“You remain alive insofar as those who have known you outlive you. You will die with the last of them. Unless some of them have made you live on in words, in the memory of their children. For how many generations will you live on like this, as a character from a story?
[…]
Your life was a hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities.
Your suicide was the most important thing you ever said, but you’ll never be able to enjoy the fruits of this labor.
Given that I am speaking to you, are you dead?”
— Edouard Levé, from Suicide tr. Jan Steyn
“Thousands of his notes set end to end, I thought, and published under the title The Loser. Nonsense. I guessed that he’d destroyed all those notes in Traich and Vienna. Don’t leave any traces behind was of course one of his sayings. If a friend dies we nail him to his own sayings, his comments, kill him with his own weapons. On the one hand he lives on in what he said to us (and to others) all his life, on the other we kill him with it. We’re the most ruthless (toward him!) as far as his comments, his writings, are concerned, I thought, if we don’t have any more of his writings, because he prudently destroyed them, we go after his comments in order to destroy him, I thought. We exploit his unpublished papers in order to destroy even more the one who left them to us, to make the dead man even deader, and if he hasn’t left us the appropriate instructions to destroy his papers, we invent them, simply invent declarations against him, etc., I thought.”
— Thomas Bernhard, from The Loser tr. Jack Dawson
“That’s just it! Max Brod, Felix Weltsch, all my friends always take possession of something I have written and then take me by surprise with a completed contract with the publisher. I do not want to cause them any unpleasantness, and so it all ends in the publication of things which are entirely personal notes or diversions. Personal proofs of my human weakness are printed, and even sold, because my friends, with Max Brod at their head, have conceived the idea of making literature out of them, and because I have not the strength to destroy this evidence of solitude.”
— Franz Kafka, in Gustav Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka tr. Goronwy Rees [“In answer to Janouch’s question of why he allows his stories to be published if, as he put it, “publication of some scribble of mine always upsets me.”]
Opaque pebbles. Markers on what gameboard? He didn’t understand. They played him, they fell, indifferently, into the abyss they’d opened in his heart. No stalagmites in him could reach up to touch the source of their streaming. For a long time, he bowed his head and words fell hard like rain across him. Then he raised his face, his eyes, and looked up through the words. High above, at the cave’s summit: the sun. And it was the sun that he would reach to himself.
I think it was the dream of his death that allowed his words to flash. Death, that would join him to a sun above writing. A dream, for certain. There is no silence, only roaring. Pythagoras was right: the universe is noisy. The planets turn in their gyres and a great roaring is heard. It is that we must stop hearing to hear. To speak with silence, and not with words, if only to hear what will not be silenced.
What did Mishima hear as he died in the characters he let die by evisceration? The roaring of the sun, heard from within the sun. What did he see? Light, as it’s seen from within the source of light. He knew what would come to befall him. It was the object of his erotic fantasies, and he staged his death over and again in his stories. He rehearsed for death — but death had already reached him. He wanted to silence the words, to make his body all surface without depth. There would be no dark, interior space within which words would fall, only brightness, as rain falls flashing in the sun.
But what does this mean? That it is by some break that writing might be allowed to echo the ceaseless streaming of language. Some break, some block, as though there had to be a rack upon which the writer is stretched. But imagine an agony that is owned by no one and a rack upon which no one is stretched. Is it the body of the night that is pulled apart? Is it light that is torn into jagged flecks?
Now I imagine it is all of language that turns there like a Chinese dragon. Turns, and is turned against us. Language seeks to attain itself. Molten language, words and sentences still, but running. Isn’t that what flashes up in Mishima’s novels?
What are their characters? Wicker men and women to be sacrificed. What are their stories? Offerings to be burned. What unfolds in the time of their narratives? The setting fire of time; the sacrifice that must always happen again."
— Lars Iyer, from “Solar Journal”
There is a kind of writing that begins at the horizon, where others end. That begins with death, with the wearing away of everything. You are here, already at the end. It’s all finished where the horizon is a straight line, dividing land and sea. Over, and before it began."
— Lars Iyer, from “Solar Journal”
(Source: fraglit.com)
In a similar sort of way, I promenade my conscious unconsciousness along my tree branch of the usual. I promenade my destiny that goes forward, though I stay put. And the only thing that alleviates my monotony are these brief commentaries I make with respect to it. I’m grateful that my cell has windows inside the bars, and on the dust of the necessary that covers the panes I write my name in capital letters, my daily signature of my covenant with death.
With death? No, not even with death. Whoever lives like me doesn’t die: he terminates, wilts, devegetates."
— Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet tr. Richard Zenith
His voice fades. Most of his ruminations end this way - not morosely, as in his books, with a kind of rollicking doom, barreling toward repeated destinations: the passage of time, the state of the world, his own mortality, the basic futility of life, a dark but fun stickball game.
‘When I kick the bucket,’ he begins… then goes parenthetical: ‘Which can’t be too long from now. I think I’m getting out just in time. Watching the news, everything seems to be in disorder. Everybody seems to be unhappy. We’ve lost the knack of living in the world with the sensation of safety.’
The man who imagined escapes as romps that ended with warm suppers says, ‘I wonder why people still have children. I mean, why put kids in the world when the world is so insecure? This is how old people rationalize their death. You get a little crotchety with the world.
"— Amy S. Rosenberg, from “Sendak, picturing mortality,” an interview with Maurice Sendak (via)
“There’s the desire to return, to love, to not be absent,
and the desire to die, fought by two
opposing waters that are never to be an isthmus.
