01 05 2024 evening
Type one: reads to destroy themselves, writes to put themselves back together (French literature until Baudelaire).
Type two: reads to put themselves back together, writes to destroy themselves (Russian literature, Kafka).
Type three: reads to destroy themselves, writes to destroy themselves (American literature).
Type four: reads to put themselves together, writes to put themselves together (works at university, has two young sons already. Ah, I wish them well!).
It’s really far too much to look anyone in the eye: it’s the beginning of the unforgettable. And yet people complain that I look – stare blankly – at people I don’t know. Don’t you see? I’m protecting my mother!
02 05 2024 morning
The harder and colder you look at people you don’t know, will never know, the more flexibly, loosely, languidly will you look at those you love. Around whom the gaze should break, split into two and meet again behind them, the two sides of your seeing feeling their way back to wholeness on the other side of the head.
If you look into the abyss, it looks back. Fine, then take that look – carry it gently on the unmoving surface of the eye – and slowly deliver it, as with water poured, tilt it down into the chosen eye.
The ocular gymnasium of the commute…
02 05 2024 evening
Measure time as units of life, and what happens to your life?
Measure time as units of death, and what happens to your life?
And – is there any difference?
And how strange to call them little deaths, when all that happens is that you look under the carpet of time. That is not what death is about. In death that very carpet is used for mummification, in death its underside is precisely what is hidden.
What could be more horrible to contemplate than the backside of a face? The monks with their old skulls had it all wrong; what does the head have to do with time or life? Or with anything? The skull is a get-out-of-jail-free card for sophomoric existential dread.
All activity is a memory of the first time you opened your eyes.
Said to M, who had closed her eyes, that yes, I’d have no issue being blind except for – well, one minute a day would do it, not because a minute is long or short but because sight doesn’t measure.
But this is in no sense true for hearing, touch; they need time to function, and where are they sourcing it? It leaks down from sight, pools in these subtle indentations. Pools and yes, fills.
The face is a moment looking for eternity, that is, rest, that is, the final exit from the idea of measurement.
03 05 2024 morning
You have already said far too much about yourself, and even if it is all true it is untrue as a whole because you have said too much; once you say one sentence too many, then you are lying. If you say something true because it is true, then you are lying.
And you have thought too many thoughts, far too many. This will be God’s judgement. He will simply explain that it is not the content or even the form but the quantity that counts. And yes, a God of absolute quantification will know how to punish.
The eating of the fruit: the victory of the aesthetic over the ethical. The complete defeat, by the merest taste (the sin was in the mouth, in the skin of the teeth, not in the digestive tract) of all ethics. Or rather, of all ethics as it existed at the time, in its singular, pre-eminent form: the ethics of non-existence.
Contra Kierkegaard, isn’t it therefore the comingling of the ethical and the aesthetic that produced religion?
Someone else exists, and has a body, and it is via their body you see, again – and by again I mean for the first time – every other body. It’s true: from now on every time I think of Napoleon, on his horse, freezing in the snow, cramped and scheming in Elba, every time I think of Napoleon – and I will, more and more – I will have to route the thought through you, right through your heart perhaps, through which it will pass with varying degrees of difficulty. Well, it will simply have to pass. Unless –
(A famous local madman, whose speech has retracted to this breathless point, ‘unless –’)
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How long have you been writing aphorisms? Where do the particularities of your style come from? Highest compliment from a narcissist: I feel like I've written them, but forgot. Always look forward to posts!
“All activity is a memory of the first time you opened your eyes.”—this line is the most memorable of many lines of similar quality—nice work!