Blind Pony Books

the forsaken toys of others.

2011-12-27T12:05:00.000-08:00

Your letter has drawn me from the solitude in which I had shut myself up for nearly nine months, and from which I found it hard to stir. You will not guess what I have been about. I will tell you for such things do not happen every day. I have been making a list of from two to three hundred radical words of the Russian language, and have had them translated into as many languages and jargons as I could find. Their number exceeds already the second hundred. Every day I took one of these words and wrote it out in all the languages which I could collect. This has taught me that Celtic is like the Ostiakian: that what means sky in one language means cloud, fog, vault, in others; that the word God in certain dialects means Good, the Highest, in others, sun or fire...I asked Professor Pallas to come to me, and after making an honest confession of my sin, we agreed to publish these collections, and thus make them useful to those who like to occupy themselves with the forsaken toys of others.

- Letter from Catherine the Great, dated 9 May 1785, from Curious Versions of Modernity, D.l. Martin, MIT Press 2011

Marcel Schwob: The Passive Adventurer.

2011-11-10T21:54:00.000-08:00

Mayer André Marcel Schwob was born into a family of rabbis and doctors. The mother, Mathilde, was a Cahun, descendant of Caym de Sainte-Menehould, who had followed Joinville across the sea and — it is said — had, in the presence of the holy Jean de Acri, nursed and healed him from cholera. Through his mother's grandfather Anselm, Rabbi of the Jewish community Hochfelden, Schwob had inherited the wide brow, sensual mouth, and a half-sad smile in his eyes. Marcel had the pride of his clan and frequently preferred not to consort with some people of his race. Names, words, and legends were rushing through his brain. At three years of age he spoke German and English. There was a great silence in the house at Rue de I Eglise in Chaville. The mother tiptoed up the stairs, and even the Prussians, as they were stealing wine from the cellar, behaved very tenderly towards the all too precocious child, who was suffering from brain fever. During his sickness, while he was lying in bed with closed shutters, Marcel continued to set out on long journeys. He was somewhat rachitic and dreamed of swimming across the English Channel. Upon his arrival, there was Jules Verne, who embraced him. Another friend, with whom he had conversations as soon as he had scared off the German tutor, was Edgar Allan Poe. He put his little table in order, prepared his room for the encounter. He immersed himself in conversations with Edgar and Jules and, consequently, he despised his peers and their childlike stammering. His concentration was so great, that during these soliloquies he did not notice the hours that passed, nor the years. All of a sudden he was fifteen years old and devoured the Grammaire Comparee of Auguste Brachet. His uncle, Léon Cahun, author of the Vie Juive, became his protector and teacher. Who, incidentally, could be Schwob's teacher if not a Cahun. Conservator at the Bibliothèque Mazarine, he knew the histories of adventurers, of sailors and soldiers, he had traveled through Asia Minor, along the Euphrates. He knew very much, even in Uygur.

At the Lycée, Marcel met Georges Guieysse, a strange and melancholic classmate. They quickly became inseparable and worked together. Each of Marcel’s pages goes through Georges’ hands, and like a renaissance humanist Marcel writes him letters in Greek, with greetings in Arabic, or just a simple shake hands. Marcel confides in him that he is often incredibly tired, thoughts slip away, memory is gone. Why not go as kitchen boys to Australia or Canada? Regrettably, George had seemed absent for some time. When they saw each other, he left it to Marcel to invent itineraries, which they would have embarked upon eventually. He sat huddled in a corner and watched the scholar, prey to the spleen. On 7 May 1889 Georges Guieysse shot a bullet into his heart. He was twenty years old.

From then on Marcel resided in the sober and often empty halls and archives of the Bibliothèque Mazarine, where he unearthed documents about Villion and the Coquillards. He became a writer. One evening in autumn, when the rain is already cold, he encounters a little working girl of childlike intellect, Louise, and falls in love. She is thin, haggard from consumption, a poor little girl with chestnut colored hair and vague, mocking eyes, who writes letters to him in colored pencils. Marcel is delighted by the little silly things that Louise always tells him. For example: My Loulou, my hair has fallen out, cover your nails, which grow, and the little flakes of your skin, which are falling. I have a tummy ache. I have sown back the nose of my doll, now it is shorter and also thicker, and I forgot to leave holes for the nostrils. I will continue my silhouettes later, but I must have lost my scissors. Don’t forget to bring me another pair when you come, that you may help me perhaps. Pichciquinki.

The scholar had become addicted to playing. His pockets were filled with cotton, nails, and colorfully hemmed fabric. He spoke in falsetto with the publishers of magazines, whom he despised, and he smiled a lot. Meanwhile Marcel worriedly took care of the girl, for her condition was serious. The doctors were dismayed by Louise's surroundings, the little room without a breath of air, and only one small window that was always closed. Louise smoked one cigarette after another, cigars, Marcel’s pipe, and always drank coffee. Soon Louise was dead. After the burial the unhappy writer returns to the room, bedding all the dolls into a trunk, he takes them home. His friends watch over him, for as soon as Marcel is alone he becomes afraid of the dead one dying again. He sees her ghost laugh in the corners of the house. His tearful eyes keep suggesting new appearances. Marcel locks the scissors and the pocket knife into a little box and throws the nails and cotton scraps away. He becomes superstitious and longs for sleep. But sleep brings the echo of arrant laughter to him. Did the girl grow up in death, have the tomfooleries gone? The next morning, in the mirror, he finds that his hair has fallen out overnight, that his forehead has become wider still.

He becomes accustomed to morphine. These are moments of magnificent solitude. When the friends have left, he bolts the doors and windows, no sound gets through. They are the everlasting hours, eternity piled in layers in his room. Afterwards he became the great sheik of knowledge and of the grimoires, as Doctor J.C. Madrus called him, dedicating the fifteenth volume of his translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night to him. Madrus has a honey-sweet voice and his laughter makes Schwob lose his patience now and then. He was dressed in long coats with patched seams and dangling buttons, but the inside pockets were filled with gold. In the remarkable stories that Madrus was telling, tales of money kept recurring. Schwob soon preferred to restrain this friendship. He thought of writing Vies Imaginaires, of men that lived like dogs and holy women fooled by cunning monks, and those who curse themselves, yearning to fall lower still. This was the society that Schwob now mingled with. He noticed that he smiled when he read his lines: “Don’t embrace the dead, for they suffocate the living…the dead bring pestilence.” Schwob was already sick and knew that he would never get well again.

