“Original and astonishing works of culture are like a bomb which falls on a lazy, stupefied town, where everybody sits with their mug of beer and is very wise, and is oblivious of the fact that their insipid well-being is precisely the cause of the thunder’s crash.” - Hegel, “Aphorisms from the Wastebook”, Miscellaneous Writings of G. W. F. Hegel, ed. Stewart
The Magic Lantern
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Meanwhile, in the expansiveness of her joy, the Moon filled all of the room like a phosphoric atmosphere, like a luminous poison; and all of that living light thought and said: “You will be eternally subject to the influence of my kiss. You will be beautiful in my manner. You will love what I love and who loves me: water, the clouds, silence, and the night; the immense, green sea; formless and multiform water; the place where you will not be; the lover you will not know; monstrous flowers; perfumes that make you delirious; cats who swoon on pianos, and who moan like women, with a hoarse, gentle voice!
We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.
Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.
I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.
astonyen:clubdeluxe:jesusplayingolf:
“I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.”
It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.
The next day I visited the same shop and asked for the same girl. This was not only because I still had a good deal of money left over. The act, when I had first committed it, had seemed terribly poor in comparison with the ecstasy that I had imagined, and it was essential for me to try once more and to bring it slightly closer to my imagined ecstasy. One of the many ways in which I differ from other people is that the acts which I perform in my real life are inclined to end as faithful copies of what is in my imagination. Or, rather, I should not say imagination but the memory of my own wellsprings. I could never get over the feeling that every single experience that I might enjoy in life had already been experienced by me previously in a more brilliant form. Even in the case of a physical act like this, I felt that at some time and at some place which I could no longer remember—-perhaps with Uiko—-I had known a more violent form of carnal joy, a sensuality that had made my entire body seem numb. This provided the source of all my later joys, and indeed those joys were merely tantamount to scooping out handfuls of water from the past.
Truly I felt that at some time in the distant past I had somewhere witnessed a sunset glow of incomparable magnificence. Was it my fault that the sunsets which I had seen thereafter had always appeared more or less faded?
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
Do you realize that people don’t know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
“My great problem is that I’ve always felt -and especially since I’ve become a so-called personality, a celebrity, & so forth -that it was all a very exposable myth that I was somebody. I’ve felt that this was an absurd dishonesty and that if I were close to people, it would be instantly evident & they would say, ‘Well, gee, he’s nothing at all. What do we want to see him for?’ If I can talk to someone for just five minutes, five vital minutes, I feel I can carry on the myth of being a full person, but any longer and I would be shown up as an empty, worthless nothing… all colorless and shrinking, invisible.
Ironically, I spent a couple of years playing parts in which I was supposed to be a decisive person, but all the while I was in a torment over this feeling of being a total cipher. It just about paralyzed me.”
-Anthony Perkins, in 1960 Sat. Evening Post interview (quoted in Charles Winecoff’s Split Image) (photo by Sam Levin, 1963)
There are moving pictures with sound and light which never leave the projector of the soul but run in loops throughout life with unchanging sharpness, unchanging objective clarity.
People make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
“Many couples, many people, are not living with real human beings, but with their ghosts. Who has not followed for years the spell of a particular tone of voice, from voice to voice, as the fetishist follows a beautiful foot, scarcely seeing the woman herself? A voice, a mouth, an eye, all stemming from the original fountain of our first desire, directing it, enslaving us, until we choose to unravel the fatal web and free ourselves.”
—Anaïs Nin
[via liquidnight; photo from unexpectedtales]
(via moonlitcorner)
