difficult and invisible

Today it is difficult to assess 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 number 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 Rohde 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

...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

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

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

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

- Cioran

Tesla

died penniless, alone with his pigeons.

Blind Pony at Observatory

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

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