In a pavilion at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, Marcel saw a Chinaman named Ting, and he employed him. He resolved to set out for the places of Robert Louis Stevenson, “55 percent artist, 45 percent adventurer,” with whom he had corresponded. Schwob and Ting set sail on board the Ville de la Ciotat on course for the Australian sea. When he heard of Schwob's departure, Jules Renard, one of his acquaintances, noted: “He will live his stories before he dies.’ Greasy functionaries strolled upon the ship, colonial civil servants who kept entering into conversations, and a not very tidy family with four thickset daughters with heavy red braids and an albino son, who looked like a plump farm-girl, dressed like a man. The journey soon seemed much too long. In Colombo he beheld, fatigued, the Babel of religions. He watched caravans of men praying in a cave and saw the feast of the Tamils. Increasingly more tired, he was breathing laboriously, the warm wind covering him with dust, gnats tacked to his skin. The landscape often appeared ominous to him, Australia’s long beaches white as death, with shrubs that swayed like scalped hair. They call him tulapala, talk-man in Samoa, coercing him to tell them tales deep into the night. He shakes the hand of king Mataafa, who resembles Bismarck. Schwob did not see Stevenson’s grave, on top of Mount Vaea, between the flowers. He found not what he was seeking. A certain captain Crawshaw showed him postcards from Stevenson. In one of them he advises secrecy and digression, asking him to catch Wurmbrandt in Toga, and to bring him. Wurmbrandt was an Australian adventurer who appealed to Stevenson. This pilgrimage to the shadows of enchantment had come to nothing. What remained was a catalog of aimless wanderings. He had met whiny swindlers, who dragged themselves about, suggesting business, wrecks of charlatans, and wormy duplicates of the rogues and criminals who he had always been so familiar with. Thus offended by the crowd, he yearned for his room in Paris.

He locked himself up in the house to breathe in his return. Océanide, Vaililoa, Captain Crabbe were the titles of the books he would never write. And never did he want to leave again. He felt like a “vivisected dog.” Why don’t the dead return, to converse for half an hour with the invalids? His face changed color a little, became a golden mask. The eyes remained imperiously open. Nobody succeeded in closing them. The room reeked of mourning.

Translated by Herbert Pfostl from Isabel Matthes’ German version of Fleur Jaeggy’s essay - published in DER PFAHL I, Matthes & Seitz Verlag, 1987

Dedicated to my Kirston.
hp

hermes

2011-10-21T10:30:00.000-07:00

...der Heilige gibt den halben Mantel, die Gottheit den ganzen Schleier.

...the holy man gives half of his coat, divinity the whole veil.

- Franz Hessel, Ermunterung zum Genuss.
- Southern Netherlands, Reliquary of the Virgin's Veil, early 15th century, detail

thank you, woolgathersome, for bringing this image to me.
hp

a vagabond melancholy.

2011-10-15T13:41:00.000-07:00

There on the pier, stabbed by an ice pick, the Empress Elizabeth, symbol of the oldest European monarchy, which must die at the villainous hand. The contemptible Lucheni raved about making noise and killing someone in the public eye. But it was really the enduring vagabond melancholy of Elizabeth Wittelsbach that, in the mysterious dialogue of souls, summoned the madman to Geneva from Piedmont and anointed him as her assassin. For that matter, even the Italian government was a Lucheni. (Perhaps in its death wish, Vienna itself summoned him.)

- Guido Ceronetti, The Silence of the Body

such moments in gestures.

2011-10-11T22:52:00.000-07:00

I have read now quickly, now slowly through the whole of your wonderful book.

What at first would appear to be an Ars Morendi
Suddenly shifts into alternative contemplations
On history, literature, religion:
All products of the Self.

The resonance is of one who, because of age,
Contemplates his own mortality
And tries to persuade himself
That though the end is the end
Life is not pointless.

The art of book-making shines on every page
Reflecting the author’s own claim to immortality
With rare choices and artful placement
On beautiful paper softly radiating a luminous sepia.

- Glenn Watkins on To Die No More

Glenn Watkins is the coeditor of the complete works of Gesualdo and author of Gesualdo: The Man and His Music (1973) and The Gesualdo Hex: Music, Myth and Memory (2010). He is also the author of Soundings: Music in the 20th Century (1988); Pyramids at the Louvre (1994); and Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War (2003).

too light to sink, too faint to float.

2011-04-25T20:29:00.000-07:00

If one of those little flakes of micasand, hurried in tremulous spangling along the bottom of the ancient river, too light to sink, too faint to float, almost too small for sight, could have had a mind given to it as it was at last borne down with its kindred dust into the abysses of the stream, and laid, (would it not have thought?) for a hopeless eternity, in the dark ooze, the most despised, forgotten, and feeble of all earth's atoms; incapable of any use or change; not fit, down there in the diluvial darkness, so much as to help an earth-wasp to build its nest, or feed the first fibre of a lichen;
— what would it have thought, had it been told that one day, knitted into a strength as of imperishable iron, rustless by the air, infusible by the flame, out of the substance of it, with its fellows, the axe of God should hew that Alpine tower; that against it—poor, helpless, mica flake! — the wild north winds should rage in vain; beneath it— low-fallen mica flake —the snowy hills should lie bowed like flocks of sheep, and the kingdoms of the earth fade away in unregarded blue; and around it—weak, wave-drifted mica flake! — the great war of the firmament should burst in thunder, and yet stir it not; and the fiery arrows and angry meteors of the night fall blunted back from it into the air; and all the stars in the clear heaven should light, one by one as they rose, new cressets upon the points of snow that fringed its abiding place on the imperishable spire?

John Ruskin, Modern painters, Volume 4
/Portrait of Miss Rose La Touche, 1874.

dedicated to kirston of woolgathersome.

dearer than one’s own decay, in a world so nearly blind.

2010-10-30T07:38:00.000-07:00

“He became frightened of flowers because they grew so slowly that he couldn’t tell what they planned to do.”

These wine-leaf-brown prose fragments need no page numbering, these chance discoveries connect one's own feelings to those of kindred spirits and now fill the room, a place of chamotte-golden daylight, they vibrate and swing, are highly vivacious attractors of thought, grains of salt to garland the sting of death, nourishing light set against the dark premonition of a final end to the godless Western world and its consuming despair.
They can be found in a sensuous treasure chest of similar dimensions, weight, and texture as a smallish cigar-case, one that might hold five Havanas. A deliberate piece of art, a vignette of death, sways in relief at the cover’s middle: the stylized figure of a doomed little ship on calm seas, emblem and symbol of the human soul equipped for certain death.
Its cross is proud and questioning simultaneously- though ever dependent on a deeper center, from which its perpendicularity is derived and its echo resounds.
From its pale blue frame, it partakes in the triumph of the already-dead:   Nevermore will we die.

