“384. You learned the concept ‘pain’ when you learned language.”
(Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.)
Category Archives: commonplace
ll. 1. f., among the angel’s / hierarchies:
“The angel of the Elegies is that creature in whom the transformation of the visible into the invisible, which we are accomplishing, already appears in its completion . . . ; that being who guarantees the recognition of a higher level of reality in the invisible.—Therefore ‘terrifying’ for us, because we, its lovers and transformers, still cling to the visible.”
(To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)
(note on p. 317 of The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. & trans. Stephen Mitchell.)
the logic of mysticism
“It’s a paradox that, generally speaking, mystics want their religion to be mystical and their art to be inchoately logical – rather than the other way around.”
(Samuel R. Delany, interviewed by Josh Luskin, The Minnesota Review, 65–66, spring 2006.)
vice interviews john calder
“Huw Nesbit: What made you remark that you believe Burroughs to be an important writer but not a great one?
John Calder: He had no interest in style. He never revised anything. He just enjoyed the act of writing. I remember sitting down with him when we were preparing Naked Lunch, and saying to him: ‘Look, this character on page so-and-so, it’s really the same one under another name a hundred pages later, isn’t it?’ and he’d say: ‘Yes, you’re probably right’. He was only interested in what he was doing in the moment and that is not the sign of a great writer. He was a good artist, but not a great craftsman.”
(from the new fiction issue. Also! a new translation of Kleist’s “The Earthquake in Chile” by Peter Wortsman (with reading!), and an interview with Ursula Le Guin.)
fake aura
“The effective lifespan of a forgery, [Agnes] Mongan often said, is but a single generation. We’re not likely, in other words, to get fooled by the fakes of our fathers. Looking at forgeries much later, a person schooled in different aesthetic traditions and comfortable with other visual languages can see them for what they are, noting, say, the forger’s overly fancy, even fussy line, which, in the case of Mongan’s fake Matisse, bears the mark not of the modern master but something more conspicuous and contemporary, a more than passing resemblance perhaps to certain elegantly drawn department-store advertisements from the 1950s.”
(Paul Maliszewski, Fakers: hoaxers, con artists, counterfeiters, and other great pretenders, p. 101.)
will themselves to vanish
“Fakers, by their nature, remain elusive. They seek not to be discovered. They leave no fingerprints. Their signature is invisible or looks identical to another person’s. The most gifted fakers will themselves to vanish, leaving behind only the work they made: the forged painting, say, which we nonetheless admire, or the seemingly true story, which engages and entertains us no matter how incredible it seems or how false it’s proved to be. ‘The counterfeiter’s real purpose,’ Kenner writes, ‘is to efface himself, like the Flaubertian artist, so that we will draw the conclusion he wants us to draw about how his artifact came into existence.’ Believers too are elusive – though for far different reasons. They may be embarrassed or feel disinclined to relive the moment they were taken in by a faker. ‘When did you first realize you were fooled?’ is a question nobody looks forward to answering, but for years now I have worked under the assumption that the question is in fact worth asking, and asking anew, and that the answers can tell us much about what we believe and what we want, why we trust and why we still get duped.”
(Paul Maliszewski, Fakers: hoaxers, con artists, counterfeiters, and other great pretenders, p. 84.)
a part of a collage
“When I write about Ray [Johnson]’s art in relation to his life, at least two massive problems emerge:
1) To look at a part of a collage and trace it to its past causes the wholeness of the collage to disintegrate, and each portion to lose that part of its meaning which is its bearing upon the other parts as Ray arranged them. One can have the work of art, or one can have its sources. In tracing the work to its sources it is lost, because as analysis disintegrates the whole into parts, the parts lose their meaning, which is the bearing of part upon part in the construction of a unified work of art.
2) To look at a part of a work of art by Ray Johnson, and to follow from it toward his drowning, is to subsume the work in a larger whole, a final act of his life. But the images in the collages are hypothetical, and the work of art is more than just material or physical. It exists as it is perceived at a certain focal plane, and its wholeness is an aesthetic illusion, available to none of the sciences, and probably to no animal but humans. But Ray’s drowning is not hypothetical, it is categorical. While as an event it gathers many images which Ray has used in his art, and which he has acted upon in his life – hanging out around water – it is not a work of art or an aesthetic illusion, and it is not hypothetical.”
(William S. Wilson, With Ray: The Art of Friendship, p. 30.)
names
“In the original complication of having the narrator and the author of Remembrance of Things Past bear the same Christian name, Proust begins the process of merging appearance and reality in order that he may, ultimately, separate them. This doubling of names makes us aware that we are reading a novel that is, in some way, based on fact; it warns us simultaneously that appearances can be deceiving. This strange duality, connecting and yet severing the ‘I’ of the book from the ‘I’ of its creator, suggests its theme: It is nothing less than the rescuing of the self from the oblivion of time. There is an ‘I’ that needs to be rescued; there is an ‘I’ that does the rescuing. Insofar as each successfully acts out his role, the ‘Marcel’ of Proust’s narrator more cleverly disguises himself than any other name possibly could. The fictional Marcel becomes aware of the need of salvation only as he turns into the Marcel who creates him. And it is in the process of that creation that salvation exists. It is a difficult and all-important strategy.”
(Howard Moss, The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust, pp. 2–3.)
all that language can do
“Thought can’t really encompass the world at all, pace Bruno’s unresting daemon. It can’t limn the world exactly or represent it adequately. Language, thought, conception, can’t even cross the gap between the soul and the world; it may even constitute that unbridgeable gap. All that language can do is to transform.”
(John Crowley, Endless Things, p. 183.)
driving
“But there was an abiding and aboriginal fear too, which had kept him from ever being tempted; where cars had been to Joe Boyd and the boys of the Cumberlands heart-filling personifications (even named, often) of freedom and power and heat, to Pierce they had been like the dogs chained to stakes outside Cumberland cabins, or encountered roaming free in the hollers: big beasts, minding their own business but to be dealt with gingerly or not at all. He still sometimes dreamed of such dogs, but filled with mindless malevolence, their chains giving way like twine; and he had dreams too of finding himself inexplicably at the wheel, under way and the pedals useless, the car speeding willfully toward ruin.”
(John Crowley, Love & Sleep, p. 278.)