?!

Silence, mostly …

Authority? Don’t get me started …

There is a constant tussle between all the possibilities of human thought and between all the possibilities of a human mind’s sensitivity and between all the possibilities of a human character. – Thomas Bernhard, Walking – trans. Kenneth Northcott.

… “He said he had a voice once, a privileged one is what he said. He seemed anxious. I guess he was trying to work out which came first, the privilege or the voi…”

“… watched the blogosphere develop, lurking.  She claimed what she read on there, arts-wise, had inspired in her a profound sense of nausea. She didn’t look like she was kidding around either. She got this wild look in her eye, then grimaced and stared at me with a hatred so singular I had to look at my shoes …”

All is infected that the infected spy,
As all seems  yellow to the jaundiced eye.

Alexander Pope – An Essay On Criticism.

… all writing is like vomiting, really. Your mind’s muscle clenches, the words come out in a hot, desperate splurge, and you either feel better or worse afterwards (usually worse); sometimes, if you don’t feel better, you clench again, you have to barf again, and again - dare I say ad nauseam - until you’ve ralphed everywhere, blowing ideas in half-digested chunks all over your own personal ivory tower.

My tower, safe to say, is in dire need of a clean-up … seismic shifts in squalor; caught between tectonic plates: – trash, steaming piles of publicity material and books – many, many books - with titles like (glancing around) Works of Rabelais, Oblivion and The Hidden Journey: Melanoma Up Close And Personal …

* * *

Woman on the Tightrope

In her centre I could suspend my world, if I were not corrupted by academic learning. I could have used, misused her for my theories, taken her all the way, even before she became a possibility. For which both she and I lack the intelligence …

Thomas Bernhard, Amras – trans. Peter Jansen.

*  * *

… the problem is – the only way to clean your tower up is by hurling in a slightly different pattern, with bile fluid and distressing gobbets of regurgitate all cloying together in a manner that suggests slightly different stuff … I don’t know about you, but watching someone heaving their guts out makes me want to puke too …

It’s always like this. Even the best, spangled-with-eloquence, most maddeningly well-considered writing is this way …

***

What, in your view, is a conversation?

I don’t usually have them. To me people who want to have a conversation are suspect, because that raises particular expectations they’re unable to satisfy. Simple people are very good to talk with. When talking is supposed to become conversation, that’s when things get gruesome! That fine expression “everything under the sun.” It all gets thrown in together and then one person stirs this way, the other stirs that, and an unbearable stinking turd comes out the bottom. No matter who it is …

- from an Interview with Thomas Bernhard, 1986.

***

… Dialectic you say? Well, two’s company, but I rather think you knew what you were looking for in advance …

“A just decision is always required immediately, “right away”. It cannot furnish itself with infinite information and the unlimited knowledge of conditions, rules or hypothetical imperatives that could justify it. And even if it did have all that at its disposal, even if it did give itself the time, all the time and all the necessary facts about the matter, the moment of decision, as such, always remains a finite moment of urgency and precipitation, since it must not be the consequence or the effect of this theoretical or historical knowledge, of this reflection or this deliberation … that must precede it.”

– Jacques Derrida, The Force of Law.

… language is chunderous. Criticism? Art? They both depend on (a) what kind of violence you’re willing to inflict … (xxy) what you had for breakfast … Deadline? Such a misleading word – what a deadline really is is a kind of wound, self-inflicted or forced upon us …

If you’re still reading this, you might have a distinct urge to spew. Or perhaps you’re just a bit squeamish about when the next ellipsis is going to arrive … So, what did you have for breakfast? … Hnnnnnnhhhhhhh. I’m speculating …

… even though you’re dead to me, I admire your fortitude. Especially those last two pars: self-indulgent, completely vile … gross generalisation and annoying, circular facete; imagining (and speaking for) other people in front of them, etc … your gag reflex has become inverted, i.e. you can’t stop the technicoloured yawn without conscious thought …

***

… also this weird notion that you couldn’t actually show anyone anything in critical mode, you had to tell them. That’s mimesis bad, diegesis good, for you pointy-headed types. A repellent idea. It was partly why most criticism that came out of universities at the time was so apocalyptically stupid and boring no one wanted to read it

… ities were where art went to die; critics were undertakers. It was important to arrange the body with meticulous …

… You’ve never heard of Godel? Well that’s that about that … even mathematics has a burning fleck at the back of its throat … He killed himself, you know, starved himself to death more or less. Walled himself in his study … ties in with what I was saying before, about immurement as capital punishment … What’s a professor when she’s at home? …

***

If we hear something, says Oehler, on Wednesday we check what we have heard and we check what we have heard until we have to say that what we have heard is not true, what we have heard is a lie. If we see something, we check what we see until we are forced to say that what we are looking at is horrible. Thus throughout our lives we never escape from what is horrible and what is untrue, the lie, says Oehler. If we do something, we think about what we are doing until we are forced to say that it is something nasty, something low, something outrageous, what we are doing is something terribly hopeless and that what we are doing is in the nature of things obviously false. Thus every day becomes hell for us whether we like it or not, and what we think will, if we think about it, if we have the requisite coolness of intellect and acuity of intellect, always become something nasty, something low and superfluous which will depress us in the most shattering manner for the whole of our lives …

If our intellect is keen, if our thinking is the most ruthless and the most lucid, says Oehler, we are bound after the shortest space of time to say of everything that it is unbearable and horrible. There is no doubt that the art lies in bearing what is unbearable and in not feeling that what is horrible is something horrible …

The art of existing against the facts, says Oehler, is the most difficult, the art that is the most difficult. To exist against the facts means existing against what is unbearable and horrible, says Oehler. If we do not constantly exist against, but only constantly with the facts, says Oehler, we shall go under in the shortest possible space of time.

- Thomas Bernhard, Walking – trans. Kenneth Northcott.

1.d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. g3 d5 4. Bg2 dxc4 5. Nf3 Be7 … Aha! A Catalan.

Auto-save? Jesus …

Criticism as Hand-maiden to Art? No no no. Pope is cute, but we’re not in Kansas anymore. People with jaundice don’t see yellow, by the way, they just appear yellow to others … yes, terribly self-conscious … Criticism? Art? Dance partners, maybe, cannibals at the same feast …

… an asymptotic relationship …

… complete the following sequence:   … >.>   … <.<  … >.< …