Calm and silence, time’s greatest tools, heal everything- because time gets lost in itself, recedes completely, forgets itself- only thus is the wide sea of soul released.
That is the promise kept by this little book, this compendium of thoughts and images materialized from realms of the in-between.
Toward the end of the book, mysterious credits embrace the thinkers who brought forth its fruit. There are great names, who here withdraw behind the greatness of their words- as if all of them were written by one single man, one single soul expressing itself in the book.
Mankind, truly-voiced.
Whoever is willing to take it up, gains the self and the silence to confront horror.
The blossoms of a black spring: the intimation that the very first things will be met again at the very end.
And not as religion would have these things, but as they are held commonly, as every person may perceive them, coming into flower so "slowly that he couldn't tell what they planned to do..."  
Here everything is true and deep. No idea harasses, no image squints in judgment at an observer. They are sufficient to their own ends and, self-sustaining, reach far into open space- even into one’s own thinking!
They give themselves freely to one who understands love. One who searches using the same questions, scouring the immeasurable for faint traces, clues which are held dearer than one’s own decay. For ars moriendi has always begun with the first heartbeat, and they who make life ravishing, exuberant, and worth living belong to a unique school of magic, whose alumni are only reared correctly on a diet of the entirely other-than-ordinary - the Different required by death.
A reliable friend is death, his companions reliable friends. In each present, passing moment, the dead and the living mold this world jointly. This view is the only possible basis for action in a world so nearly blind.
The hide of the blind pony acts as blanket to the gathered people. Together they acquire the horse’s strength- unending fortitude and vigor. Oh, they stagger in the lurching movements of purposeful action, they climb, they copulate, they shelter within themselves, they dis-mean, they mis-live, they cannot recognize the conditions of their existence.
Death finally removes the blanket, allowing them to see freely.
The images in the book show such sights. Out of the mist - out of these white shadows surrounding the self-searcher - emerge dark forebodings- aquarelles possessing the soul's tenderness, violence and loving clear-sight. 
Again and again, the animals in the paintings, who seem quite unloosed from mortality, are envoys of the other side.
If they die, they die only allegorically, calmly.
If there is drama, it is only in our eyes, the eyes of the human spectator.
Perhaps such is required for us to empathize and to understand their message.  
Again and again, the ships, which we ourselves are.  
Again and again, man in all his magnificence and sorrow, his doubts and wild errors. 
And - surprising and novel - this whole book intrinsically rubs against the grain: nevermore will we die...
Much more than a book. A rescinding of time and space, of reason and logic, limitation and finitude, of the lust for a future and validation by a past.  
There is a totally different and new space-time continuum in these pages, breathing eternity out into eternity. Whoever wills is in the heart of it: nave, navel, naval, ship.
Where we come from and where we go remain numinous.
But in tender arms we sway and are secure.
This book will accompany me until I see the archetypes of its images.
It is - to stout hearts - everything in a nutshell. It is - to the rational - a font of steady confrontation. To the dying - a treasure hoard beyond description. To the most vital among us - a very, very good compass.
Compass? Yes. A compassion they must dare to aim inward. 
"Among the dead are thousands of beautiful women."
And men.

- Susanne Bummel-Vohland
translated from the German by Kristofor Minta and Susanne Bummel-Vohland

central to every calamity, every blessing.

2010-09-18T10:29:00.000-07:00

It is not necessary to live, but it is necessary to live happily.

-Jules Renard

accessible but veiled

2010-09-06T21:12:00.000-07:00

"It's entirely conceivable that life's splendor surrounds us all, and always in it's complete fullness, accessible but veiled, beneath the surface, invisible, far away. But there it lies - not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If we call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes. This is the essence of magic, which doesn't create but calls."

- Kafka, Tagebucher
- quoted in Roberto Calasso's astonishing 'K'

the proud surge of its waves

2010-07-14T23:47:00.000-07:00

He stirs up the sea of our hearts so that the proud surge of its waves often causes us hot pains, but this is only the miraculous tide through whose strange movement our sickness and misfortune abate.

- Johan Joachim Winkelmann
in Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama

- Image : Alexander Rischer - CAPUT CORVI

For no one enjoys like a convalescent.

2010-06-19T17:16:00.000-07:00

[...]These tales are quite extraordinarily delicate - everyone realizes that. But not everyone notices that they are the product not of the nervous tension of a decadent, but the pure and vibrant mood of a convalescent. "I am horrified by the thought that I might attain wordly success," he says, in a paraphrase of Franz Moor's speech. All his heroes share this horror. But why? Not from horror of the world, moral resentment, or pathos, but for wholly Epicurean reasons. They wish to enjoy themselves, and in this respect they display a quite exceptional ingenuity. Furthermore, they also display a quite exceptional nobility. And a quite exceptional legitimacy. For no one enjoys like a convalescent. The enjoyment of the convalescent has nothing of the orgy about it. His reinvigorated blood courses toward him from mountain streams, and the purer breath on his lips flows down from the treetops. Walser's characters share this childlike nobility with the characters in fairy tales, who likewise emerge from the night and from madness - namely, from the madness of myth.

- Walter Benjamin, Robert Walser / Karl Walser: Robert Walser as Karl Moor

Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed

2010-06-11T21:30:00.000-07:00

Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound
In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat
On the silent sea we have heard the sound
That came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.

Under the mile off moon we trembled listening
To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound
And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing
The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.

Open a pathway through the slow sad sail,
Throw wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boat
For my voyage to begin to the end of my wound,
We heard the sea sound sing, we saw the salt sheet tell,
Lie still, sleep becalmed, hide the mouth in the throat,
Or we shall obey, and ride with you through the drowned.

- Dylan Thomas

of that which is sovereign.

2010-05-21T00:04:00.000-07:00

Eros is the helplessness of that which is sovereign: it is the strength abandoning itself to something elusive, something that stings.

Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

horns and bells

2010-04-23T17:36:00.000-07:00

Eros!
Now I am lost, he thought, and from that moment on he was.

Strindberg, The Cloister

Sometimes I feel very old, like my whole life's over, like I'm not around anymore.

2010-04-21T21:39:00.000-07:00

The devil just sittin' there laughing. He's glad when people does that. Then he sends them to the snakehouse. He just sits there and laughs and watch while you're sitting there all tied up and snakes are eating your eyes up. The snakes go down your throat and eat all your systems up.
I think the devil was on the farm.

The sun looks ghostly when there's a mist on the river and everything's quiet. I never knowed it before. And you could see people on the shore but it was far off and you couldn't see what they were doing . They were probably calling for help or something or they were trying to bury somebody or something. We seen the trees that the leaves are shaking and it looks like shadows of guys that are coming at you and stuff. We heard owls squawking away hooting away. We didn't know where we were going and what we were going to do. I'd never been on a boat before. That was the first time.
Some sights that I saw was really spooky that it gave me goosebumps. I felt like cold hands touching the back of my neck and, and it could be the dead coming for me or something. I remember this guy his name was Blackjack, he died. He only had one leg and he died. And I think that was Blackjack making those noises.

This girl she didn't know where she was goin' or what she was gonna do. She didn't have no money or nothin'. Maybe she'd meet up with a character. I was hoping things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine.

