Frenet, Journal

Always this double movement, at once too far inside and too far outside. But inside and outside what? As if one’s eyeballs turned inwards and outwards at the same time.

– Frenet


A waking, or half-awake dream. I lived in a room occupied by a man who had just died. I had the strength to look in the mirror. No, hardly strength. Did it crowd me or make room for me, the mirror? I made a hole in the door with a table leg through which they deigned to feed me. I had the cunning to grab their hands, to force them to touch my belly, my sex. Sometimes they enjoyed it. Sometimes I did. By listening I learned their methods and found my own. I learned to murmur back. I pressed my face against the mirror: my cheek, the back of my head, my hands.

– Frenet


Space

– To become yourself you must first be unmade.
– But I’m already unmade.
– That’s only half the battle.
– But I’m already defeated.
– There are different ways to be defeated.
– ?
– Maybe it’s a question of space.
– ?
– … of finding the space in which something may grow out of your unmaking like a plant that grows out of a broken shell.
– What space?
– There are spaces that free and spaces that cripple. You can be freed in the space inside yourself or in the space between you and another. You can be crippled in the space inside yourself or in the space between you and another.
– But I’m already crippled.
– Then find a better space.
– I have either too much or too little.
– Then find a space in between.
– Between what?
– Between yourself and others, or between you and yourself. A fertile space.
– Those spaces are only momentary.
– Then live in those moments.
– Time drags, one moment moves into the next and both are lost in the drag, like the spaces. All is one, all is confusion.
– You’re hopeless.
– It’s you yourself who’s made me hopeless, who’s unmade me.

– Frenet, Journal


Smoke

The aim of this journal is to end this journal. And if it was finished before it began, if it was dead before it was born? Then it should at least be aware of its stillborn state, of the life whose place it’s taken and to which it should give way. Let these words rise like smoke and the everyday speak in their place.

– Frenet, Journal


Between others

Love the other as yourself. What can it mean but that that you too are another, that love lives in the space between others? That love is a space that makes you by unmaking you.

– Frenet, Journal


The clearing of the everyday

I don’t escape into writing, I write to escape from writing. I am what writing’s made of me, what I’ve let it make of me. I want to put an end to it, to the whole paltry and humiliating enterprise.

*

I am looking for something. It looks for me too, through these words: it’s already here, calling me out of myself, out of writing.  Meanwhile I write to ward it off, awaiting its arrival, biding my time in infinite detours.

– Frenet, Journal


Another

I often used to ask myself how people move from inside themselves into the world with such ease. From, say, reading a book to talking with people. How, say, writers walked onto a spotlit stage to speak about their work as if the back of the stage were part of the same space as the stage itself, as if they themselves bridged the two by walking from one to the other. All I remember from such events, which I now avoid, is what the rooms and faces looked like, who spoke, how hard or soft the chair was.

To go from your room to a place full of people, from yourself to others – as on a tightrope of unknown length, suspended above an unknown height… To hear your self come out of your mouth as if through the mouth of another, answered by yet another…

– Frenet, Journal


Kindness

I confess my debt to kindness. Without small acts of kindness, my own and those of other strangers, I’d be crippled, cowed, alone. Soup brought to someone’s sickbed, a word of encouragement, a listening ear. Kindness is the last miracle on earth, a miracle *of* the earth, stronger than the chimera of truth and the chimera of love.

– Frenet, Journal


The moment

One moment submerged in the moment, the next, empty. But the moments themselves drift into one. Does it need me, the moment, to come to itself? Is that why it calls these words forth? Maybe it’s outlived itself, just as I’ve outlived myself. Does it want to escape or become itself in these words? Maybe it can do neither, just as I can do neither.

– Frenet, Journal


I pass by

I don’t read, I skim. I’m not read, I’m skimmed. I pass by, am passed by.

– Frenet, Journal


Casting off

I learned their methods too easily: it took me years to cast them off. How easy to learn, how hard to unlearn!

– Frenet, Journal


Dusk dread

This old dusk dread, this fear of the no man’s land between day and night, will I ever be free of it? Will I ever surrender to it? The only thing that helps is to be with animals. I let the neighbour’s cat in through the window, let it purr on my lap, go and play with my friend’s excitable dogs. I walk down to the gypsies’ horses with apples. They roam free all year round on a littered field, the poor filthy beasts, they come trotting when they see me, we’re getting to know each other.

– Frenet, Journal


Nothing to say

I write to say the same thing over and over, as on a palimpsest. I write to confirm that I have nothing to say, or rather that all I have to say is nothing – that it’s nothing compared to the everyday. The everyday that this journal keeps me from and flirts with. The everyday that’s hidden in the ordinary, somewhere within or beyond ordinary life. Which trumps all. Which has no opinion of me.

– Frenet, Journal


To return to what is here

To return to what was here in the beginning, to what’s always been here, patient, indifferent, waiting. That’s what I seek in this journal. To end this journal, so I can begin to live. No: so that life can begin in me. But is this not living? No. This journal was a failure from the beginning, from before it began, it’s enmeshed in failure like a fish thrashing in a net. It should seek its own invisibility, its own never-having-been, as though it were being written in disappearing ink. To return to what was here, to what is here – impossible dream.

– Frenet, Journal


The last man on earth

Strange to see the contents of my head strewn about here, as if they’d been dropped from a pocket and lay unnoticed, like obsolete objects. As if I myself were obsolete… If I were the last man on earth, if no one were ever to see these notes, would I go on writing them? But that’s precisely how one should write, as if one were the last person on earth, as if one were obsolete. What makes a wolf howl? What makes him stretch his neck and send his cry through the freezing air? Would he still howl if he were the last wolf on earth?

– Frenet, Journal


Writing itself

The dream of writing without rewriting, of writing itself (of not thinking but being thought)… Years of treading water in language, far from any shore, have taught me better. But the dream remains, to be one with the words that flow through you, through which you flow…

– Frenet, Journal


Survival

False, false, false. False even to ask where our real faces are behind our masks… A sudden plunge of anxiety, of emptiness… My life! What have I done to it, how can I repair it?

But a voice says it’s good as it is, your very survival makes it so.

– Frenet, Journal


So I say

What I couldn’t have achieved if I hadn’t been hindered by this double who follows me around like a bad twin, who squints at me, smirks at me, leaps on my back, light as a ghost, so I can carry him through my life! I’d have slipped into the world, wouldn’t I? Straight from childhood into adulthood. I’d have been like those people who can talk and sleep in public. So I say, he says.

– Frenet, Journal


To confess!

