#a book about hell

[litteraeignotae]

[dreamofmourning]

still thinking this over .. truer texts-within-texts, or more specifically, imaginary first-person narrations of a subject that exist within third-person narrations of that same subject (and center the unknownness of that subject). "Behind most secondary first-person novels, then, is a first-person novel that could not have been written effectively, if at all, in that mode" but crucially, that the demand for THAT text to be the one produced instead of this one is still there

[elanormcinerney]

Alice Notley | The Formal Skirt | Alma, or The Dead Women

Ingeborg Bachmann | A Step Towards Gomorrah | The Thirtieth Year

Alice Notley | Discredited | Alma, or The Dead Women

Anne Carson | An Oresteia | Orestes by Euripides

Ingeborg Bachmann | A Step Towards Gomorrah | The Thirtieth Year

Alice Notley | Your Man Mara | Alma, or The Dead Women

[dreamofmourning]

jude's story he tells to willem in the closet that we hear nothing of, and the written confession he leaves for harold that we also get nothing of, "that book about hell is not this one, or not entirely"

[dreamofmourning]

to return to the same scene for the millionth time, when chade tells fitz there's a legend now that his childhood bedroom is haunted, what kills me is not only that the legend partially started because chade kept that room empty all those years (the room therefore haunted by chade's desire for the child fitz that can never return), or that a ghost haunting the room would be far more benign than what chade was really doing there all throughout fitz's childhood, but that the legend was started because a stableboy saw the pocked man one night in the bedroom window. LIKE, this extremely closely guarded secret, of what fitz's bedroom connected to and who was there and what he was doing, is for a split second (and decades too late) made partly visible—and the witness creates from that brief knowledge a supernatural explanation, instead of the very mundane truth. it would be easier to believe in the ghost than to believe the actual story of fitz's life! and then on the other hand, scant as it is it does still eternalize a truer knowledge than has ever existed before: that man, at least once, was in the room where that child lived

[dreamofmourning]

( ) — PAGE RIPPED OUT I… I… I… I… [scream] [scream] but that book about hell is not this one *page intentionally left blank* something something something something

[dreamofmourning]

[dreamofmourning]

You understand, my inflammatory letters, my inflammatory appeals, my inflammatory stance, this entire fire I have put on paper with my burned hand—

Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina tr. Philip Boehm

But it occurs to me that I was noted for my endurance of pain. For my ability to hold my hand over the flame longer than anyone else, without grimacing, without crying.

Christa Wolf, Cassandra tr. Jan van Heurck

I can’t just speak and say nothing. That’s how we lose ourselves, the poem and I, in the hopeless attempt to write the things that burn.

Alejandra Pizarnik, “Cornerstone” tr. Yvette Siegert