The Shattered Notes

give me poison for death or dreams for life

[dyrkwyst]

TENSIONS

[one-divides-into-two]

“This love means an affirmative desire towards the Other – to respect the Other, to pay attention to the Other, not to destroy the otherness of the Other – and this is the preliminary affirmation, even if afterwards because of this love, you ask questions. There is some negativity in deconstruction. I wouldn’t deny this. You have to criticise, to ask questions, to challenge and sometimes to oppose. What I have said is that in the final instance, deconstruction is not negative although negativity is no doubt at work. Now, in order to criticise, to negate, to deny, you have first to say “yes”. When you address the Other, even if it is to oppose the Other, you make a sort of promise – that is, to address the Other as Other, not to reduce the otherness of the Other, and to take into account the singularity of the Other. That’s an irreducible affirmation, its the original ethics if you want. So from that point of view, there is an ethics of deconstruction. Not in the usual sense, but there is an affirmation. You know, I often use a quote from Rosensweig or even from Levinas which says that the “yes” is not a word like others, that even if you do not pronounce the word, there is a “yes” implicit in every language, even if you multiply the “no”, there is a “yes”. And this is even the case with Heidegger. You know Heidegger, for a long time, for years and years kept saying that thinking started with questioning, that questioning (fragen) is the dignity of thinking. And then one day, without contradicting this statement, he said “yes, but there is something even more originary than questioning, than this piety of thinking,” and it is what he called zusage which means to acquiesce, to accept, to say “yes”, to affirm. So this zusage is not only prior to questioning, but it is supposed by any questioning. To ask a question, you must first tell the Other that I am speaking to you. Even to oppose or challenge the Other, you must say “at least I speak to you”, “I say yes to our being in common together”. So this is what I meant by love, this reaffirmation of the affirmation.”

— Jacques Derrida, interviewed by Nikhil Padgaonkar (via heteroglossia)

[northstargrassmaiden]

It is necessary for me to live here alone without a woman, for the silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love, and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world. I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves. I cultivate this plant silently in the middle of the night and water it with psalms and prophecies in silence. It becomes the most beautiful of all the trees in the garden, at once the primordial paradise tree, the axis mundi, the cosmic axle, and the Cross.

Thomas Merton

[theoptia]

Audre Lorde, from The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action

[askebos]

“Stop thinking about saving your fragile face. Tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp. We will not blame you if your words go down in flames and nothing is left but the raw-scald. We will not blame you if, with the reticence of a surgeon’s hands, your words suture only the red places where blood might flow. We will not blame you because we know you can never do it properly: once and for all. Passion is never enough. Talent is never enough. Skill is never enough. But try. For our sake and yours. So. Forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul. You, so blessed with occasional blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

— Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993

[theshatterednotes]

Swedish 19th century proletarian author Maria Sandel

[derangedrhythms]

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, tr. Richard Howard

TEXT ID: but also from a fusion: we die together from loving each other: an open death, by dilution into the ether, a closed death of the shared grave. Engulfment is a moment of hypnosis. A suggestion functions, which commands me to swoon without killing myself. Whence, perhaps, the gentleness of the abyss: I have no responsibility here, the act (of dying) is not up to me: I entrust myself, I transmit myself (to whom? to God, to Nature, to everything, except to the other). Tristan Baudelaire Ruysbroeck

[dk-thrive]

"Human time, you know, passes like a dream."

— Kobo Abe, from “Noah’s Ark,” Beyond the Curve: Stories (Kodansha, 1992)

[a-quiet-green-agreement]

…reading books is a kind of dream sleep, you see.

– Sjón, Codex 1962: Thine Eyes Did See My Substance (A Love Story)

[theshatterednotes]

Parque Internacional la Amistad, Panama

[bluewillowmoon]

“A tender speech is combing through the willows. In a bare whisper, the elms lean. Something about the place conjures up the ancient past:”

— Claire Keegan, from Walk the Blue Fields: Stories (Grove Press, 2008)

[a-quiet-green-agreement]

But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such "turning points", one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.

– Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

[existential-celestial]

Anna Kamienska, from “Industrious Amazement: A Notebook,” translated by Clare Cavanagh in Poetry (March 2011)

[theshatterednotes]

American author Henry Dumas

[butterflypeaflowertea]

by kenneth koch

[existential-celestial]

“[…] The morn was clouded, but no shower fell, Tho’ in her lids hung the sweet tears of May;”

— John Keats, “Ode on Indolence,” in Selected Poems (Bloomsbury Poetry Classics). 

[existential-celestial]

“You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming—in fact not at all a warming—yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the colour blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French called this time of day “l’heure bleue.” To the English it was “the gloaming.” The very word “gloaming” reverberates, echoes— the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows.”

— Joan Didion, Blue Nights