To confess! To God — to the absence of God. To be absolved, absented from my past. To be emptied out and yet to live: what else do I seek with these words? To be given life. Words without me – or me without words.

– Frenet, Journal


Moments of undoing

Not stories, rather those moments of undoing when you’re stopped in your path and something lies before you like a challenge, demanding that you bear witness to it and let it do its work on you. I always admired people who can let themselves be absorbed in stories, let stories take them in from beginning to end, in the same way I admire people who can sleep in public. I’m always on the outside of every story, except when I’m pulled in by a passage that seems to step outside the story, revealing its meaning and thereby its meaninglessness; that at once illuminates and undoes the story to which it belongs. Often I’ve dreamed of writing a book consisting only of such passages. But I’ll never write a book.

– Frenet, Journal


Perhaps the only true thoughts

Perhaps the only true thoughts are those that have been obvious all along, that have been lying in wait for you only to show you how the way you shield yourself from them has prevented them from being revealed to you.

– Frenet, Journal


An invulnerable experiment

When I was young I daydreamed about sending a version of myself out into the world who could act without pain, follow his desires without fear, be caught up in life without being crushed by it: a self who could live in my stead as an invulnerable experiment.

– Frenet, Journal


Unhappiness

It’s been given to me to understand almost any form of unhappiness, that’s my talent. People come to me in their unhappiness because they sense I’ll share it. And when they move on, when they start their lives anew, I smile when I think of them, I want them to forget about me. I love them the only way I know. In another life I might have been a priest, a good man, instead of the bitter, remote person I’ve become.

– Frenet, Journal


The boundless moments

All my life, the feeling of life having taken a wrong turn. Youth: knowing nothing not yet having lived enough. Ageing: knowing nothing not having lived enough when young. It’s in the odd boundless moments of my life that I live, in the moments that detach themselves from the rest of my ragged history, that gather and lift me up. I do whatever it takes to summon them, and in between try to bridge my past and present, to create the link that would save me but never comes.

– Frenet, Journal


I give myself drift

I say ‘I’ to gather myself in, but as the word escapes my mouth I lose it, as I type it I give myself drift.

– Frenet, Journal


I type a few words

I type a few words, halfheartedly, delete half of them, smoke a cigarette, despair of my life, and if the right words come, if one right phrase comes, I’m found, or rather lost in a larger world, at least for a moment.

– Frenet, Journal


To lie

To write is to rewrite, which is to say to quibble, which is to say to lie. Thus to write is the work of the devil and to be written is the work of God. But to write is unavoidable and to write is also to be written.

– Frenet, Journal


Do I write or am I written?

Do I write or am I written? I write and I’m split in half – writing writes me and I’m one. Writing goes on and I’m lost.

– Frenet, Journal


This journal doesn’t exist

This journal doesn’t exist. It splits into a hundred pieces as soon as I start writing it.

– Frenet, Journal


An ordinary, artificial life

What an ordinary, artificial life I’ve led. And how ordinary and artificial it is to write about it, as if for ‘posterity’. What do I have to say? In an absolute sense, nothing. And that’s what I’m saying.

– Frenet, Journal


I read to say to myself

I read to encounter people who take life as seriously as I was meant to, whose very lives are at stake in their writing. But I hardly read, life gets in the way.

– Frenet, Journal


Life gets in the way

To encounter someone in the close distance or distant closeness that art creates is easy, but to stay with them in it is almost impossible. Life gets in the way.

– Frenet, Journal


Cave

Every word I utter to another is a call into a cave, and its echo is an ethical demand. It says: who are you that you can say this and mean it? It says: who are you that you think you can you help me?

Frenet, Journal


Impossible

This journal is impossible. To use writing, the very thing that distances us from life as a tool to bring life close, to get life back, is a ridiculous enterprise.

– Frenet, Journal


The struggle

The struggle is this: to allow all that’s said to enter into you as into a graveyard, to believe nothing, not even your disbelief, to seek no answer, accept no answer…

More and more the fragment, the fragment of the fragment, the swallowing and giving darkness.

– Frenet, Journal


Writing that writes itself

These notes my go-betweens to no one. In lieu of a line to God.

I send them out, offer them up, let them fall from my hands.

I dream of a form of writing that would write itself. Of writing without writing. Absolution.

– Frenet, Journal


All is confusion

There are strange lucid mornings when everything around me seems new and unfamiliar, like when you move into a new home. An uncanny silence descends on everything, like an interruption… I drink my tea, leave the flat and the world’s white noise returns, the town’s sounds and signs sweep over me, sweep me away, sweep away the silence which now seems an illusion. All is confusion.

– Frenet, Journal


Cocooned

Sometimes I sense a cocooned world of feeling inside me that would connect me to others for good if only I could release it: that would make the world come alive with meaning. But when others get too close, I want to float off into the world of words and images that continually passes through my head, into the void from which they arise, and never return: to subtract myself from the world until nothing is left and I’m free.

– Frenet, Journal


Walking in circles

A few months ago, out of a kind of desperation, I started walking. In the beginning I’d walk one or two hours a day, later whole afternoons, sweat running down my head. I walked all over the city, through parks, forests, industrial estates where lorries with advertisements on their sides rumbled by me. I walked myself into the ground, day after day. I’m slowly getting stronger, my pace grows lighter and faster. Our bodies are built to walk, I’ve discovered, built to find their natural rhythms in the steady pace of a long walk. I let my shoulders relax and my limbs move in loose counterpoint until I’m just a body moving through space. There’s always something missing, some goal out of reach, which is why I started walking in the first place. I’m walking in circles. Walk then, I tell myself, walk your circles.

– Frenet, Journal



Note towards a way of life: find your own grave and stay ready for resurrections.

– Frenet, Journal


It’s too late, I said to myself, it’s over, there’s nothing for it but to start to live. To wrench something into these sinkholes of time, these gaps between self and others, self and self.

But I’m too far away – or too close. The border between self and world either recedes out of sight or dissolves and lets the whole world in.

– Frenet, Journal


The young women in those tight denim shorts that are fashionable now, in their skirts, in their summer dresses. They own me, they make me small. Look at me, they say, look at me and… go on home.

– Frenet, Journal


Sleepy pubs in the afternoon. Soft drafts, light through the leaves, through the windows. Heat. I seep out of myself, float in the air.

I sit with the jobless and old-timers. Workers in splattered overalls filter in. Soon the suits will arrive and it’ll be time to leave.

But there comes a point, after a few pubs, when I can gather myself in and sit still, where I am, in my own skin.

And then I can sit for what seems like hours, in the slanting light, hardly moving, hardly thinking, half-listening to the muffled chatter in the background.

– Frenet, Journal


The old man whose acquaintance I once made in a pub, I who never talk to strangers, who am never spoken to. His lips moved as he sat on his own, a type I always ignore. The old man who became my drinking acquaintance during my heavy drinking days, in the days when I knew no one, spoke to no one, simply by virtue of us sitting in our customary seats some distance apart in the empty afternoons, who muttered soft banal words that I barely heard, and barely responded to, who was neither happy nor unhappy but just sat there day in day out, living out his time – a condition I aspired to in those days, which are not so far away, which in fact are always close behind me.

– Frenet, Journal


The concept of dignity has long since lost all meaning for me. I’m a desperate man. I live for the days of calm, between the black waves, when I can read and my soul expands.

– Frenet, Journal


Why this journal in the first place? I delete as I type, meanings disappear as the words appear on the screen.

A fat black fly buzzes back and forth between me and the computer. I wave it away and it returns. A perfect start.

– Frenet, Journal


Time to confess, I tell myself as I sit down at the computer. Time to tell the whole truth at last. But about what? The lack of truths to confess?

– Frenet, Journal

---

Delirium

He lay sick and coughing in bed, in a sweat of dreams. Figures, haunting specters, crowded his mind, malevolent, ugly demons, faces he knew, grotesque faces, her face, her laughter, a bitter torment till his dying days. How could he be so stupid, how could he have lost the trail? He turned over in bed, heaved a great phlegm, and directed his dream out the sinking hole. There were angels waiting in the wings. He only had to speak.

jellema's explorations part 3

the nothing that we scarcely know - heidegger (jellema viii)

In the midst of beings as a whole an open place comes to presence. There is a clearing. Thought from out of beings, it is more in being than is the being. This open center is, therefore, not surrounded by beings. Rather, this illuminating center itself encircles all beings - like the nothing that we scarcely know.

Inmitten des Seienden im Ganzen west eine offene Stelle. Eine Lichtung ist. Sie ist, vom Seienden her gedacht, seiender als das Seiende. Diese offene Mitte ist daher nicht vom Seienden umschlossen, sondern die lichtende Mitte selbst umkreist wie das Nichts, das wir kaum kennen, alles Seiende.

Heidegger -- Ursprung des Kunstwerkes


'And just in the very process of putting into words - while you roughly have in mind what is supposed to happen, because you invent it yourself (that's what you think), there may be - unfortunately not always - suddenly a moment of adjournment of thinking, a gap, a view of something that had not been there before, or a view actually not of anything determined, but a view of transparency, alogical, but very true, a view of something that is more in being than the being.
This will be in the finished poem the never precisely determined open center where one is moved. And in the moments of transparency I experience in myself something that is more in being than being: a becoming one with sight.'

(jellema mangled into english by me)

*

Jellema is reading Hölderlin (Und den Zaun wilder Holunder umblüht), the mysterium tremendum et fascinosum and writes about being intimidated by his poems, the Hölderlin-inaccessibility-problem, facing the difficulty of Hölderlin's poems not opening up. which reminds of the difficulty knausgaard had with them: Come on! Into the open, my friend, as Hölderlin had written somewhere. But how, how? This in some way is a problem of not getting in, of being outside of poetry, of life, of - inaccessibility, of the things that escape, and of whom one remains outside of - i wonder about the nature of this kind of inaccessability, what it is one is separated from...what it is that escapes...

Jellema initially sees two obstacles that cause the inaccessability of Hölderlin's poems.
Het waren de vorm en, ik durf het haast niet te zeggen uit vrees te worden misverstaan, het onpersoonlijke, of moet ik zeggen bovenpersoonlijke. En die hadden met elkaar te maken. p32
Those two things are form and something he calls the unpersonal or better overpersonal (or better: beyondpersonal?)

*

i am very much intrigued by the next poem, because it - in some way - describes this problem of - self, the self behind words, concepts but also trying to reach to whatever kind of beyond - and that this kind of beyond too also always is ongeroepen. maybe it's not just our necessity of naming that is ongeroepen, - and maybe it is this obligation, we are there to name - the ongeroepen, everything that is uncalled.... and maybe uncalled for...
not that naming always brings things into existence... even and especially if it is not called, uncalled, ongeroepen, it does exist in its uncalled state. it maybe is independent of naming... ongeroepen it exists behind us, next to us, infront of us... its own sort of invisible independence.

now i've read a bit more - but nevertheless still only have a small understanding of what's going on - i am very much impressed how jellema approaches those so called borders of what can be said and of what can't be said. and that this is where all the interesting stuff happens. and he circles round this constantly. there is nothing of everthing i've read so far that lacks this reflecting on the ineffable... directly or indirectly... of how it escapes you, of how you sometimes get close, then you don't and all the life that meanwhile happens... very thoughtful. and despite that a lot of stuff escapes one is left with something though, although what that is is hard to put into words.... the things one has seen and thought on the way, the way perhaps that one needed to achieve a mental state, a mental position, a thought, a frame of mind, and that this way, the length of it, in a sense, also determines the strength of one's position, eliminates all superficiality.
...naturally of course i find that all very intriguing.



There was no space for him, because understanding

took his place. neuter. the. barred

by norm he stayed hopelessly (& loyal to) the immature

high selfimage that being would be ended.
(this is very difficult to say in english.... i am not sure i can convey that correctly)

Maar woorden hielden hem, grens aan't vermoeden
but words held him, bordered to the suspicion
dat waar de geest naar grijpt daar achter ligt
that what the mind grasps for lies there behind (behind being)

if, more than freedom, it held the unlimited,

the - like put into an image - farview


is death infront of it, then it is to live

and is the moment, blindely undergone

an opening through which we are casually driven

and we stand in sight of the thought

't gedicht ontworpen uit toeval en wet
belicht de vorm van 't oneindig sonnet.
p287

*

the 2nd reality (on jellema iii) --

to continue my observations when reading jellema.

i am still trying to understand my fascination: you read something, something you like a lot. the writer is already dead. in fact, almost since ten years. you know there is nothing more, except maybe in some secret vaults things that wait to be published. but you can't count on that. you can't also count on that you are able to get the books since it was so difficult to get the collected works.
so you have doubts to read it all at once, you want to leave something for later. it's a strange mixture of shyness, excitement and hesitation. of impatience too.

but also: the question how the reading and the understanding changes: the way one reads every day. the way one understands things differently each day, depending on one's frame of mind, one's moods and tempers, distractions, obligations. another kind of mise en abyme. i'm not every day as open, as receptive to his writing as i'd like to be. the ways one is one's own obstacle. last time i read it and wrote about it, it didn't nearly work half as well as the first time round. it wasn't there and i knew it. today it's different again (and i'm not quite there either), now i made this changing receptivity a theme.

those days when it escapes one, the reading, the connection. today it's not going to happen (or maybe it is, you got to try anyway and who knows what happens then).... suf - and suf means some kind of state in which one thinks all kinds of stuff but it remains foggy, like when one has hangover. some sort of being flaked. it doesn't have any traction, the thinking. but then i saw this bernlef (need to find out whether they wrote about each other, bernlef & jellema) quote about lucide suffen and that's exactly it. add some lucidness to that state, some ability of the mind to actually grasp what one is doing and thinking: the 2nd reality, if one could call it like this:

Van dingen spreek ik....


