Words/No Words

This is my letter to the World               That never wrote to Me -- 

[words-no-words]

How would the painter or poet express anything other than his [sic] encounter with the world?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (as quoted in Richard Kearney, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1994, p. 82)

[mehdimia-deactivated20190214]

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

“Unexplained, seductive, never detained, never enough.”

— Anne Sexton, from The Complete Poems; “Crossing the Atlantic,” (edited)

[words-no-words]

It is still better to speak only in riddles, allusions, hints, parables. Even if asked to clarify a few points. Even if people plead that they just don’t understand. After all, they never have understood. So why not double the misprision to the limits of exasperation? Until the ear tunes into another music, the voice starts to sing again, the very gaze stops squinting over the signs of auto-representation, and reproduction no longer inevitably amounts to the same and returns to the same forms, with minor variations.

Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (1985), p, 143

[words-no-words]

Overthrow syntax by suspending its eternally teleological order, by snipping the wires, cutting the current, breaking the circuits, switching the connections, by modifying continuity, alternation, frequency, intensity. Make it impossible for a while to predict whence, whither, when, how, why…something goes by or goes on: will come, will spread, will reverse, will cease moving. Not by means of a growing complexity of the same, of course, but by the irruption of other circuits, by the intervention at times of short-circuits that will disperse, diffract, deflect endlessly, making energy explode sometimes, with no possibility of returning to one single origin

Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (1985), p. 142

[an-itinerant-poet-deactivated20]

“You know the real world, this so-called real world, is just something you put up with, like everybody else. I’m in my element when I am a little bit out of this world: then I’m in the real world–I’m on the beam. Because when I’m falling, I’m doing all right; when I’m slipping, I say, hey, this is interesting! It’s when I’m standing upright that it bothers me; I’m not doing so good; I’m stiff. As a matter of fact, I’m really slipping most of the time, into that glimpse. I’m like a slipping glimpser.”

— Willem de Kooning. Film script, Robert Snyder, Sketchbook No. 1: Three Americans.  New York:  Time Inc., 1960. Contains excerpts from “Soiree” and “Inner Monologue,” conversations taped in 1959. The script was published in book form by Time in 1960.   (via gilgai)

[words-no-words]

#realworld #somethingelse

[words-no-words]

What brings destiny about at the level of events, what brings an event to repeat another in spite of all its difference, what makes it possible that a life is composed of one and the same Event, despite the variety of what might happen, and that it be traversed by a single and same fissure, that it play one and the same air over all possible tunes and all possible worlds — all these are not due to relations between cause and effect; it is rather an aggregate of noncausal correspondences which form a system of echo, of resumptions and resonances, a system of signs...

Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 179

[words-no-words]

Good sense affirms that in all things there is a determinable sense of direction: but paradox is the affirmation of both senses or directions at the same time.

Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense (1990), p. 1

[words-no-words]

There is at least one spot in every dream that is unplumable - a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown.

Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams (1900), p.111, n. 1

[nemophilies-deactivated20190428]

I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.

Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life (via nemophilies)

[words-no-words]

Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo [If I cannot deflect the will of heaven, then I will move hell].

Virgil’s Aeneid, book VII.312

[words-no-words]

In fact, it is when he was the butterfly that the apprehended one of the roots of his identity – that he was, and is, in his essence, that butterfly who paints himself with his own colours – and it is because of this that, in the last resort, he is Choang-tsu.

Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 76

[words-no-words]

Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions – ‘Will you fade? Will you perish?’ – scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 96

[words-no-words]

Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 144

[words-no-words]

The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 133

[words-no-words]

...there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby...

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 76

[words-no-words]

She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of – to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedgeshaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

virginia woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 45