heartsnatcher

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

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 which to clothe its minor key.Chords are struck alternating 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 band music played in zoos or in the small orchestras in provincial spas.
Children are its greatest fans.

- Adorno/Zola

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

- rilke

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.)

The only cure for madness
is the innocence of facts.

- Jacques Riviere in a letter to Antonin Artaud

later times

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

and they held out as long as they could.

irretrievable & irrepeatable

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.

In November 1966, a day before his 72. birthday, composer, translator and wanderer Juergen von der Wense died in Goettingen, Germany. His attic apartment was filled with many thousands of 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 were 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

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

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

- Kafka, notebooks

paper animals

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

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

for Jahnn

Nur das zwecklose wird vom ewigen beruehrt.

- Hans Henny Jahnn

hope

"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

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

"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

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

- Benjamin, Schriften I, 349

saints

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

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...)