(of things i speak in the second reality)

(that is bendable memory)

(experiencing is too fast even for astonishment)

(a footstep sounds when one doesn't hear it anymore)
p24


experiencing is too fast for astonishment..... something slower than experiencing something. what can be slower than that? some form of bendable memory? because it is past?

to see the open door, but not to enter it. a once closed door and what's behind it.
or maybe not. not the open door, not a question of entering, but the possibility of entering. and something much more before the door, something much more preliminary.
the open door too: how can i reach you. and you is what, the second reality, or is you, or is finally- a changed question actually. and maybe still not any closer to the 2nd reality. does that matter? maybe not. each question is its own close(d)ness.


[...]

            ik dacht:
             (i thought)


(you were what you saw, and yet, the sum)

(of seeing; the existence of things you turn around)

(by way of being (the existence), their supply, their danger:)

2.


(When does alienation start and seeing?)

(a dove, your pride, jumped on by a cat)

(and you as a child the sorrow that you had)

(and to those concerned you couldn't show (the sorrow):)


(the new never can replace what you had)

(first insight: something outside me)

(shimer on the feathers, the movement of)

(both wings. A freedom that you didn't own)


(once everything is/begins for the first time. mourning too)

(never again like this. that your mother died)

(reconciled you with every goodbye that will come)


(you showed mistakes of the building)

(the door opened just once. when)

(it closed, i think, something closed in you too.)

*

3.


(people are silent over (things). plants are silent)

(about themselves. their truth does not need words)

(in order to be. so unhidden in their stupid)

(greenbeing that one can step on them)


(without pain, without any -- i can't do this one.)

sel van gods denken en niets anders dan
als groei antwoord op ons verlangen: kom.


(solutions in form, edge of leaf, withering)

(nameless eternity, or death disappears)

(in a repetition that appears to us to be like)


(what the earth brings forth/creates, silent, every)

(being trodden on bearing as something that doesn't cut/hurt -)

(do i understand it? can i reach you like that?)

p208

*

on jellema -- ontroeringen (the foundations of my enthousiasm)


 afgewend haast

this morning i sat to read jellema by the window - trying to live the good life, well slept and although coldridden, content, book in the morning, tea, concentration, repose, everything right: and thought - like often - i need to write about him (and here the question arose: what do you mean when you say that you like a book?), i need to say so much about him, i want the whole world to read him (his work consists largely of poetry, translations and essays). but then, he wrote in dutch and is to my knowledge largely untranslated. this fate that he shares with so many, he translated such an impressive amount (and i love his meister eckhart translation, among others), but in turn, this honor is not bestowed on him. and i thought i have to do it myself then, knowing i am not the translator type of person, an insight and limitation i am aware of, that this is not in my personality, not something i can do. i can translate for practical use, but not transferring the beauty into another language. which also has to do with that i don't know any of my languages well enough to do this sort of undertaking, and i cannot do it into english, because my english is worse than my other languages.... but i can say maybe what is going on there in those poems, in that book and why his writing has such a strong effect on me. trying to grasp: - what is actually going on when you read his writing:

the moment of repose, in reading, or - in love too:


(my soul is in quiet with the moment)

(as if i never before was so --)

and i cannot translate the word bestaanbar - (but can you describe it?) - what it means  it has to do with standing. but it has a meaning of standing as in standing still and of continued prolonged existence, it's very fundamental.

the story of my reading: i came across him first - how, why? i don't even know anymore, i think because of eckhart even, saw a footnote and looked him up, went to the library, got the books and -- it had an impact. i thought i need to read this all right now. but this was a busy time in my life and i didn't get round to read this all. but it called me back, i couldn't concentrate on the things i was supposed to do, because i felt i need to read jellema. but then i couldn't and then i went somewhere else and all of a sudden i had a very hard time to get the book. until last december when i was travelling and some very kind and helpful (ontroert again) were able to get it for me. and now, now i've got the time to read it properly.

so i have called this ontroeringen, because this is the title of an essay collection (which i haven't read yet) by bernlef, but it is also the feeling that predominates my feelings when reading. ontroert. what does this mean. it's in some ways a word for being moved which since recently i decided i don't want to use anymore, because -- i don't know, i am scared it gets overused. and i like that ontroeren is a compositum which to move isn't. besides moving means other things too, while ontroering is a word made especially for the very phenomenon of being moved.

and that you just can't say you're excited about something - or moved, you need to say why, what are the foundations of your enthousiam (and enthousiasm means: the gods within). and i immediately thought those foundations are - as usual - unnamable, in the sense that it's a foundation with no solid ground and maybe therefore even stronger. but there it is, all just wittering, rabbiting, grand titles and no explanation. instead you write the story of how you got to know the book. but no escape into the unnamable, to aim deeper, to explore this more. what does it mean to be moved by a book. the easy solution would be to go on, explaining, what about the plot was interesting, the genre discussion. a  necessary glassbead game in its own way.

but maybe there is no explanation and the answer is still: the unnamable. descriptive rather than prescriptive. describe your don't know why.

and there it is:


(Identity)


(what do i know about you)


(you need a lot of sleep)

(and you don't tolerate coffee well)


(that you love your dog)

(and partly why)


(that you are happy)

(or sad i can see)

(and hear, with my own eyes)

(own ears)


(and you love me)


(but which dream has changed you)

(into a black panther, white raven)

(how many faces did you want to kiss)

(or hit, and why didn't (you))


(what i don't know: how would you have been)

(without me, where, with which people)

(who in my place -- i don't know)


(neither how you will die)

(and on which day)


maybe my sort of translating is a sort of speaking after, repeating what you said, but in a different language. a sort of saying after you. not really a repeating. i follow your word. and it feels so much more banal, in english (i often feel there is a lot of dutch character lost in translations of the dutch, with other languages i don't feel this so strongly). but there it is. the things you don't know. het waarom niet gedaan. this is the line that -- moved me most. the reasons why people don't do the things they do. literature, the books you read an those you didn't. identity is also always about the unknown. there are the things you know. and those that you don't. to me - and i feel this very strongly - this is a big part of what attracts me to his writing, that he always thinks with the things you don't know, that this sort of unknown is always included in his thinking and writing. here in this poem this is expressed explicitly. very often it is not. and i do prefer -- i am not sure art is the right word, - i prefer art that is like this.

