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.
