novalis, the threads connect, the warp, the weft, the weeping. I turn the page, I make another gesture, another motion. I record another attempt.
And then? I read about the lives of Perec, Blanchot, Derrida — what they inherited from their Europes (and Africa) of the 20th century, how all I have inherited is a lack of place. Yet my struggle still feels so great.
Nightlife is a beautiful compound word. Etymology functions differently with compound words — it seems as though Melville was the first to use the word in 1852: “All the garish night-life of a vast thoroughfare, crowded and wedged by day, and even now, at this late hour, brilliant with occasional illuminations.” This was in Pierre; or The Ambiguities, a book that I do not have the time to read right now. I have been accumulating books that I do not have the time to read, or rather accumulating links for them.
The first chapter of The Landscape of Events focuses on night and light. Once it became possible for the night to be lit, time changed. With it, language changed — many compound words with 'night-' were born.
The thing about Secret Defense is that you actually find out “the secret” unlike the other Rivettes which move about the secret, where the secret is fundamentally unknowable. The secret in Secret Defense is not unknowable but unspeakable — no one is able to utter the secret in its entirety. Which is the cause of Sylvie’s death. The impossibility of speaking the secret is the cause of the film’s final death.
The impossibility of speaking the secret is the cause of the film’s first (on-screen) death. The final death that preceded the commencement of filming, the last death before the initial cut, is not the secret. The death is known. As is the first death before the initial cut. After the death[s], the authorities assemble the evidence in order to create a reconstruction of the events. The reconstruction leads to a judgement, a cause of death is assigned. This cause is not the secret, nor part of the secret, but the veracity of the cause is. Only truth is not a binary, but a spectrum, or rather a topological space, where true and false do not represent fixed points but rather regions whose boundaries remain indeterminate — truth values exist in relation to one another within this space but cannot be assigned definite positions or topoi; true and false mark distinctions that dance about points rather than being definable locations. J.D: There is in every poetic text, just as in every utterance, in every manifestation outside of literature, an inaccessible secret to which no proof will ever be adequate… ‘One will never be able to prove that someone has lied.’
veracity (n.) 1620s, of persons, “habitual truthfulness;” from French véracité (17c.), from Medieval Latin veracitatem (nominative veracitas) “truthfulness,” from Latin verax (genitive veracis) “truthful,” from verus “true” (from PIE root *were-o- “true, trustworthy”). By 1660s as “fact or character of being true.”
Curiously, the first death strikes Véronique, who goes by Vero, whose name comes not from verus or were-o but from the Greek, from Berenike, goddess of Victory, rendered into Latin as Berenice. And Vero, this embodiment of a misheard truth, is replaced by a double. It is the double that pulls the trigger. Sylvie dies at the hands of near-truth’s double, hands which have pulled the trigger of Paul’s gun.
One can retrace the sequence of fallen dominoes the lead to this final death, a final death that is a reversal of the first death. The movement swings back and forth, like an idealized Newton’s cradle. Science functions as a fundamental staging device, with action migrating between the laboratory and properties purchased through the wealth of Pax Industries, the weapons company Sylvie’s father ran with Walser. A final etymological concern: that Pax is latin for peace, that the first domino fell for peace. And with it, a cemetery was borne.
I think it's good that I'm not getting geeked up rn because I really want to get geeked up rn. Last night I started two oil paintings that I plan on working on for a long time. I struggle with this — working on the same thing for a long a time. This morning I read Romeo and Juliet on the train and felt delirious. The biting of thumbs and accusations of quarrels felt like gang signs and calls to squabble up, the sort of approximation of language where you lack a precision of meaning towards each individual part, but can intuitively understand the whole — flu flamming, coals/colliers/cholers. Like we know the truth, like language living and dying, everything feels so foreign and I don't know when I'll be able to leave. I realized I want to leave because time works differently here and I desire the illusion of manipulating time. Which is part of the desire to get geeked up — to manipulate reality, writing of the holiest purpose, et cetera and so on. The track loops. I'm like Giannis. Bitch I need Bucks.
Really it's just this same feeling of nowhereness, and a lack of belonging. It's unfortunate because drugs do solve those problems in the short term. I have so much to do. That's what I do, give myself things to do, tasks to accomplish. It's not the boulder up the hill, but something else, movement around the map, writing the map, making the map. I'm hoping that I can feel something soon. The crisis will pass and there will be another crisis. Elsewhere I wrote that soon I would feel good, but now I'm not so sure. I would like to turn everything off, if only that were possible, but it is possible.
The interest of the diary is its insignificance. That is its inclination, its law. To write every day, under the warranty of just this day, and to remind it of itself, is a convenient way of escaping both silence and the extravagance of speech. Each day tells us something different. Each day noted down is a preserved day. Doubly advantageous operation. We live twice.
"The diary in the beginning represented for me the supreme recourse to escape total despair confronting the act of writing," and also "The curious thing in my case is how little I have the feeling of living whe my diary accumulates only its deposit."
Down there, in The Waves, roars the risk of a work in which one has to disappear. Down there, in the space of the work, everything is lost and perhaps the work too is lost. The diary is the anchor that scrapes against the bottom of the day-to-day and clings to the roughness of vanity.
Someone does nothing in his life but writes that he does nothing, and there, all of a sudden, something is done.
... finally the hope, by uniting the insignificance of life with the nonexistence of the work, to raise null life up to the beautiful surprise of art, and formless art to the unique truth of life — the interlacing of all these various motives makes the diary an undertaking of redemption: one writes to save writing, to save one's life by writing, to save one's little self (the revenges one takes on others, the nastiness one distills) or to save one's great self by giving it scope, and then one writes in order not to be lost in the poverty of the days or, like Virginia Woolf, like Delacroix, in order not to be lost in this ordeal that is art that is in the limitless demand of art.
One writes to save the days, but one entrusts one's salvation to writing, which changes the day.
The diary linked to the strange conviction that one can observe oneself and that one must know oneself. But Socrates did not write.
It is tempting for the writer to try to keep a journal of the work he is writing. Is it possible?... To question oneself on one's projects, weigh them, verify them; as they develop, to comment on them, for oneself — that does not seem difficult. Doesn't the critic who, as they say, is a second creator, have his word to say? Can't this word take the form of a ship's log, in which from day to day the fortunes and blunders of navigation can be inscribed? And yet such a book does not exist. It seems that the experience unique to the work, the vision by which it begins, "the sort of wandering" that it provokes, and the unusual relationships it establishes between the man we meet every day and who carefully keeps a journal of himself and the being we see rise up behind each great work, the relationship between the work and the act of writing it, as between Isidore Ducasse and Lautréamont, must remain incommunicable.
We see why the writer can keep the diary only of the work that he does not write. We see, too, that this diary can be written only by becoming imaginary and by immerseing itself, like the the one who writes it, in the unreality of fiction.
We also feel that these fragments constitute the anonymous, obscure traces of the book that is trying to be realized, but only insofar as they do not have a visible connection with the life from which they seem to come, nor with the work to which they form the approach.
For the edges of a secret are more secret than the secret itself.
It's not that this is the most depressed that I've ever been so much as that it's impossible to remember past depressions, just as it's impossible to remember past highs, the precision of what it felt like is lacking in a significant way and my memories of memories seem to be forming into this muddy mass of gray. But also that I've cut myself off from the short-term escape routes, and have to wander the passageways until I find some sort of change in the geography.
