24 notes "There is no water to wash ourselves
before we speak."
— Ray Gonzalez, from “Dark Star”

(Source: anti-poetry.com)

45 notes "Everything has its limit, people say.
Each day I stand at a new one
and so come to think
about infinity, this
world’s strangest word
because only language contains it
within language itself, so then
a limit is thereby set.
It is clear, though
like its background colorless
like grief
that has consumed all colors
so their absence
stand out all the clearer.
The picture can be called
The Blue Desert and placed
on the other side of itself
in the next room
so with these words meaning
becomes sand.
Has everything come along?
Like it I bring only
the contents of my pockets.
So perhaps what is missing
could be a statue
of myself.
and made of iron, in the second person singular."
— Henrik Nordbrandt, “If Giacometti Had Been Along” tr. Thom Satterlee

21 notes "She knew what it was possible to say and in what categories people thought, who was capable of saying this or that and why. She had always loathed this language, every imprint that was stamped upon her and that she had to stamp upon somebody—the attempted murder of reality. But when her kingdom came this language could no longer be valid, then this language would pass judgment on itself. Then she would have opted out, could laugh at every verdict, and it would no longer matter what anyone took her for. The language of men, insofar as it was applied to women, had been bad enough already and doubtful; but the language of women was even worse, more undignified—she had been shocked by it ever since she had seen through her mother, later through her sisters, girl friends and the wives of her men friends and had discovered that absolutely nothing, no insight, no observation corresponded to this language, to the frivolous or pious maxims, the jumble of judgments and opinions or the sighed lament."
— Ingeborg Bachmann, from “A Step Towards Gomorrah” tr. Michael Bullock

6 notes "The children are in love but do not know with what. They talk in gibberish, muse themselves into an indefinable pallor, and when they are completely at a loss they invent a language that maddens them. My fish. My hook. My fox. My snare. My fire. You my water. You my current. My earth. You my if. And you my but. Either. Or. My everything… my everything…. They push one another, go for each other with their fists and scuffle over a counter-word that doesn’t exist.

It’s nothing. Those children!

They develop temperatures, they vomit, get the shivers, sore throats, whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever; they reach the crisis, are given up, are suspended between life and death; and one day they lie there numb and shaky, with new thoughts about everything. They are told that war has broken out."
— Ingeborg Bachmann, from “Youth in an Austrian Town” tr. Michael Bullock

17 notes "Mishima also felt those falling words a sickness and sought to hone his body in the sun in recompense. No doubt he was right to fear those falling words, that made themselves, with him, into stories, essays, plays of all kinds, each in but a single draft, knowing that as they were given to him, they were also turned away.

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”

21 notes

33 notes "to say as birds as well as words


*


The knowledge not of the century, you were
saying, but of birds.
“How dare you pronounce the world,” you
said “as birdswept.” Weather I say is
the knowledge not of sorrow, but of
windows, and past them
smoke, fatal evidence of birds. If
they’d stop singing, I’d talk
of music. Because my hands
smell like water, like how the beak
and the charred parts of the neck
both smell like water. I’d say I don’t
believe water, everything under
its sucking current, cement."
— Joseph Bradshaw, from The way birds become homonyms: an aviary

17 notes "i.

I am a fool
The soul has a shadow
The shadow drained the meaning from words
I was left with a few words, nonsense
I had simple things, a chair, a spoon, a smooth gray rock
I began to understand
Science is small, even frightened
Beneath it all, in our homelessness, there is nothing we possess
Now I will draw a picture
I said I am a fool
I draw what I see when I draw
The world is inarticulate
Once, I listened to a stone wall the way you would listen to a river
I began to speak its absent language
Stripped of everything but beginnings, I stayed on the cusp
The language of the passing world is make do
I began to speak this absent language"
— Rick London, from “The Receptive: A Radio Play” (a monologue in the person of the elderly C. G. Jung) (via)

33 notes "For language, over the past few years, had become the object of an intense — if somewhat vacuous — scrutiny. Become the plaything of new scholastics, myself included. Needless to say, I’d gone astray. Got lost in the intricacies of so much empty speculation. For isn’t language, after all, nothing more than a conveyor of meaning? How, indeed, could I expect a mirror to furnish its own reflections?"
— Gustaf Sobin, from Drafts, Updrafts, and the Physiognomy of Air

16 notes

6 notes "

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

9 notes "At the request of the painter Edgar Jené, [Paul Celan] wrote the “Dream of a Dream” and an introduction to an exhibition of paintings by Jené… Without his being aware of it, Celan uses diction that sounds as if he were appropriating Hiedegger’s. His concern with fundamental matters, which he expresses in the words ground or reason (Grund), Being (Sein), and “the alien death” (der fremde Tod), have a distinct Heideggerian ring and give the first intimations that the two share something in common…

The overriding Heideggerian echo in this prose piece, however, both in diction and in content, is the poet’s express exploration of the origins of poetic language, a topic that Heidegger discussed repeatedly in his later works where he saw the language of thinking and the language of poetry as arising from essentially the same source. Celan’s speaker desires to rejuvenate or regenerate worn-out language by returning to its primeval origins. In the process he uses two of the same words that Heidegger, in his project to examine and understand Being, had already employed in Being and Time for his announced intention of recovering originary language—primordial and primordialness (ursprünglich, Ursprünglichkeit). In What is Called Thinking, a later work, Heidegger openly admitted that his intention was also to revolutionize the German language so he could revolutionize thinking about Being… Without knowing this, Celan’s speaker announces his revolutionary intent of cleansing language of the “slag of centuries of old lies about this world” (von der Schlake der Jahrhunderte alter Lügen von dieser Welt) in order to recover authentic poetic language. He sees all humans as “languishing in the chains of external reality” and “gagged” so they cannot speak (dass der Mensch nicht nur in den Ketten des äußeren Lebens schmachtete, sondern auch geknebelt war und nicht sprechen durfte). His proclaimed goal is to recover originiary language in order to liberate humankind from this “burden of a thousand years of false and distorted sincerity” (weil seine Worte… unter der tausendjährigen Last falscher und enstellter Aufrichtigkeit stöhnten)."
— James K. Lyon, from Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: an unresolved conversation, 1951-1970

7 notes

itonaim:

Mikko Kuorinki

Wall piece with 200 plastic letters, wooden bars 

Text: Ingeborg Bachmann

(Source: mianoti)