In these gaps is the darkness

What guarantee is there that the five senses, taken together, do cover the whole of possible experience? They cover simply our actual experience, our human knowledge of facts or events. There are gaps between the fingers; there are gaps between the senses. In these gaps is the darkness which hides the connection between things…. This darkness is the source of our vague fears and anxieties, but also the home of the gods. They alone see the connections, the total relevance of everything that happens; that which now comes to us in bits and pieces, the ‘accidents’ which exist only in our heads, in our limited perceptions.

— Idris Parry, Kafka, Rilke, and Rumpelstiltskin (via here)

A hazy torpor overcomes our thoughts

The first moments of sleep are the image of death: a hazy torpor overcomes our thoughts, and it is impossible for us to determine the precise instant when the I, in another form, resumes the creative work of existence. Little by little an obscure underground cavern grows lighter, and the pale, solemnly immobile figures that inhabit the realm of limbo emerge from shadows and darkness. Then the picture takes form, a new light illumines and sets in motion these old apparitions: –the world of Spirits opens before us.

— Nerval,  (via here)

 

A sin against speechlessness

Sam: ‘All writing is a sin against speechlessness. Trying to find a form for that silence. Only a few, Yeats, Goethe, those who lived a long time, could go on to do it, but they had recourse to known forms and fictions. So one finds oneself going back to vieilles compétences [know-how] – how to escape that. One can never get over the fact, never rid oneself of the old dream of giving a form to speechlessness.’

About his new work, he said [the problem is] ‘qui est qui. One would have to invent a new, a fourth person, then a fifth, a sixth – to talk about je, tu, il, never. Qui est qui. The logical thing to do would be to look out the window at the void. Mallarmé was near to it in the livre blanc. But one can’t get over one’s dream’. Avigdor said, ‘Because of energy.’ Sam: ‘And entropy. And between these two we know which one wins.’ Avigdor: ‘That’s being.’ I: ‘Being isn’t logical.’ Sam repeated: ‘A sin against speechlessness. When one tries to say it, one uses the old forms, one tells all kinds of stories.’

– Anne Atik, How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett

‘Undersongs’ and ‘Waking Dreams’ added up top.

 

Language is a lie

‘God’, too, comes forth, is fabricated by the power of naming, from nothing. In this sense, the God that is named is an impostor. Whereas verbal richness constitutes the lie of the language of men, nudity and poverty are the lies of God (‘La nudite´, la pauvrete´ sont mensonges de Dieu’, Livre des questions, p. 93). The inventive, mythifying power of the word is human in its wealth of flourishes and divine in its dearth, its blankness clearing space for infinity. But in either case, language is an artifice, a lie relative to the truth of infinite silence that outstrips it and is always already there where words end. So that the saying even of nothing betrays it into the guise of something: some sound or sign is given to represent the unrepresentable. This makes language constitutively mendacious.

— William Franke on Jabès 

Story 3 cont.

She took to leaving for mysterious dam-related projects and in my new free time I learned to monitor the movements of shadows across my bed and walls; in the end I got out a tape measure and notebook. Tiring of this I invented knots and bows with the tape measure, finally getting it tangled beyond use. Time now was more like a giant gellid pool extending to all sides than a clean sealine in the distance, and to make up for it I declared war on each clock and watch in the house and by extension each electrical device. But when the items, dismounted and dismantled, lay spread out in all their scrambled quiddity I felt a wave of shame like never before. I looked for plates, throws, papers to cover the mess, asking myself how would I take my revenge if I came home this?

It was time to take some sort of action, we agreed. The dam too was leaking, the other night it was all they could do to plug it with poles, paper, leaves, she said. It was an emergency, she said. Have you been having a lot of those, I said. It’s always hanging over us, she said. Maybe you should look elsewhere, I said. Maybe you should look elsewhere, she said.

Now and then I tried my luck with one of the words we’d made up, sometimes she bit the hook and softened, let me have my catch again, it’s surprising what a made-up word in some corner can do now and then.

*

It was a simple question of whether you wanted to feel at home in the world, we agreed, then agreed it was meaningless question.