*


I’ve learned to value failed conversations, missed connections, confusions. What remains is what’s unsaid, what’s underneath. Understanding on another level of being.

Anna Kamienska -- A Nest of Quiet

*

jellema's explorations part 2

Stifter: thinking like the wood

109. THE TREASURE OF GERMAN PROSE. from Goethe's writings and especially Goethe's conversations with Eckermann (the best German book in existence), what German prose literature remains that is worth reading over and over again ? Lichtenberg's Aphorisms, the first book of Jung-Stilling's Story of My Life, Adalbert Stifter's St. Martin's Summer and Gottfried Keller's People of Seldwyla and there, for the time being, it comes to an end.

Nietzsche -- Human, All Too Human II The Wanderer 109

[Der Schatz der deutschen Prosa 109. Der Schatz der deutschen Prosa. — Wenn man von Goethes Schriften absieht und namentlich von Goethes Unterhaltungen mit Eckermann, dem besten deutschen Buche, das es gibt: was bleibt eigentlich von der deutschen Prosa-Literatur übrig, das es verdiente, wieder und wieder gelesen zu werden? Lichtenbergs Aphorismen, das erste Buch von Jung-Stillings Lebensgeschichte, Adalbert Stifters Nachsommer und Gottfried Kellers Leute von Seldwyla, — und damit wird es einstweilen am Ende sein.]


that is nietzsche's list of important books and -- i have read the eckermann, the stifter, some of the lichtenberg, not the jung-stilling, and not the keller, but something else by keller. and the question is this: why not green henry, why the people of seldwyla.

but stifter.  
st martin's summer. indian summer. aftersummer. late summer. the time now: late august, september...

i don't know what it is. i tried to read something else after i read some stories by stifter, but just couldn't. not ready for something new. but why is it so gripping. i found even things (not a lot at all) i don't like in stifters's writing but this doesn't stop me being gripped by it. all the other books, new books i bought, somehow didn't feel right and so i thought, well i have some more stifter here, i can read this just as well, so i subjected myself to witiko and it is just as gripping and just seems to get better and better. (a lot of people think that witiko is even more boring than indian summer.)

why. what is this particular stifter experience: so many people complain about stifter there is nothing going on, all that harmony and all those good people, utter boredom they say... etc also stifter maybe not the first writer you associate with nietzsche. but how he influenced them all.... for instance bernhard's woodcutters and stifter's story Der Hochwald, other instances bernhard referd to him...and how bernhard writes to h spiel about stifter, compares him with wittgenstein...

it's not beauty - or not just beauty alone, because it's beautiful too -- it's something more, the decisive thing more. the ineffable that creates significance. the innermost in indian summer: i looked and searched for something, anything inner, for something that was far beyond lines and colors, that was bigger than those things and yet had to be able to be created by (way of) lines a colours...


time and length:
some disposition, personal preference: i like boring things and which made me wonder why generally i prefer reading the long book. the first 200 pages just to get used to it all. long books require time, no shortcuts are possible. the security there is always enough time to unfold things. nothing too abrupt. the time things also need in real life and in this sense --

to abstract from the personal preference: stifter has created his own time. not so much created time as in how people were, act, what they wore etc. but how things happen. you get thrown -- not thrown, immersed rather -- into this stifter world. some inner force in the writing to be slow. this happens then that. and then you read it and see what goes on and it's sort of some kind of journey into the innermost but not without neglecting the outer world, predominantly nature, but also people, feelings... all the things that can get mocked so easily. and witiko it seems is the application of the education of the lad of indian summer in reality, but to say this would deny the reality of everything that goes on in indian summer, so this is wrong... reality -- difficult word. the application of t
what stifter called das sanfte Gesetz the gentle law, from the preface to Bunte Steine, a law that preserves and guides humans just like the law of nature preserves the world. they can't be thought independently of each other. these are quiet and incessant laws and noticable only in singular expressions and silently animating the soul: a life of justice, simplicity, restraint of oneself, prudence, being active in one's own surrounding, admiration of beauty, love of close people...



thinking like the wood is from witiko...he asks the girl whether he might be able to hear her sing when he comes back, she replies: might do, if you think and sing like the wood. i was exulted he says, and he can't sing, but he says he can think like the wood....
witiko, he's gone out in the world to look for his luck, for his happiness. not a lost luck, but a different luck from that of being at home. a fate, a huge fate. a fate yet unknown, because it wouldn't be luck if you knew where it was. you got to make your fate. it's not clear even whether one is the right person to make one's fate but after all it's about to do in the world all one is able to do, just according one's capacities. isn't it that also what art is about.... the art is about to set out to create itself. be created not the right word, what is the place of art in the world, not one that it already knows but one it has to find first, a very own place (and only that) that's suitable for that very (piece of) art according its very own characteristics. the art that goes out in the world to find its place...



*

withdrawn, quiet, kind

the handke/lenz letters
was just the right thing to read and heal me from my resentment towards the evil monolingual english... and it's not really what i mean, monolingual, i know not everyone has the time to learn languages...it's just this weird dire depressive cultural situation here that gets me down...

and i read these letters and - haven't finished them yet - and wonder why people don't talk about books anymore like that (or maybe they do, i only don't know where), in this withdrawn, quiet, kind tone. which reminded me of this recent or current discussion - i didn't follow that properly -- about how to write reviews: to write them only in an enthousiastic (enthousiastic means: the gods within, and "if only" i hear someone say) way, but they mean: superpositive about the book, no matter what; or in a critical way, ought it not to be allowed to write bad reviews and so on and so on tear the book apart if it's shit and why is that wrong. and i don't understand all that really. enthousiastic and bad are just two kinds of loud. and what ever happened to good old descriptive. all those discussions feel so strange to me, i rather sit in the garden to read and carry my teacup around to see how the flowers are doing in between those letters. who emanate just the right atmosphere to think about books and literature and writing.
but then again i also don't know whether it makes much sense for me to write about those letters. i feel this burden of - if not literally - making this mood understood and to make this mood understood is maybe already too much interference to destroy it... i don't know

but it reminds me to read more this sort of thing...

[page 279 has a honorable mention of our mr abbott in it in which he is being described by mr handke as having the spirit of mr lenz's books very much in himself (der Deine Bücher schön in sich hatte).
well, this just describes aptly the very spirit of those generous, heartwarming and intelligent letters...]


*

Jellema: How to approach a literary text

The literary text determines itself with which method, with what complementary science you can approach it in the best way. And then it depends on your reading experience, your life experience, your erudition, your literary intuition (= your openness, your open mindedness, willingness to understand the impossible as possible, the improper as proper), the structure of your personality (whether you are willing to question your own insights about life or whether you're convulsively embracing absolute truths), from all this it depends what you are doing with a literary text and what the text is doing to you, in the sense of giving you an insight, creating a change, taking away a prejudice, and you answer to this in the form of giving account, formulated as clear and as precisely as possible.
The problem with believing in method (too much) is that one regards a literary text as an object, a thing that one can keep outside of oneself: and then literature is dead.

29 november 1977

C. O. Jellema

*

Sentences by Max Frisch have an incredible intensity. I don't know why that is. Maybe because they don't contain a superfluous word. Not a single literary decoration. He can smell: apple sauce, flowers. A great word: Apple sauce [Apfelmuß] - with Frisch this is very direct: a detail that is. Maybe the intensity has its origin in the fact that Frisch has a capacity for love - of things, people. Hannah in black! In such a sentence Hannah is present with all intensity of love that Faber feels for her. However problematic relationship are in Frisch, in essence those relationships are important to him, and their realness.
There is never a cold expression of brokenness, much more an attempt to go to the bottom of things, to repair the brokenness, and if this can't be done, then to look at the brokenness in a way that it/the brokenness reveals itself as guilt and shortcoming. I suddenly have to think about Anna Blaman. Also her niveau  - although Frisch is virtuous where Blaman is always a bit arduous - is determined by the neverending drive to look at human relations under the sign of guilt and love. Blaman as well doesn't stop at the psychological exploration of a feeling, as Vestdijk often does - she aims for the human situations/condition in general. This is what Meckel lacks: the warmth that gives life. It is well true what Proust says: the talent of a writer is determined by their goodness - a good writer is always a good person -; by way of their capacity to love. This is why A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is Handke's best book.
This is why Frisch sentences are so intense. They create relation(ship)s in which the things are themselves - not in themselves (alone) - because they are in-relations. We need to learn to love.

6 december 1973

C. O. Jellema

*

living permanence - ontgrenzing (jellema x)

not the first time you read jellema, but the first time you had his books from the library. on the way home, in some kind of waiting room, waiting (what were you waiting for, certainly also for the book and what's in it, what it would tell you), reading and feeling the significance of - those closed pages which you feel: are like an unheard melody, something without words, but very tangible.
something that is not emptiness.
(were you waiting for the reality of the not-emptiness?)

'what is emptiness: not days in which one has nothing to do, on the contrary, one might be very busy.
an emptiness of waiting, for instance: one waits for a certain letter that doesn't arrive and when it finally does one reads it real fast, hurried and looks in the contents for something that cannot be in that letter. Or one reads a book: one is moved: this is it, the truth, until one suddenly realizes the relativity of one's opinion, the onesidedness of what one has read. Every experience has as its basis a something that is not absolut, that is not a last and final truth, a something that is relative and perishable. And people, loneliness is a bigger reality than any form of social life. One suddenly can realize, while being in a conversation: this is that meeting. what will remain. a memory, vague and sometimes embarrassing.'

the impossibility of - having no boundaries, of - is it becoming one? being one with everything? what expression are you looking for? ontgrenzing means - deboundaring.
and the way this is impossible except for moments. described in a peom like this:
to lay down next to being and to be fruit, and dark together.

the absolute awareness, full well aware, of this state, and the way there is an urgency in this awareness (ik heb het absoluut gekend) and how this brings one to face nothingness.

the reality of nothingness, the reality of (social) emptiness...

and first it is about being a reality. another person can only be a reality in one's own life if one is a reality in one's own life. and sometimes those realities can fall together. how this is very close to mystic, but not quite and it's important to make that clear - just for clarity's sake? or better: to make it clear for what can be said and what not.

Considered in itself and independently of all sensuous matter, his personality is nothing but the pure virtuality of a possible infinite manifestation, and so long as there is neither intuition nor feeling, it is nothing more than a form, an empty power. Considered in itself, and independently of all spontaneous activity of the mind, sensuousness can only make a material man; without it, it is a pure form; but it cannot in any way establish a union between matter and it. So long as he only feels, wishes, and acts under the influence of desire, he is nothing more than the world, if by this word we point out only the formless contents of time. Without doubt, it is only his sensuousness that makes his strength pass into efficacious acts, but it is his personality alone that makes this activity his own. Thus, that he may not only be a world, he must give form to matter, and in order not to be a mere form, he must give reality to the virtuality that he bears in him. He gives matter to form by creating time, and by opposing the immutable to change, the diversity of the world to the eternal unity of the Ego. He gives a form to matter by again suppressing time, by maintaining permanence in change, and by placing the diversity of the world under the unity of the Ego.

Schiller -- Aesthetic Letters XI

the source of reality is in the person...  and is reality an intrusion between the world and the self? is reality in the way of all the ontgrenzing, the being without boundaries?  is reality in the way of me being able to hear those poems? but that reality can be mediated  by way of voice (is voice always the ego?)

to see those moments, the experience of being without boundaries as - a wish to see them as songs, living, longlasting songs that sing out of themselves when they are being touched by a voice. giving those moments some living permanence.

the person brings reality to the world.
but voice brings some kind of living permanence to those moments, but only if spoken to, otherwise the songs remain silent...

duurzame, levende liederen, die uit zichzelf gaan zingen, zodra een stem ze aanraakt. 11 november 1963

when you were first with the books, you were waiting for that living permanence (but you didn't know that) and waiting for this permanence to wake up, maybe reading is just another word for touching other people with one's voice, but then the other way round - not the speaking or writing is the touching, but listening and reading gives life, is touch. the reading bestows living permanence. reading awakes something and once it's woken up one listens to those moments of ontgrenzing, and being together with the book, being dark with the book. you just need to lay yourself down next to being.