Linda Manz in 'Days of Heaven'

impetuous and illimitable

2010-04-08T07:52:00.000-07:00

I hold against all modern religions that they have provided their believers with consolations and embellishments of death, instead of giving them means, in their heart, of living with it and coming to an understanding with it. With it, with its entire unmasked harshness: this harshness is so tremendous that precisely with it the circle is closed: it leads back to the extreme of a gentleness that is great, as pure, and as perfectly clear (all comfort is murky!) as we have never suspected gentleness to be, not even on the sweetest spring day. But toward the experiencing of this deepest gentleness which, if only some of us felt it with conviction, could perhaps gradually penetrate and make transparent all the circumstances of life; toward the experiencing of this richest and most wholesome gentleness humanity has never taken even the first steps - unless it be in its oldest and most unsuspicious times - the secret of which has been almost lost to us. Nothing else, I am sure, was ever the content of the 'initiations' but precisely the communication of a "key" that made it possible to read the word "death" without negation. Like the moon, so surely life has a side that is continually turned away from us, which is not its opposite, but rather its completion to perfection, to fullness, to the whole and full sphere and globe of being.
One should not fear that our strength would not be sufficient to endure any experience of death, even though it would be the nearest and most terrible; death is not beyond our strength, it is the measuring mark of the brim of the vessel: we are full whenever we reach it - and being full means being heavy...that is all. I do not wish to say that one should love death; but one should love life so magnanimously, so without calculating and selecting, that love of death (the turned-away side of life) is continually and involuntarily included - which actually happens invariably in the great motions of love, which are impetuous and illimitable....It would be conceivable that death stands infinitely closer to us than life itself....What do we know about it?

And love too, which mixes up the numbers between people for a game of nearness and distances, in which we enroll only insofar as the universe seems so full and there is space nowhere but in us. Love too takes no account of our categories, but snatches us, trembling as we are, into an infinite consciousness of the whole. Lovers do not live by the segregated Here; but as if a separation had never been undertaken, they lay hands on the tremendous possession of their hearts. Of them one can say that God becomes truthful to them and death does not harm them: for they are full of death in being full of life.

- Rilke, Letter to Lotte Hepner (1915)

the place where death went

2010-03-26T23:06:00.000-07:00

Roland Barthes, whose philosophy of photography sprang from the loss of his adored mother, treasured photographs of the dead woman for their almost shamanistic value, as a kind of literal transcription of the light that emanated, directly and physically, from her living hair, her skin, her dress. Through these feelings he aimed at an unsurpassable definition of photography - as the place where death went when religion let go.

- Claudia Roth Pierpont

handed down mysteries

2010-03-18T05:48:00.000-07:00

Where everything is bad
it must be good to know the worst.

- F.H.Bradley

a paradise that comes and goes.

2010-03-13T23:13:00.000-08:00

Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair
in the face of infinity.

- the brothers Goncourt / Jean-Léon Gérôme

incursions

2010-02-10T21:35:00.000-08:00

'We are given the shadow for the thing, and in the end we live among shadows, and not only believe that things are made for the sake of their shadows, but find that this is actually the case.'

Edgar Wind - Art and Anarchy

The Trembling and Unbroken Circle...

2010-01-19T18:56:00.000-08:00

The greatest masterpieces created by man are now bound to a freedom from death as they are contained in records, and a child of three may hold weighty spiritual secrets in small hands.

~ Maurice Maeterlink

Guest entry by the wonderful Woolgathersome.
http://woolgathersome.blogspot.com/

unreal in the eyes of the dead

2010-01-16T13:41:00.000-08:00

I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead...

Sebald - Austerlitz

a closing of remedies.

2010-01-01T23:03:00.001-08:00

Get drunk saying good-bye.

With C&W weepers from the golden age as backdrop.

And featuring a performance by PERFVGIVM.

http://www.perfvgivm.com/

At Observatory: 543 Union Street (at Nevins), Brooklyn, NY 11215

The formation of attention.

2009-12-27T21:55:00.000-08:00

In : Roberto Calasso, The Forty-nine Steps
University of Minnesota Press. 2001

...a hoot of mockery

2009-12-21T21:47:00.000-08:00

You say that her fleas degrade her for you. That was precisely what attracted me. Their sickening smell mixed with the scent of her skin, streaming with sandalwood. I want a touch of bitterness in everything, a hoot of mockery in our moments of triumph, even desolation in our enthusiasm. It reminds me of Jafa, where, as I entered the town, I caught in the same instant the scent of lemon trees and the stench of corpses; the smashed-up cemetery was full of rotting skeletons, while the green trees dangled their golden fruits above our heads.
Do you not feel the completeness of this as poetry?
It really is the great synthesis.

- from Flaubert's journal

Guest entry by Acep Hale.

ALL SORTS OF REMEDIES TALK

2009-12-06T19:30:00.000-08:00

a candid conversation about the twin stars of art & death.

wine will be sold; you may bring your whiskey.

herbert pfostl | all sorts of remedies
november 21, 2009 - january 8, 2010

Observatory | 543 Union Street | Brooklyn
thurs/fri 3-6pm | sat/sun 12-6pm
observatoryroom.org

ALL SORTS OF REMEDIES

2009-11-04T10:23:00.001-08:00

at Observatory

543 Union Street- at Nevins
Brooklyn, New York 11215

Hours:
Thur & Fri 3-6pm
Sat & Sun 12-6pm

Opening: Saturday, November 21st at 7:00pm

Exhibition: November 21, 2009 - January 8, 2010

Further events coinciding with:
ALL SORTS OF REMEDIES:

ART AS MAGIC & THE COLD HARD FACTS OF LIFE

DECEMBER 18 - 7:30

as well as:

Palinurian splinters

2009-10-17T10:38:00.000-07:00

There are also solitary bees, and it is not claimed that they are biologically inferior.

When we see someone living alone, like a beech-tree in a clearing, with no other signs of life around him yet proclaiming his freedom, displaying his possessions and maintaining his devotion to his friends, we can be sure that such a person is an ogre and that human bone-meal lies buried under his roots.

Why do ants alone have parasites whose intoxicating moistures they drink and for whom they will sacrifice even their young? Because as they are the most highly socialized of insects, so their lives are the most intolerable.

Streets of Paris, pray for me; beaches in the sun, pray for me; ghosts of the lemurs, intercede for me; plane-tree and laurel-rose, shade me; summer rain on quays of Toulon, wash me away.

For a dark play-girl in the night-club I have pined away, for a dead school boy, for a bright angel-vixen I have wept in vain, If this thoughtless woman were to die there would be nothing to live for, if this faithless girl forgot me there would be no one for whom to write. These two unseen and otherwise occupied figures compose the fragile arch of my being and constitute a Tribunal which they have long ceased to attend.

A child, left to play alone, says of quite an easy thing, 'Now I am going to to do something very difficult'. Soon, out of vanity, fear and emptiness, he builds up a world of custom, convention and myth in which everything must be just so; certain doors are one-way streets, certain trees sacred, certain paths taboo. Then along comes a grown-up or a more robust child; they kick over the imaginary wall, climb the forbidden tree, regard the difficult as easy and the private world is destroyed. The instinct to create myth, to colonize reality with the emotions, remains. The myths become tyrannies until they are swept away, when we invent new tyrannies to hide our suddenly perceived nakedness. Like caddis-worms or like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.

We pay for vice by the knowledge that we are wicked: we pay for pleasure when we find out, too late, that we are disappearing.

- The Unquiet Grave
A Word Cycle by Palinurus (Cyril Connolly)

remedies

2009-09-09T18:36:00.000-07:00

The wonderful, of which the miraculous is a subcategory,
was never boring.

- Jacobus de Voraigne

2009-09-07T10:43:00.000-07:00

"We are a part which has to imitate the whole."

- Simone Weil/Brancusi

to be absolved...

2009-08-22T17:13:00.000-07:00

Throughout the first centuries of our era, the Gnostics disputed with the Christians. They were annihilated, but we can imagine their possible victory. Had Alexandria triumphed and not Rome, the extravagant and muddled stories that I have summarized here would be coherent, majestic, and perfectly ordinary. Pronouncements such as Novalis' "Life is a sickness of the spirit", or the despairing one of Rimbaud, "True life is absent; we are not in the world", would know the conditional assent of the pious laboratories. In any case, what better gift can we hope for, than to be insignificant? What greater glory for a God, than to be absolved of the world?

Borges - Other inquisitions

pieces

2009-08-14T09:11:00.001-07:00

There is no paradise on earth, but there are pieces of it.
What there is on earth is a broken paradise.

- Pierro della Francesca / Jules Renard

difficult and invisible

2009-06-20T12:08:00.000-07:00

Today it is difficult to asses the enormous extent of Nietzsche's solitude at the time. Having become a shadow for most of his old friends, a difficult and invisible man, by now accustomed to publishing his books at his own expense, accustomed too to counting his loyal readers on his fingers and having to reduce their numbers as each new book comes out, Nietzsche seems to have circled as far from the world as possible, to a point of insurmountable alienation, which his old friend Erwin Rhode had felt at their last meeting, in the spring of 1886: "as though he came from a region inhabited by no one else."

Calasso - Fatal Monologue

2009-06-10T21:39:00.000-07:00

...that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been,
is half owning to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life,
and rest in unvisited tombs.

- George Eliot

two and a half

2009-06-10T21:26:00.000-07:00

Man has here two and a half minutes -- one to smile, one to sigh,
and a half for love: for in the midst of this minute he dies.

- Jean Paul

accomplished gestures

2009-06-08T15:20:00.000-07:00

Crown prince Rudolf and Marie Vetsera

In Vienna the world was often coming to an end;
usually to winegarden songs.

He must be saved by some midnight beyond reason:
the logic of daytime was sinking so fast.

How beautiful the leaves aged on ten thousand twigs!
No politics could produce such glory in a forest.
Only so natural and simple a thing as death.

Rudolf had conjured the glistening anticipation of greatness, only to dissolve into black bafflement.

By then the word Mayerling had already begun to phosphoresce throughout the world.
Abroad it tingled and thrilled. In Vienna it was like some hidden hell machine of which nothing was known except that it was made of gold.

- Frederic Morton, A Nervous Splendor. Vienna 1888/1889

brief epics

2009-05-07T23:15:00.000-07:00

Death makes no sense
except to people who have passionately loved life.

- Cioran

Tesla

2009-04-29T18:56:00.000-07:00

died penniless, alone with his pigeons.

Blind Pony at Observatory

2009-04-04T09:19:00.000-07:00

PERFVGIVM is low-fi ventriloquism - of the old American man-with-guitar tradition - infused with curtains of wayward noise. The performance at Observatory will be an experiment in re-creating the shapes of sound and physical space manifested in the recordings "Perfugium" and "The Gown".

heartsnatcher

2009-01-14T20:58:00.000-08:00

Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near
one can catch hold - all else goes beyond human strength.

Kafka - letter to Milena
Image: Hans Christian Andersen

Quasi una fantasia

2008-12-25T10:56:00.000-08:00

There is music from the nineteenth century, which is so unbearably solemn that it can only be used to introduce waltzes. If it were left as it is, people listening to it would fall into a despair beside which every other musical emotion would pale. All the feeling of great tragedy would surely overwhelm them and they would have to veil their heads with gestures that have fallen out of use since time immemorial. This music no longer possesses a form with plangent tunes, and each stands on its own so that the listener is exposed to them in their naked immediacy. Only the excess of pain helps which springs from the certainty that things cannot go on like this. The double attack of F in the violins, the dominant of B-flat minor - a pathetic remnant of sadness together with a tiny E grace note, which a moment later will drive on the waltz melody in sharp, jolly spasms, always staccato and always in the train of the E.
Nowadays such music thrives for the most part only in the bad music played in zoos or in the small orchestras in provincial spas.
Children are its greatest fans.

- Adorno/Zola

2008-12-18T21:11:00.000-08:00

Who has turned us round like that, that we,
do as we may, are in the attitude
of going away?

- rilke

2008-12-02T21:08:00.000-08:00

There are two truths which men will not generally believe: one is not knowing anything, the other is not being anything. Add a third, that grows largely from the second: of having nothing to hope for after death.

Giacomo Leopardi, from his journals

(Thanks to James Walsh for finding it.)

2008-10-26T22:05:00.000-07:00

The only cure for madness
is the innocence of facts.

- Jacques Riviere in a letter to Antonin Artaud

later times

2008-10-17T13:53:00.000-07:00

Fate had elected him for a special deed.
But he then made sure that later times lost all memory of him.

- Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

2008-08-06T15:00:00.000-07:00

and they held out as long as they could.

irretrievable & irrepeatable

2008-08-04T12:44:00.000-07:00

What conclusion can we draw?
To invite the gods ruins our relationship with them
but sets history in motion.
A life in which the gods are not invited isn't worth living.
It will be quieter, but there won't be any stories.
And you could suppose that these dangerous invitations
were in fact contrived by the gods themselves,
because the gods get bored with men who have no stories.

- Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Thank you Tonya van Gieson

When I die, the world is in my room.

2008-07-19T20:17:00.001-07:00

In November 1966, a day before his 72. birthday, composer, translator and wanderer Juergen von der Wense died in Goettingen, Germany, in an attic filled with 10.000 pages of writings on science, poetry, philosophy and music.
Few splinters from it ever reached the public.
He lived for his work, always alone, with no academic or artistic consolations, in poverty supported by a few friends and admirers.
Nature, art and religion to him was one – and ALL important.
Despite loss and solitude, his life was a marvelous experiment, guided by its own inner light, overflowing and outreaching (in 6000 letters to friends) – and blessed by the absence of (and concerns for) career, family and endorsements.
A solitary genius like Mahler or Nietzsche and odd like Bruckner, he was a universe to himself. Marvelous and homeless like the storm.

---------------------- Splinters from EPIDOT:

Movements are not created, they only find each other. That something happens is only ... luck, an act of genius. God himself is permanently surprised. True art.

Biographies must become prophetic. Every life is a divination. Genius is a sacrifice, from which God foretells himself. The life of a genius is fragment, secret knowledge.

Flaws must enter the composition like poisons in medicine.

To be free means to be free from opinions. To be sociable with the stars above. To be rich from spending one's life. To embrace it with one's knowledge, to know it with one's heart.

Wisdom is a crisis.

Sudden happiness is a great loss, so we become sick, because it breaks our habits, unsettles our vanities, when we realize, how long we had been content with the platitudes of feeling.
This joy whisks me from my destiny.

Everything we experience is an answer.

What is noble about the sun is not her warmth but her distance.

We embrace the ocean when we drown.

Consolation: nature has no opinion of me.

People without love have no destiny, they only improvise. With the speed of a falling weight my destiny increases because of love.

The meaning and goad of navigation is the secret, to sail after the sun and to go down with her. The meaning of travel is religion. Wanderlust is our nobility: a marvelous striving without destination. Seafarers were the first aristocrats.
With Columbus begins the downfall. His high caravels, filled with mutineers and robbers: the image of rabble. He thought he found paradise, but every paradise was discovered by the devil.

The rainbow is the banner after the battle between the sky and earth.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My translation.
Hoping against hope that someone will pick it up from here to bring Juergen von der Wense or Hans Henny Jahnn or Jean Paul Richter a better appreciation and impetus for us to keep going.
hp

nothing in return

2008-07-06T13:24:00.000-07:00

The fulcrum of America is the Plains, half sea half land, a high sun as metal and obdurate as the iron horizon, and a man's job to square the circle.

Some men ride on such space, others have to fasten themselves like a tent stake to survive.
As I see it Poe dug in and Melville mounted. They are the alternatives.

In Moby-Dick, when Ishmael has said all he can say about Ahab, he admits that the larger, darker, deeper part of man is obscure. He suggests the same holds true for any man and insists it is necessary to go down to a place far beneath a man's upper earth in order to uncover the unknown part.
There, he says, a man will find that his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state

an antique buried beneath antiquities and throned
on torsos.

Melville became Christ's victim, and it was death, and lack of love, that let him be it.

Death bothered him. That bare-headed life under the grass, his own, worried him, in Dickinson's words, like a wasp. He looked for solace to the Resurrection. He got nothing in return. For the loss of mortality he got nothing in return.

trostlos

2008-06-30T21:49:00.000-07:00

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

- Kafka, notebooks

paper animals

2008-06-02T20:25:00.000-07:00

But in formulating his wish he made an allowance of which even he was barely aware, so that all would not be lost if the sign did not come again: he gave the Lord advance permission not to give a second sign, and even if he did not, that would not mean anything bad.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal - Military Story

war is always

2008-06-02T20:13:00.000-07:00

The more we get used to being killed, the better we like it.
- Private Wilbur Fisk of Vermont

for Jahnn

2008-06-02T20:03:00.000-07:00

Nur das zwecklose wird vom ewigen beruehrt.

- Hans Henny Jahnn

hope

2008-05-28T20:57:00.000-07:00

"Mahler is matter-of-fact even in the supreme metaphysical sense, in that he jettisoned the aesthetic illusion of meaningful totality which no longer existed, if indeed it ever did. Mahler, whose uncompromising spirituality separated him from the hedonism of his age, from Debussy and from Strauss and whose mind selflessly strove to conceive of something that goes beyond mere existence - Mahler discovered the impossibility of such a task simply by refusing to be deflected from his path. A metaphysician like no other composer since Beethoven, he made the impossibility of metaphysics his central belief, even while battering his head against the brick wall this represented. His world, like that of his compatriot Franz Kafka, is a world infinitely full of hope, although not for us."

- Adorno, Quasi una Fantasia

heads

2008-05-28T20:31:00.000-07:00

More tears are shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.

- St. Teresa of Avila

Guest entry by Anne Gibbs of THE LOST SOCIETY OF COLLECTORS
http://lostsocietyofcollectors.blogspot.com/

friendship

2008-05-15T22:28:00.000-07:00

"Friendship cannot be separated from reality any more than the beautiful. It is a miracle, like the beautiful. And the miracle consists simply in the fact that it exists."

"The essence of created things is to be intermediaries. They are intermediaries leading from one to the other, and there is no end to this."

"…It is necessary to be dead in order to see things in their nakedness."

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

- Guest entry by Louise Despont

2008-05-11T17:58:00.000-07:00

What seems paradoxical about everything that is justly called beautiful is the fact that it appears.

- Benjamin, Schriften I, 349

saints

2008-05-11T08:07:00.000-07:00

Josephine's road, however, must go downhill. The time will soon come when her last notes sound and die into silence. She is a small episode in the eternal history of our people, and the people will get over the loss of her. Not that it will be easy for us; how can our gatherings take place in utter silence? Still, were they not silent even when Josephine was present? Was her actual piping notably louder and more alive than the memory of it will be? Was it not rather because Josephine's singing was already past losing in this way that our people in their wisdom prized it so highly? So perhaps we shall not miss her so much after all, while Josephine, redeemed from earthly sorrows which to her thinking lay in wait for all chosen spirits, will happily lose herself in the numberless throng of the heroes of our people, and soon, since we are no historians, will rise to the heights of redemption and be forgotten like all her brothers.

(Kafka, Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk)

Image: The dancer Wera Ouckama Knoop, whose sudden illness and death at the age of 19 inspired Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus.

ponies

2008-04-28T03:48:00.000-07:00

The midnight, the morning, or the middle of day,

Is the same to the miner who labors away.

Where the demons of death often come by surprise,

One fall of the slate and you're buried alive.

Merle Travis - Dark as a dungeon (additional stanza, rarely performed...)

closing doors

2008-04-27T13:36:00.000-07:00

Eilidh, Eilidh, Eilidh, heart of me, dear and sweet
In dreams I am hearing the whisper, the sound of your running feet
that like the sea-hoofs beat a music by day and night, Eilidh,
On the sands of my heart, my sweet.

O sands, of my heart, what wind moans low along thy shadowy shore?
Is that the deep seaheart I hear with the dying sob at its core?
Each dim lost wave that lapses is like a closing door:
'Tis closing doors they hear at last who soon shall hear no more,
who soon, soon shall hear no more, my grief, no more!
Eilidh, Eilidh, Eilidh!

Come home to the heart of me! 'tis pain I am having ever,
Eilidh, the pain that will not be.
Come home, come home, for closing doors are like the waves of the sea;
once closed, they are closed forever,
Eilidh, lost lost, lost for you and me.

2008-04-26T18:10:00.000-07:00

"...and love, though in a sense it may be admitted to be stronger than death, is by no means so universal and so sure. In fact, love is rare - the love of men. of things, of ideas, the love of perfected skill. For love is the enemy of haste; it takes count of passing days, of men who pass away, of fine art matured slowly in the course of years and doomed in a short time to pass away, too, and be no more."

Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea

overcome

2008-04-20T22:09:00.000-07:00

Nothing, for us, can fill the place of undiminished brightness except the unconscious dark, nothing that of what once we might have been, except the dream that we had never been born.

- Adorno, Minima Moralia

2008-04-17T22:07:00.001-07:00

When we are no longer children, we are already dead.
-Brancusi

substitutes

2008-04-17T14:33:00.000-07:00

At first sight I really believed that the only reminders in the Piana graveyard of the nature which, we have always hoped, will endure long after our own end, were the artificial purple, mauve, and pink flowers, obviously pressed upon their customers by French undertakers, made of silk or nylon chiffon, of brightly painted porcelain, wire, and metal appearing not so much a sign of enduring affection as the final emergence of a kind of proof that, despite all assurances to the contrary, we offer our dead only the cheapest substitute for the diverse beauty of life.

-Sebald, Campo Santo

2)
The positive element of kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

- Adorno, Quasi una Fantasia

2008-04-17T08:52:00.001-07:00

today is my birthday!
hp

masks

2008-04-15T22:05:00.001-07:00

"We have art that we may not perish of the truth."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

The cuckoo

2008-04-14T13:37:00.001-07:00

The cuckoo is a merry bird, she sings as she flies,
She brings us good tidings and tells us no lies;
She sucks the sweet flowers to make her sing clear,
And she never sings "cuckoo" till summer is near.

O meeting is a pleasure, but parting a grief,
An inconstant lover is worse than a thief;
For a thief will but rob you and swear to be true,
And the very next moment they'll bring you to the grave.

The grave it will rot you and bring you to dust,
There is not one in twenty young men girls can trust;
They will kiss you, and court you and swear to be true,
And the very next moment they'll bid you adieu.

Come all you young women wherever you be,
Build your nest in the top of a tree;
For the leaves they will wither, the branches decay,
And the beauty of fair maids will soon fade away.

- Folk song from Sussex

toys

2008-04-13T13:21:00.000-07:00

"All children talk to their toys. The toys become actors in the great drama of life, reduced in size by the camera obscura of their little brains. The child twists and turns his toy, scratches it, shakes it, bumps it against the walls, throws it on the ground. From time to time he makes it restart its mechanical motions, sometimes in the opposite direction. Its marvelous life comes to a stop. The child, like the people besieging the Tuileries, makes s supreme effort; at last he opens it up, he is the stronger. But where is the soul? This is the beginning of melancholy and gloom."

- Charles Baudelaire

2)

"Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage, the capacity to convert energies once intensified beyond measure to destroy recalcitrant objects, into the concentration of patient observation, so keeping as tight a hold on the secret of things, as one had earlier when finding no peace until the quavering voice had been wrenched from the mutilated toy."

- Adorno, Minima Moralia

2008-03-18T18:27:00.000-07:00

Actaeon out hunting chances upon the goddess Diana
and her nymphs bathing; furious, she changes him into
a stag; his own dogs no longer know him and tear him
apart.

debris

2008-03-06T20:31:00.000-08:00

"All could be well, but in fact all is lost."

- L'ARGENT
- Adorno, 'Mahler'

the good wound

2008-03-01T19:10:00.000-08:00

Among the great tragedies of childhood, De Quincey included that of the little boy's lips forever separated from his sister's kisses. Men with no sisters also share in this tragedy. Gloomy, incessant death of the sister in Munch's paintings. (Without a dead sister, abandoned lifeless at the foot of a distant staircase, a man cannot rediscover in the dark his sister's lips, the good wound happy to start bleeding again.) At its most ethereal and imaginative, a sister's wedding reaches the deepest endogamic intensity; it makes us feel as if our ties with Chaos and the contracted universe cannot be undone.

- Guido Ceronetti

image from the very fine batsandswallows.blogspot.com

"a place far beneath a man's upper earth"

2008-02-24T22:23:00.000-08:00

notecards from charles olson's 1930's master’s thesis, the growth of herman melville, prose writer and poetic thinker, completed in 1933.
these cards mainly dealt with melville's reading and marginalia and the "lost five hundred" (melville's books sold to a brooklyn dealer in 1892 by his widow, pursued by olson).
"as a young scholar, olson was indefatigable in his research; when he located a volume from melville's library in a grand-daughter's home, in a private collector's hands, or on a public library's shelves, olson carefully transcribed onto 5 x 7-inch note cards complete bibliographic information on the volume, as well as the content and location of melville’s annotations and reading marks".
these cards ended up being severely water damaged, but were preserved by the university of connecticut.

- Guest entry by THE ART OF MEMORY
(http://theartofmemory.blogspot.com/)

2008-02-23T22:47:00.001-08:00

"We were happy, all of us, but that was all."

Image via Anne of White Mule Picture Frames (wmpf.blogspot.com)

Thanks.

asleep in scotland

2008-02-22T20:29:00.000-08:00

The Cotard delusion, also known as nihilistic or negation delusion, is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that he or she is dead, does not exist, is putrefying or has lost his/her blood or internal organs.

Rarely, it can include delusions of immortality.
It is named after Jules Cotard (1840–1889), a French neurologist who first described the condition, which he called le délire de négation ("negation delirium"), in a lecture in Paris in 1880.
Young and Leafhead (1996, p155) describe a modern-day case of Cotard delusion in a patient who suffered brain injury after a motorcycle accident:
“ [The patient's] symptoms occurred in the context of more general feelings of unreality and being dead. In January, 1990, after his discharge from a hospital in Edinburgh, his mother took him to South Africa. He was convinced that he had been taken to hell (which was confirmed by the heat), and that he had died of septicaemia (which had been a risk early in his recovery), or perhaps from AIDS (he had read a story in The Scotsman about someone with AIDS who died from septicaemia), or from an overdose of a yellow fever injection.
He thought he had "borrowed my mother's spirit to show me round hell", and that he was asleep in Scotland. ”

- from wikipedia

2008-01-30T22:00:00.000-08:00

Why were you born when the snow was falling?
You should have come to the cuckoo's calling
Or when grapes are green in the cluster,
Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster
For their far off flying
From summer dying.
Why did you die when the lambs were cropping?
You should have died at the apples' dropping,
When the grasshopper comes to trouble,
And the wheat-fields are sodden stubble,
And all winds go sighing
For sweet things dying.

- Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894) , "A dirge"

2008-01-28T13:14:00.001-08:00

The dead make things never be the same.

- text fragment: flowerville (http://oneinten.blogspot.com/)
'to those our dead whom we mourn secretly and to those who mourn them secretly'

- images: http://anonymousworks.blogspot.com/

2008-01-26T23:43:00.000-08:00

closing sequence from
georg wilhelm pabst's the three penny opera, 1931

Guest entry by THE ART OF MEMORY
(http://theartofmemory.blogspot.com/)

2008-01-24T23:01:00.000-08:00

We do not think enough of the Dead as exhilirants - they are not dissuaders but Lures-Keepers of the great Romance still to us foreclosed - while coveting (we envy) their wisdom we lament their silence.

Grace is still a secret.

Emily Dickinson (Prose fragment 50)

2008-01-19T19:48:00.000-08:00

At the last

She cometh no more:
Time too is dead.
The last tide is led
To the last shore.

Eternity!
What is Eternity,
But the sea coming,
The sea going
Forevermore?

a deep grave surely

2008-01-17T03:46:00.000-08:00

"The stillness was that of a deep grave, save for the raindrops, falling light as thistledown, with a faint, monotonous sound like a whisper that dies and begins again and dies there behind the wet, glistening trunks."

~J. P. Jacobsen, Marie Grubbe, 1876

shadows and smells

2008-01-09T21:37:00.001-08:00

the army is imaginary...

2008-01-08T03:43:00.001-08:00

Lazarus - he already stinks.

-Kierkegaard - Journals and Papers v.3

2008-01-07T18:50:00.001-08:00

Darwin, who was born into a large family that for two generations had been scientists, engineers, industrialists, and well-to-do landowners, and yet who, despite his genius, was a sufferer of neuroses, constant illnesses (he vomited every afternoon at four), a kind of hysteria that took the form of gasping and palpitation, and seizures of depression in which he wept uncontrollably.
- Guy Davenport

(the image is by Etienne Leopold Trouvelot of an "ideal section of the atmosphere of the sun."
From the fine woolgathersome.blogspot.com)

2008-01-06T19:15:00.000-08:00

normal

caffeine

LSD

mescaline

1)
"Nourished on the blood of a schizophrenic, a spider weaves crazy webs."

-Guido Ceronetti, The Silence of the Body

2)
During the 1950s, a swiss pharmacologist named Peter Witt conducted a set of experiments in spider doping. He found that the spiders spun uniquely cockeyed webs depending on which substance they had ingested.

-images and Peter Witt information from the great http://www.kirchersociety.org/blog

2008-01-05T21:02:00.000-08:00

A Moon Piece, describing that notable Battel between Axalla,
General of Tamerlane, and Camares the Persian, fought by the
light of the Moon.

- Sir Thomas Browne, Musaeum Clausum II

(Thank you James Walsh)

i wish all fields were paper

2007-12-26T17:27:00.000-08:00

Miserere my Maker o have mercie on me wretch
strangelye distressed
cast downe with sinne oppressed
mightelye vext to the souls bitter anguishe
even to death I languishe,
yet let it please thee to eare
my ceaseless cryinge
miserere, I am dyinge.

anonymous

- thank you Antonia ( http://oneinten.blogspot.com/)

2007-12-24T14:57:00.001-08:00

He had a strange affinity with animals of all sorts, an eerie ability to get along amazingly well with them. At the zoo, lions and tigers would take one look at Buster's unsmiling face and come to him immediately.

- Tom Dardis, Keaton

Beneath his lack of emotion he was also uninsistently sardonic; deep below that...for those who sensed it, there was in his comedy a freezing whisper not of pathos but of melancholia.
- James Agee, 1949

image by corinne chaufour

2007-12-21T23:06:00.000-08:00

In the end the only thing that never changed, never became deformed,
were animals.

2007-12-09T19:47:00.000-08:00

…all these adventurers, fairy tale princes, sea pirates, and magnanimous criminals, I don’t complain that they have passed on but I would wish that they might find with every new orbit that life affords us successors on whom the whole sum of love and belief dedicated to them might be carried on.

- Ernst Junger

2007-12-09T10:52:00.000-08:00

anything not strange is invisible
- paul valery, cahiers

2007-12-09T10:31:00.000-08:00

Since I saw my grave,
there is nothing I want
but to live.

Heinrich von Kleist

E is for elephant

2007-12-08T17:31:00.000-08:00

The elephant is only a huge beast, but he is the most worthy that lives on the earth and has the most sense. I want to tell you about a characteristic of his honesty: he never changes females and loves tenderly the one he has chosen, with whom he nonetheless copulates only every three years, and that only for five days, so secretly that he is never seen in the act. But he is seen, however, on the sixth day, on which, before doing anything else, he goes straight to some river in which he washes his whole body, wishing in no way to return to the herd before he is purified.

-Saint François de Sales (1567–1622), Introduction à la vie dévote

They know no adultery, and do not engage each other in mortal combat over females as do other animals; not because they do not know the power of love, for the tale is told of the elephant who was enamored of a salesgirl; and have no illusions that she was chosen by accident: she was the mistress of the famous grammarian Aristophanes. Another elephant was taken with Menander, a young Syracusan who served in Ptolemy's army, and when the elephant couldn't see him, he manifested his unhappiness by refusing to eat. Juba tells that a young perfume dealer was loved by one of them. They all gave proof of their affection: joy at the sight of the beloved, naïve caresses, coins that they were given were saved and showered into the lap of their loves.

-Pliny the Elder, Natural History

2007-12-03T19:57:00.000-08:00

"Who knows," says Euripides, "if life is not death, and death life?" Plato in one of his dialogues puts these words into the mouth of Socrates, the wisest of men, the very man who created the theory of general ideas and first considered the clarity and distinctness of our judgments to be an index of their truth. According to Plato, Socrates almost always when death is discussed says the same, or much the same as Euripides- No one knows whether life is not death and death life. Since the earliest days the wisest of men have lived in this state of mystified ignorance; only common men know quite distinctly what life is, and what death.

How has it happened, how could it happen, that the wisest are in doubt where the ordinary man can see no difficulty whatsoever, and why are the most painful and terrible difficulties always reserved for the wisest? For what can be more terrible than not to know whether one is alive or dead?

- Lev Shestov

2007-12-03T19:41:00.000-08:00

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved: so I said,
"Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."

And so he was quiet; and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight, -
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an angel who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins and set them all free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;
And the angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father, and never want joy.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.

William Blake, Songs of Innocence-The Chimney Sweeper

2007-12-03T19:27:00.000-08:00

Weeping we scattered the seed on the fallow ground and sadly we went away.
- Sigmund von Birken

2007-12-03T13:00:00.000-08:00

This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless.Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science.What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.

Wittgenstein - Lecture on Ethics

Thank you, Antonia, for finding this fragment.

2007-12-03T12:43:00.001-08:00

i only want that i never had a friend

2007-12-03T10:03:00.001-08:00

When I am dead, my dearest

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

- Christina Georgina Rossetti , "Song", from Goblin Market and Other Poems, published 1862

2007-12-01T23:28:00.001-08:00

'The leg that you wash tonight could be amputated tomorrow."
- Guido Ceronetti

2007-12-01T23:20:00.001-08:00

utterly alien.