The End of Beauty

Documents & Failures

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Jan van Kessel the Elder. A Cockchafer Beetle, and Woodlice--other Insects, with a Sprig of Auricula. c. 1650s.

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Etel Adnan. Untitled. Oil on canvas, 24 x 30 cm. 2010.

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Thinking helps the flowering of the body . . .

Etel Adnan. Sea and Fog. 2012.

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Jane Hammond. Sore Models Two. Oil on canvas with metal leaf, 88 x 81 in. 1994.

More from the John Ashbery collaboration here

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On pain and language

[F]or the person, in pain, so incontestably and unnegotiably present is it that “having pain” may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to “have certainty,” while for the other person it is so elusive that hearing about pain may exist as the primary mode of what it is “to have doubt.” Thus pain comes unshareably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed. Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unshareability, and it ensures this unshareability in part through its resistance to language . . . Prolonged pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned. 

Elaine Scarry. The Body in Pain. 1984.

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We saints have a score of music and as we sing some are "translated," that is disappear

Alice Notley. Mysteries of Small Houses. 1998

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We think and write for animals themselves. We become animal so that the animal also becomes something else. The agony of a rat or the slaughter of a calm remains present in thought not through pity but as the zone of exchange between man and animal in which something of one passes into the other. This is the constitutive relationship of philosophy with nonphilosophy.

Gilles Deleuxe and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? First appeared in French in 1991. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. Columbia University Press, 1994. 

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Sometimes you read something and a thought that was floating around in your veins organizes itself into the sentence that reflects it. This might also be a form of dreaming.

Claudia Rankine. Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. 2004.

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On trees

Trees are not extensions of the self but pure phenomena. Their time does not intersect with ours. They travel differently. They are cyclical, and envied for that. Their lives are not part of our tragic continuum; they have a lightness, a closeness to water, air or fire, all of their own.

Etel Adnan. Seasons. 2008.

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Judas Iscariot. Fresco. 16th century. Tarzhishte Monastery, Strupets, Bulgaria.

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I do not deny that I am inadequate. It is a call-out. A renewable source. Meanwhile the world is burning, language.

Freke Räihä. "Swedish Trees – a conceptual floræ. / Extracts of fruit:." Translated from the Swedish by the author. Asymptote, April 2011. 

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On "god"

. . . if God shocks the mind, it is because, conscious of its immense creative power, the mind cannot conceive of a superior, eminently inventive force upon which it would be dependent. It is as if, in a way, there had been an inversion of roles: man inventing God only in order to raise his own thought to the height of the unthinkable and to continuously widen the extent of his powers; the mind, by its very essence, being unable to accept what limits its creation. Humility does not belong to the domain of mind, but the domain of heart.

Edmond Jabès. From the Desert to the Book: Dialogues with Marcel Cohen. First published in French by 1980. Translated by Pierre Joris. Station Hill Press, 1990.

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Katherine Sandoz. After Julie Speed. Acrylic on somerset, 8.5 x 11 in. 2008.

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On the breathing gaze

. . . there is a gaze that empties itself of speech, of words, a breathing gaze, where surfaces and faces contract on the inhale, expand on the exhale, a breathing gaze, a blue pond, or a cow's eyeball, or, alternatively, you could simply bypass the visual by walking up to an eye and simply licking it, or a text, yes.

Christian Hawkey. Ventrakl. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010.

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Melanie Bonajo. La Foto. 

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what do you mean/ praise/ lament / praise and lament / what do you mean / do you mean / beatitudes

Geoffrey Hill. Canaan. 1996.

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On thinking

It is the law to think now. To think becomes the law, the dream of young and old alike moving together where the dark masses grow confused. We must drink the confusion, sample that other, concerted, dark effort that pushes not to the light, but toward a draft of dank, clammy air. We have broken through into the meaning of the tomb. But the act is still proposed, before us,

it needs pronouncing.

John Asbhery. Three Poems. 1972.