Isolde

[mournfulroses]

Clarice Lispector, from her novel titled "The Passion According to G. H.," originally published in 1964

[a-h-mad-hish]

"You will never find the limits of forgetting, no matter how far you may be able to forget."

Maurice Blanchot, from “Awaiting Oblivion”

[feignedremote]

Memory says of the event: it once was and now it will never be again. The irremediable character of what has no present, of what is not even there as having once been there, says: it never happened, never for a first time, and yet it starts over, again, again, infinitely. It is without end, without beginning. It is without a future.

Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock

[thirdity]

“And there is no question that we are preoccupied by dying. But why? It is because when we die, we leave behind not only the world but also death. That is the paradox of the last hour. Death works with us in the world; it is a power that humanizes nature, that raises existence to being, and it is within each one of us as our most human quality; it is death only in the world — man only knows death because he is man, and he is only man because he is death in the process of becoming. But to die is to shatter the world; it is the loss of person, the annihilation of the being; and so it is also the loss of death, the loss of what in it and for me made it death. As long as I live, I am a mortal man, but when I die, by ceasing to be man I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death, but the impossibility of dying.”

— Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Poetic Outlaws :: @OutlawsPoetic

* * * *

“It's no good closing your eyes, you must leave them open in the dark, that is my opinion. I am not speaking of sleep, I am speaking of what I believe is called waking.”

—Samuel Beckett

[onenakedfarmer]

SAMUEL BECKETT "Texts For Nothing"

Yes, I was my father and I was my son, I asked myself questions and answered as best I could, I had it told to me evening after evening, the same old story I knew by heart and couldn’t believe, or we walked together, hand in hand, silent, sunk in our worlds, each in his worlds, the hands forgotten in each other. That’s how I’ve held out till now.

And this evening again it seems to be working, I’m in my arms, I’m holding myself in my arms, without much tenderness, but faithfully, faithfully. Sleep now, as under that ancient lamp, all twined together, tired out with so much talking, so much listening, so much toil and play.

[89rooms]

I can no longer speak my name. It has been a long time since I no longer can. I am not able to articulate it. I stammer desperately each time the question is asked of me, also people almost always ask me to repeat it. For me it is something unbearable. I feel as though I must extract it from the depths of myself, like spit. I flay myself, I am raw. And also often, I am naked, shameful, guilty. Why am I disarmed thus. My name. I often find it strange that it is precisely this word that I can no longer pronounce. Is it by chance. Who knows.

Danielle Collobert - ‘Murder’

[lapassionbeatrice]

Simone Weil, Waiting for God

[petaltexturedskies]

The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.

Marguerite Duras, The Lover

[mothwood]

To the extent that we hold our gaze still, things move. Thought, as well, exists only with regard to a halt which is empty. Joë Bousquet wrote, this paralysis has carved a hole in space. To write is to carve that hole in space. Everything takes off from immobility, from the effort of attention that is also a corporeal effort…a matter of knowing when to stop, of starting out aware that there is no beginning. Writing is a craft of ignorance.

silence is a form.

— Claude Royet-Journoud (trans. Keith Waldrop), The Whole of Poetry is Proposition 

[loneberry]

This itching in the wings, in the absence of the beloved, is a violent pain: The channels through which the wings push up are dried up and closed and hinder the growth of the wing. What is inside them, full of desire but closed in, beats like a pulse in an inflamed sore; it pierces these channels like a needle. Thus the whole soul everywhere is stung (κεντουμένη) as if bitten by a gadfly and tortured. At the same time, having the memory of beauty, it is full of joy. [When it sees the beautiful, the part where the wings are pushing is soothed], it has a respite from the prickings and the tortures, and tastes for a time the sweetest of delights.  —Plato's Phaedrus, quoted in "God in Plato," Simone Weil's fragmentary notes on Plato. Weil: “The soul recovers a memory of the god that it followed above and whose image it sees in the beloved. ... The lover tries to make the beloved as much like this god whose memory he has found again as possible, and when the beloved responds to this love, there is established between the two of them a friendship founded on a common participation in divine things.”

[queercodedangel]

"Some people have asked me what is the use of increasing possibilities for gender. I tend to answer: Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread. I think we should not underestimate what the thought of the possible does for those for whom the very issue of survival is most urgent. If the answer to the question, is life possible, is yes, that is surely something significant. It cannot, however, be taken for granted as the answer. That is a question whose answer is sometimes “no,” or one that has no ready answer, or one that bespeaks an ongoing agony. For many who can and do answer the question in the affirmative, that answer is hard won, if won at all, an accomplishment that is fundamentally conditioned by reality being structured or restructured in such a way that the affirmation becomes possible."

- Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

[noctilucents]

Why this sudden at-homeness, all-out, all-in? I can, look, sink myself into you, glacierlike, you yourself slay your brothers: earlier than they I was with you, Snowed One. Throw your tropes in with the rest: Someone wants to know, why with God I was no different than with you, someone wants to drown in that, two books instead of lungs, someone who stabbed himself into you, bebreathes the cut, someone, he was the one closest to you, gets lost to himself, someone adorns your sex with your and his betrayal, maybe I was both

[Why this sudden at-homeness], Paul Celan, trans. Pierre Joris

[noctilucents]

RIP Pierre Joris (14 July 1946 – 27 February 2025)

[hautaaja]

Forgetting, waiting. Waiting that assembles, disperses; forgetting that disperses, assembles. Waiting, forgetting. “Will you forget me?” — “Yes, I will?’ — “How will you be sure that you have forgotten me?” — “I will be sure when I remember another woman.” — “But I am still the one you will remember; I need more.” — “You will have more: I will be sure when I no longer remember myself.” She reflected on this idea, which appeared to please her. “Forgotten together. And who, then, will forget us? Who will be sure of us in forgetting?” — “The others, all the others!” — “But they don’t count. I couldn’t care less about being forgotten by the others. I want to be forgotten by you and you alone.” — “Well, then, I will be sure when you have forgotten me.” — “But,” she said sadly, “I have a feeling that I have forgotten you already.”

from Awaiting Oblivion by Maurice Blanchot

[hautaaja]

Suffering is suffering when one can no longer suffer it, and when, because of this non-power, one cannot cease suffering it. A singular situation. Time is as though arrested, merged with its interval. There, the present is without end, separated from every other present by an inexhaustible and empty infinite, the very infinite of suffering, and thus dispossessed of any future: a present without end and yet impossible as a present. The present of suffering is the abyss of the present, indefinitely hollowed out and in this hollowing indefinitely distended, radically alien to the possibility that one might be present to it through the mastery of presence.

from The Infinite Conversation by Maurice Blanchot

[wishicouldcrossthesea]

A man drinks a glass of water. The water is God's "I love you". He is two days in the desert without finding anything to drink. The dryness in his throat is God's "I love you". God is like an importunate woman who clings to her lover, whispering in his ear for hours without stopping: "I love you- I love you- I love you- I love you..."

Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, trans. Richard Rees

[mournfulroses]

Clarice Lispector, from "Too Much of Life Complete Chronicles," publ. in 2022