*

the world as will and tenderness: de geestelijke waarde van de tederheid (jellema ix)

the concept of tenderness.

it's always interesting to find out about other people's favourite words which then might become something stronger, concepts maybe, built around a certain worldview, fitted into a system of beliefs, of perspectives.
and the way people arrive there, at finding out why one or other word might be significant and how some of those words become concepts that are not usually included in average
philosophical terminology somehow become more meaningful, maybe especially so, because they are not included in already established systems of thought. words, concepts that have to be rescued in a way. attention is one such word, although, quite a few people pondered this, such as cristina campo for instance.

similarly other people thought about tenderness as something more than just - a word.

jellema (14 maart 1962) ponders love and the way one expresses oneself in love the way one really is and in ways one can't express oneself normally, - or: verbally; with an added amount of intensity.

jellema starts with a confirmation of his belief in the intellectual value of tenderness (de geestelijke waarde van de tederheid - and it is a real shame that there is no english equivalent for the word geest/Geist). he hesitates: am i not making a fool out of myself. but then repeats: the intellectual value of the tenderness. an intellectual value of something that is commonly associated with the sensual.
he describes tenderness as a capacity all people are capable of and they ought to find it in themselves in almost all circumstances. for jellema it is for one's personal life as important as will and persistence, albeit with a different task than will. the world as will and tenderness: will is directing life through one's possibilites and tenderness is of a carrying nature, it carries life, makes life fertile for developing (those possibilities). It opens life.

 Noordhuis & Jellema


this is contrasted with jellema's description of his times rather honouring and preferring 'hard & harsh masculinity' which makes it difficult to live tenderness (especially for men, and more especially: for gay men), and that in daily life generally tenderness is cornered, the longing for tenderness had to make space for calculation, accounting, the impersonal and the sober. here tenderness as something that enrichens a person, makes a person a person and consequently that jellema believes in tenderness as the most important aspect of being human. and that in literature very often tenderness is mistaken or misunderstood as blind erotic. so, tenderness also has to do with seeing, or maybe awareness. it's not a blind capacity.

tenderness then is generally built into an idea of a good way to live and that onesidedness can be damaging, upsetting the psychological equilibrium. and that the best balance and protection against onesidedness is to do or have a bit of everything: work, love, being in company, being alone, to live, to write, for others, for oneself. so the advice against one-sidedness is to do just what/the very thing one lacks of those things listed in the previous sentence and tenderness helps to balance/develop all those things, and lacks. adds an indirect intensity. because it helps one express what one cannot say otherwise (and then says it differently), and not just - in love. maybe like this: a different love. tenderness expresses life in an essential, intellectual, nonverbal way life can't be expressed otherwise. and that a lack of this expression of life is a serious impairment, of one's person and of (one's) life (and writing).

*

[while you were writing this someone's sleepy hand was resting on your back]

jellema's explorations

Breath, you poem beyond all seeing!
Pure and ceaseless demi-urge
in counterpoise with our own being.
Interchange in which I rhythmically emerge.

Lone wave, whose gradual sea
am I; You, the most austere
of all conceivable seas,
- space's conqueror.

How many spaces in this vast horizon
have I contained within? Many a wind
seems like my own son.

Do you know me, you breeze, so full of spots
hitherto mine? You once smooth rind,
swell and leaf of my spoken thoughts.

Rilke


*


J.A. Dèr Mouw

Who is he?

jellema's exploration

who is she?

*


do you still know who you are?


*



what interests you: not the big constructions with the big words, not the new discoveries, rather
the nature of quiet, of staring, of being alone and together alone. those sorts of states which occasionally seem to be a precondition for -- a specific sort of encounter with one's thoughts, one's self when reading...

your idea of theory is θεωρία which just means looking at something, contemplating. not writing longlong treatises on something. although you do that too occasionally. just not on the internet.

you just want to write along.
just so.
without that it necessarily has to mean anything.
you don't want the big words. the big books. you want small, short phrases (but you want precision too). and then you go on reading all those longlong novels. maybe a sign of your slowness: you need 100 pages to get used to it all.

and the short form leaves you space in a different way.

reading a bit more poetry too, of late...

*


Patience it is music
unfolding slowly
It must play out until the end
without omitting anything
like a quiet happiness that comes
climbs up a path and descends
down the hills of days and nights
difficult fragile unaware
...

anna kamienska


*


and in an odd way coming across lenz, hermann pondering a tenderness for words (Zärtlichkeit für die Wörter) which you reminded you of jellema thinking of tenderness as some kind of intellectual capacity. this sort of thinking should be encouraged.
last night you read lenz, jmr, or as you always call him: the actual lenz. the büchner one. and that is some rather gorgeous writing. very aware & very sensitive. sad. about a dear room which he has to leave: so soll ich dich verlassen, liebes zimmer.


and the lovely idea to teach them both lenz hermann & jmr and that would fit. only it would not fit to the british education system or what's left of it, so it's not happening.

harmony. ἁρμονία - agreement. harmonize: to make something fit to each other.
 difficult fragile unaware



*

beautiful.

*

sometimes you don't know words in any language anymore.
 such a simple word for a practical thing and you don't know it anymore in any language. also not even vaguely so you could look it up. you could ask someone, you know: what is this?


and so you read on and on and all those writers and their words - overlap - and it's not bad way to spend time....

it's not that you mind that you don't know anymore who you are or what words you forget.

*

jellema, a poem about silence: to stare is to drink silence out of things
you cannot go further because light determines the borders in which you breathe.
you, here:
...
you're not dreaming at/the night, why then sleeping when there is no dream...

*


Que peut-être je guérirai

*


The soul sometimes gasps in the breast
It does not want to fly to the air in these
explosive times It grips the ribs like bars
But then it comes murmuring Houses tremble
in fear Because everything happens inside
not outside

ene mihkelson


*

it's not like you take things very serious here with what you call: writing into the internet, no uppercase, incomplete references, jotting down. in some others you wonder about all this ambition, this direction, this drive and the big race to: getting published. and the resentment of those who won't and who then strive to improve their - game.
-- enough said.