I’d never seen our neighbour until the afternoon I came home with a new kitchen clock; she entered her door at the same time as I did mine, leaving me obscurely annoyed. I refrained from dismantling the clock as soon as I laid it on the table but denied it its battery as long as I could.

*

The way they gridlocked time in the wine-bottling factory was as case-hardened as some of the line managers, some of whom played with speeding up the conveyor belt when certain combinations of packers and lifters they didn’t like were lined along it. We didn’t all enjoy it equally. For my part I knew I had to stay alert and ready. I gulped my lunch at the far side of the alley where I could watch the empty football field. At night I swallowed pills when cheap supermarket wine didn’t do the trick.

Most things were wrong when I heard the neighbour’s voice, nothing as they say had prepared me for it, and what seemed right after hearing it was out of reach. Some time later I detained her by the neutral curve of the stairwell banister on some point of municipal order. Our words wound right up through the stairwell as if it were a throat. She of course felt no such thing for all I knew.

Already lost

The days weren’t right when they should have been, in the days of your youth, when you had the energy of youth, just then the days were as wrong as they could have been, you were too stupid to benefit from your youth and your youth was wasted in waiting for your stupidity to end, in being put down, in being made to put yourself down, it was all the wrong way round. Only by waiting it out and thus weakening your resources, weakening your hope could you hope to find a way to begin again, so that when the time might come at last, when it looked at last as if you might overcome your youth it was too late, your youth had steered you wrong too often, steered you down certain winding rivers, down certain treacherous rivers, into certain whirlpools, you in your youth had steered yourself wrong too often, had been made to steer yourself away from calm  days on open seas.

Writing now means somehow prevailing over oneself

Writing now means somehow prevailing over oneself, for what to write when everything one touches is unspeakable, unrecognizable, when nothing belongs to one, no feeling, no hope; when an enormous provision, got I know not where, of suffering, despair, sacrifice and misery is used up in large amounts, as though everybody were somewhere in the whole mass, and the single person nowhere; nowhere any longer is the measure of the individual heart applicable which used to be the unit of the earth and the heavens and all expanses and abysses.

— Rilke, letter (via here)

What is in a word?

What is in a word? What lies at the core of language? It can only be the silent, empty Nothing of the tomb, the pyramid of the dead letter, as in the letter A. For language abstracts from things, it memorialises life, it voids presence. Yet, language says this nothingness in so many beguilingly soft, sweet, subtle and insinuating ways. The textures of words make it palpable, their sonorities render it audible and their suggestively shapely letters display it graphically. At the core of a word, beneath the crust of its consonants, is the liquid of its vowels, and these vowels in effect liquidate the word until it flows into the ocean of nothingness. This nothingness is what Jabès finds harbouring rapturously in the wings of language, and he parades and stages it in his books. But that nothingness into which all that is articulated dissolves is the unity of everything, albeit a unity that is itself nothing. As such, the inexistent totality/nullity of the Book governs every passage of the writing of words. Words are but the unfolding of this total nothingness. It turns them into a universe of emptiness: ‘Le verbe est univers du vide’ (‘The word is a world of emptiness’, El, p. 93).

— William Franke on Jabès

In spite of, or rather along with, those exchanges, quips, questions, there were also entire evenings when he didn’t say a word. At such times it was not easy to break the silence; it would have been worse than interrupting an avowal. There’d be a murmur, a shift in position, and someone’s voice slowly breaking the artefact that silence had become. Even though Sam’s was not an aggressive directed against anyone, but rather a sinking into his own private world with its demons, or so we imagined, those present suppressed their acute discomfort and feelings of ineptitude when it happened. His intimate friends learned how to cope with his struggle – A. by talking about a wine he had tasted, the theatre designer Jocelyn Herbert by bringing in a chessboard. I coped by bringing up Dr Johnson, and Con Leventhal. His old friend from Dublin, by retelling a bit of Trinity College gossip. They, or we, coped by doing any of the ordinary things friends do, the more ordinary the better, to bring to an end the fleeting and rather frightening chill.

— Anne Atik, How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett