spoken

20.09 

spoken 

spoken als niet hier maar toch hier 
spoken als others can't see;
als persoonlijke geesten, mijn kleuren mijn geuren mijn verleden mijn beleven verstenen verdwijnen

*

verdwijnen achter woorden van anderen omdat niet genoeg vertrouwen in eigen beleving. alsof de zintuigen defect zijn, of simpelweg mijn brein, niet in staat impressies te vertalen naar iets dat wellicht logisch is. kan zijn. 

the particular the universal 
anything beyond nothing—

the tenderness i feel (portishead, 'the rip')

gewoon een nest. to be brave is to not turn away.

24.09

—
(toevallig zilver.)


27.09 

spoken als hier maar toch niet hier.

*

nu zelfs afstand van woorden. lagen warmte aantrekken, maken, herfst maar ook—wat is het. honger. zien. verdwijnen.
(herhaal.)

she was pretending as if it really were true, amidst the pretending she needed to speak the truth of an opaque stone so it could contrast with the glinting green pretending, pretends that she loves and is loved

pretends that her chest is relaxing and a weightless golden light is guiding her through a forest of silent pools and tranquil mortalities

trying so hard to learn life

nothing was flowing. the difficulty was a motionless thing.

she was waiting. (..) nothing happened.

she wanted things "to happen" and not set them in motion herself

(alles schuingedrukt uit an apprenticeship or the book of pleasures van clarice lispector (penguin modern classics: p4, 5, 7, 13, 19, 92))


14.05

(..)
appel, appel, apple, appel. 
(..)

raak me aan is het lied. maar waar is de tijd.


28.09

mistig vanmorgen, 09:02 uur.

ik liep vanmorgen langs een veld vol schapen en moest aan farmer oak denken (uit thomas hardy's far from the madding crowd); another man who waited. maar: fictief, net als lispectors ulisses.

i must not question the mystery in order not to betray the miracle. (lispector, p80) 

going beyond one's person

spoken. 

/ genoeg. te veel afleiding. terug naar de boeken, het lezen. (het (laten) vormen.)
retracing steps from earlier this year. 

*

“(..) Kenneth White makes the distinction between five ways of reading: skating-reading and gobble-reading devoted respectively to newspapers and most novels; study-reading, which we do when we want to learn something; meditation-reading which entails ‘texts of high specific density’; and finally illumination-reading, which he describes as ‘almost a state of grace’.”

“(..) the way in which Kenneth White sees reading: as the possibility of going beyond his person to create a new transpersonal context.

It is often and wrongly believed that writing consists of ‘personal expression of the treatment of a problem’. For White, what matters on the contrary is ‘the explosion and the expansion of the person’ and the ‘penetration into a space’. This space exists outside the pervasive and much abused myth of personal genius, and beyond any preoccupation with so-called and often illusory ‘originality’. What is ultimately interesting is the ‘cultural network that someone can create, reveal and radiate’.”

 
“‘I'm looking for a world’, he explains, ‘and if someone seems to me to have approached this world in an admirable way, I salute him and quote him, not content to just borrow ideas on the sly and boil them down into some homogeneous soup.’ This comes from a certain intellectual honesty: to recognise that one is not the inventor of everything, all by oneself. But it is also an integral part of a cultural strategy: ‘When a voice is alone in the desert, it will not have much influence, but when it presents a whole current...’ It also involves a certain mental topology: ‘like abrupt landscapes and mindspaces, with a quotation set in it like a rock in the sea.’”

 
“‘What, among other things, a book like this can do,’ says White about his book on Antonin Artaud, ‘is to bring together minds and energies that never met, or hardly met, in actual life (..)’”

—anne bineau in ‘a geographer of the mind: kenneth white as reader and writer’; p. 123-135 in grounding a world. essays on the work of kenneth white

i hear the far-off fields say things

“the achievement of being a human being is knowing how little you know and being surrendered to that. rilke says, what we need is to be defeated decisively by constantly greater beings.”—martin shaw in gesprek met iain mcgilchrist: 'this is what we were born for'

: 

the man watching/ rainer maria rilke (translation robert bly)

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great.
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.