*

Duparc, Chanson Triste (1868) - Jessye Norman


*

yesterday:

(My voice has no bearing No echo / Who observes me in reality e.m.)

you woke up with the cat curled up by your feet, her little head leaning in the curve created by foot and ankle. you didn't dare to move.

food:
the day consisted of approx 3 litres of tea.
bread (not english bread, proper bread) + butter + springonion & chives sprinkled on it.
for lunch you fried some potatoes with onion. in all fairness, you belong to the 'unsophisticated heartwarming grub' school of cooking.
in the evening a tin of grapefruit segments and you like that it is called segments. not a fancy new word. so latin. latin grapefruit segements.
you take 4h over one glas of wine. not chateau petrus. you prefer stout anyway. which you've been told is an old fogey beverage here. fogey is a good word.

your way of coping with academentia: not going in, only ever going in when absolutely necessary. not checking your university mail more than twice a week. never replying immediately.

still: writing. happily chipping away. due to new wordprocessor you suppose. you always used an open source programme which did the job but wasn't brilliant. now you try iPages. and good.
but also helped: talking to someone whom you knew from the days of yore. more confidence in your writing. the connection: in order to write one has to be confident, at least to some extent. you often lack that. if you ever feel secure about something it is often only afterwards


the lost thought:
more important than what.
why are lost thoughts important.

the vexing thought:
the things that you betray...

the things that you betray.

how: in speaking about them in -you can't say it.


the books you read, so many many interesting books... too many at once. a lot of them wonderful.


you speak dutch to your cat: dag poes, hoe is het met je? you don't know why.
you listen to duparc and you allow him to break your heart a little (only a little). so this is what you do, you eat and drink and read and write,


Dans ton coeur dort un clair de lune,
Un doux clair de lune d’été,
Et pour fuir la vie importune,
Je me noierai dans ta clarté.
J’oublierai les douleurs passées,
Mon amour, quand tu berceras
Mon triste coeur et mes pensées
Dans le calme aimant de tes bras.
Tu prendras ma tête malade,
Oh! quelquefois, sur tes genoux,
Et lui diras une ballade
Qui semblera parler de nous;
Et dans tes yeux pleins de tristesse,
Dans tes yeux alors je boirai
Tant de baisers et de tendresses
Que peut-être je guérirai.

you haven't been outside all day.

Because everything happens inside
not outside


it is 3am and you tried to sleep since probably 12. you give up for now, meaning to try again at least before it gets bright again which is around 5am. you're rather more content than not - , still, you can't sleep. it's also the last night alone at home and you sleep distinctly better when he's there. sleep should go back to normal soon, hopefully.



calme.

*

aiming without direction; muted clarity


finished reading jellema. you know that his writing will accompany you for a longlong time and you will return to it. you already are returning to it.

the characteristic aftermath after reading a significant book. the well known emptiness.

and in order to smooth the transition to - (transition to what?) you decided to read about something that’s similar:

lenz (hermann), a book about his house (called: Im stillen Haus by Norbert Hummelt), where he  lived, in munich,  first as a student, then as an old person. images of old furniture and (old) books. you watched a documentary about jellema, maybe similar old furniture and old books. the same old feel. who loves old furniture is a hurt person (wer alte Moebel liebt, der war ein verletzter Mensch p24)
you have foremost antique furniture yourself. go to an english furniture store, then you know what you're up against: antique furniture is more beautiful and cheaper. in the uk.



in that book a biography of lenz:
1913 born
1922 passed an exam at school
1924 moving to stuttgart
1927 read mörike for the first time
1929 read stifter for the first time

biographies ought to be like that, describing a life according to the inner decisive events, experiences, the books one has read. and when.


[biography of today
8.00 - 12.00 pondering the lenz book and jellema
12.00 trained clematis up to shed to grow over the roof, overcome fear of height (2m!)
afternoon: thought about a certain jellema poem and how you're not sure what to do with this beauty, but how you are grateful that it exists. you think also how jellema is being called, or better: accused of being too cerebral, but you think the cerebral bit essential
13.45 how to write about this all. wanting to write and then not doing it.
13.52 pondering the 2nd person exhortation
in the guardian, the other day, someone complaining about bloggers using the 2nd person and how that's bad style. 2nd person, that's you. you've also even occasionally reflected on your use of the 2nd person. occasionally you even write in the 1st person. it's probably not wrong to say that your use of 2nd person is due to the ability to create distance and also - ego fragility. who is ever sure of themselves. you could probably defend your use of 2nd person by referring to humboldt's dualis, or buber's i and thou -- and for instance gadamer's celan study: that the you is aiming, but it is rather aiming for nothing instead of for someone in particular. it is aiming without direction.


the same thing: your tendency to ask questions without using a question mark.
14.something - ? 16.50ish:  reading judith schalansky sailor book, ok but not great. not as great as the island book.
sometimes the habit to read books such as the schalanksky one that distract you from what is actually important to you, such as jellema for instance. what hinders you to focus?
18.31 brought freshly harvested red currants to neighbours to share.
20.15  opened grillparzerbook which was lying in the sun, opening it caused a wonderful sensation of old paper smell. old words. and who will read all those old words. you want to.
now: still too warm
now: how to write about this all
now: i am really thinking about it
now: i love those poems.
now: do i read grillparzer or - how to write about this all. you're not even coming close.
now: concentrate, no, better: composure and greeting the evening. first reading then writing, then thinking. in that order. you have to rediscover your patience, your trust in the muted clarity of the not yet present word.

now: thinking about that inner area that lenz described, where writing takes place:

the main effect of reading lenz - that his writing is so disarming.

*

to be continued...




Acknowledgement: http://fortlaufen.blogspot.co.uk/

Max Richter - The Blue Notebooks

Everyone carries a room about inside them. This fact can be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one's ears and listens, say at night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.
(Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks)

Scene from Nostalghia, Andrej Tarkovsky 1983

Julien Sorel's dream

in enchanted gardens



her gentle spirit



to guide you




this is where I search


 to find you




into the labyrinth


i dive



in dreams


she leads you



your own gentle spirit


to find

Aboard, abroad

The pin-pricks of memories drawn from the well of nostalgia.

Knowing we have no home, we locate to the house of pain. But joy is in the details.

Sometimes the heart is a destitute thing, rooms upon empty abandoned rooms.

This bed, a mast of dreams, carry me home.

We have tasted oblivion, but not of the lasting kind.

But dreams are impotent if we have no way to resolve.

They lie shattered and in pieces. And call out in the night.

Until that delectable hour, when you arise once more, with nothing but the sun in your hair.

You give me words to sing.

You give me these things.

And it's enough if I linger among the roses

Among the thorns and the bleeding.

And stay on this path.

I die here.

I come alive here.

A picture of you

And all of our yesterdays are but stardust

Exorcism and Execution

He had fallen silent these past few months. There was nothing left to say. Only to live. Let the past be swallowed in a thousand things. A time will come when words will matter again. But not now. Not today.

Today is a day for a beheading.