…
There’s the desire… to have no desire, Lord;
I point the finger of deicide at you:
there’s the desire to have never had a heart.”
— César Vallejo, from “Weary Rings” tr. Rebecca Seiferle
the water gave me madness
incessant humming blood
the water remembers the torn torso
melting through a seashell’s portholes
the quadrangular tight-rope of death
disease slaughtered women the trade
in gold and spirits of five hundred nations drifting
the water remembers the water is clarity
the water remembers offers back hurricane
the water remembers hides its secrets
no wonder water remembers its tectonic shifts
and the angry expectorant of lava
no wonder water runs muddy revolts
to flood and brackish
no wonder water stays still in the dark
the water is coming back home
— Roger Bonair-Agard, “what the water gave me (after Frida Kahlo)”
“We play at “Is it true I am real
and death will come”
We look at the photograph of the philosopher
The philosopher has the wet eyes of a rodent
Alas, but I am not real, says the philosopher
I am a photograph
…
And then we played at “Is it true I am real
and death will come”
So what was your conclusion?
we ask the philosopher
Tell us
Tell us
Tell us
Deaf man, dead man
ancestor god
Deine Zunge ist rot
Your tongue is rot
The philosopher in the photograph
only clutches
his favorite monograph
cause language, what can it say”
— Eugene Ostashevsky, from “The Two-Dimensional Philosopher”
Familiar land boundaries merge in the North. At their furthest tip, Canada nearly touches Greenland; you can cross from the New to the Old World in pursuit of a hare. From that point, Siberia, the other side of the world, is only a thousand miles away—a few weeks’ journey by dogsled. And Alaska is only half again as far. The opposite ends of the earth come together in the Arctic. From any spot, Ultima Thule could be just beyond the line of the horizon.
What is still more strange is the fact that if you stand at the North Pole, every direction is South. The same compass direction is both in front of you and behind you. It suggests a lexicographer’s nightmare, in which antonyms have the same meaning, or the same word has contradictory meanings (for example, our word “cleave,” that means either hold together or rend apart). This seemingly impossible situation is nevertheless familiar to you, who have often observed this fusion of opposites: water and fire, beauty and terror, sea and sky, hunger and disgust. This idea is not strange here; when you fall through the ice, the immediate danger is not the cold but the light: by the time you are able to see underwater, you are usually under the sheet of ice. Though easy to fall through, it is nearly impossible to break apart from below. You must look for the darkest patch and swim toward it, hoping it is the image of the hole you fell through—and not a log or a seal stretched out the ice, blocking the sun. Once you climb out of the water, the light and dark may reverse themselves; the water is pale blue, the old ice a dull gray.
You are not cold; you feel fine. This is an illusion of the sense of feeling. Instead, your body is going into shock. You must remove the freezing clothes immediately or you will die quickly. A quiet, painless death, a calm death, almost a soothing death, as ordinary as the snow.
Foreigners might well assume that this condition, called “confused snow,” is often applied to the more vertiginous aspects of love relations. But this is not so: in the far North, love and sex, to endure, must always battle against their opposites. Any fusion of love and hate, pleasure and pain, or sex and death would mean annihilation here. Such sickly conflations are the exclusive luxury of the temperate nations.
"— Brian Richardson, “Opposed Snow,” from The Twenty-four Words for Snow
5.
They asked a Kabul sparrow
Just what is mankind up to?
The sparrow considered this and died!
—Kamran Mir Hazar, from “Virus Writing” tr. Nushin Arbabzadah
The surface lacks history and when words cover it they say nothing, are mute scraps mistaken for nicks or stains. The surface erases wrinkles and blemishes, smoothes out ridges, tames the shaggy savagery of the convolutions and toothed corners in the undefended gullet of the days rushing by. The surface’s lack of history makes it responsive to the experience of death: its territory could be pain, the curved shouts of the rending of emotions and its abundance magnetized on the nervous system."
— David Huerta, from “Toward the Surface (Hacia la superficie)” tr. Mark Schafer
the earth around her stem
was so dry it refused
the water we poured there"
— Maggie Sawkins, from “Red Geranium on an Isolation Ward”
Estragon: In the meantime let us try to converse calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent.
Vladimir: You’re right, we’re inexhaustible.
Estragon: It’s so we won’t think.
Vladimir: We have that excuse.
Estragon: It’s so we won’t hear.
Vladimir: We have our reasons.
Estragon: All the dead voices.
Vladimir: They make a noise like wings.
Estragon: Like leaves.
Vladimir: Like sand.
Estragon: Like leaves.
silence
Vladimir: They speak all at once.
Estragon: Each one to itself.
silence
Vladimir: Rather they whisper.
Estragon: They rustle.
Vladimir: They murmur.
Estragon: They rustle.
silence
Vladimir: What do they say?
Estragon: They talk about their lives.
Vladimir: To have lived is not enough for them.
Estragon: They have to talk about it.
Vladimir: To be dead is not enough for them.
—Samuel Beckett, from Waiting for Godot
I have tried to understand death as related to the idea of waking. I am not certain of the name for this relation. It may be more appropriate to ask someone better acquainted with mathematics…
Fossils, like windows, are moments of discourse. Music is distinct from the measurement and transcription of sound. It is a form of recurrence.
I have tried to understand waking as the moment when the world ceases to make sense. Maybe one day everything will be collected in sequence and bound with leather.
"— Richard Froude, from “Fabric”
