FIGURES OF NEARNESS
And force and pain and what pushed me and drove and held me: [. . .] the rush of pine scent (once upon a time), the unlicensed conviction there ought to be
geoffrey hill
another way of saying this.
We have to renounce knowing those to whom we are bound by something essential; I want to say, we should welcome them in the relation to the unknown in which they welcome us, us too, in our remoteness. Friendship, this relation without dependence, without episode, into which however, the utter simplicity of life enters, implies the recognition of a common strangeness which does not allow us to speak of our friends, but only to speak to them, not to make of them a theme of articles, but the movement of understanding in which, speaking to us, they reserve, even in the greatest familiarity, an infinite distance, this fundamental separation from out of which that which separates becomes relation.
Here, discretion is not in the simple refusal to report confidences (how distasteful that would be, even to think of), but it is the interval, the pure interval which, from me to this other who is a friend, measures everything there is between us, the interruption of being which never authorizes me to have the friend at my disposition, nor my knowledge of them, (if only to praise them) and which, far from curtailing all communication relates us one to the other in the difference and sometimes in the silence of speech.
M. Blanchot, L’amitie
Kafka spoke of books as “hatchets with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.�
[mathesis singularis I - tender insurrections]
Ditching Art for art’s sake, as in ditching Philosophy for thinking. “Art” as such is too institutional, too bound up in wherever it ends up and how it gets there. This is about going on paths that lead now/here, they precisely do not LEAD. Paths nonetheless — in greek the word for path is “methodos”, the etymology of our word method.
MIL A N KLÍ Č
[in the company of poets]
[meridian]
In this first volume of Milan’s image archive, we were faced with the unspeakable demands posed by these early creaturely expressions of Milan’s “inner gravity”. Like frozen lava, these human figures were made under the oppressive night of a “occupation” regime when Czechoslovakia was a part of the communist block and all aspects of culture were subject to official dogma. Amongst all (im)possible attunements in curating (caring for for) this archive, we found it best to undertake this work in the company of poets. Paul Celan’s Meridian speech offered a curating thread thanks to which other fragments of poetry could descend — and allow this desperate conversation to begin. At times it had to take on dialogical form. Indeed, what is important to Celan, what requires a different kind of attunement and small rabbit ears to hear, is the particular way “art” and “poetry” come together and pulse through one another in the cycles of repetition that are at the heart of language, here to be heard from an open wound at the heart of Europe. In this more than silence and less than saying, (which is a book) we hope only to show that only archive is the witness — it must always be so.
the breathturn
p.c.
Poetry is perhaps this: a turning of our breath. Who knows, perhaps poetry goes its way—the way of art — for the sake of just such a turn? Perhaps after this, it can be itself . . . in this now art-less, art-free manner, go other ways.
w.b.
Somewhere between the saying and the said, there is a conversation held as it were between ourselves and citations. So extensive are these borrowings and so constitutive is their role in the conversation, as to become the enactment of a decisive ethical principle of an/other kind of communication?
p.c.
Yes, a conversation, a desperate conversation full of words which seem to smile through quotation marks. I assert it is necessary to turn away from received and compromised notions of the true in order to open to the possibility of a coming — rather than a comfortable—truth; I plan to speak here about hope.
t.s.e
A hope without hope, because it would be a hope for the wrong thing…
m.m.
Perhaps a chance to open a passage among seemingly independent and sovereign realms, whereby letting ourselves be guided by the way verbal, textual, and human bodies come together in exuberant flashes, where connections are unwittingly forged between unsuspecting interlocutors, where uncanny interventions of words “come” in place of others?
I find something which consoles me a bit for having walked this impossible road in your presence, this road of the impossible. I find something as immaterial as language, yet earthly, terrestrial, in the shape of a circle which, via both poles, rejoins itself and on the way serenely crosses even the tropics: I find ‌
a meridian.
paul celan
I believe we have just touched it again.
g.a.
It is only after a long and arduous frequenting of names, definitions and facts that the spark is lit in the soul which, in enflaming it, marks the passage from passion to accomplishment‌
The unavowable community ?
5
From a certain point on, there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
Zurau aphorisms F. Kafka
t. s. eliot
the still point of the turning world?
Neither from nor towards;
— at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement.
and do not call it fixity.
the still point, where past and future are gathered.
but I cannot say
[...]
— where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
[There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.] — I can only say :
there we have been.
between the done and the not yet ...
For some time now we have shared one shadow.
[irreversible springs]
“this world demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease.�
In his address at the University of Cape Town in South Africa on June 6, 1966, Robert F. Kennedy painted a grim picture of the state of the world:
“There is discrimination in New York, the racial inequality of apartheid in South Africa, and serfdom in the mountains of Peru. People starve to death in the streets of India; a former Prime Minister is summarily executed in the Congo; intellectuals go to jail in Russia; and thousands are slaughtered in Indonesia; wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere in the world.” Yet, he argued, “as I talk to young people around the world I am impressed not by the diversity but by the closeness of their goals, their desires, and their concerns and their hope for the future.” For Kennedy, the young generation across the globe represented “the only true international community” that was able to transcend “obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans” and “a present that is already dying.” In his view, “this world demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease.” Hence, amidst revolutionary transformations worldwide, Kennedy called on the young to take the lead, admitting that “you, and your young compatriots everywhere have had thrust upon you a greater burden of responsibility than any generation that has ever lived. “
“the only true international community”
The fiery moments of Spring 1968 In Paris, Prague, Berlin, Washington, New York, London, mostly young people took to the streets in protest against a state of affairs which had for a long time been denounced. This youth manifested a sincerity which was neither the brutality of ideology nor the violence of action, but a movement towards one another, which only comes through the experience of human vulnerability best expressed in the declaration — we are all undesirables. Irreversibly, the vague and often abused notion of authenticity took on a new precision: Youth is this authenticity. Capable of reviving responsibilities loosened from the thick rubble of history, this youth, of which it can no longer be said “if only the youth knew” — ceased to be an age of passage or transition (“youth has to pass”) — to show us the true face of our humanity. In the “West” this outrage was quickly extinguished by a conforming babble as sterile as the one it aimed to replace. In Czechoslovakia it was crushed by tanks and suffocated by impenetrable regime of bureaucratic humiliation encompassing all aspects of daily life: “normalization”.
Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false, because we have always spoken about its masses, just as if we were telling about a gathering of many people, instead of talking about the one person they were standing around because he was a stranger and was dying?
The notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge Rainer Maria Rilke
PRAGUE, AUGUST 1968
[mindful of our dates]
67
He runs after the facts like someone learning to skate, who further more practices where it is dangerous and has been forbidden.
Zurau aphorisms F. Kafka
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. Think now She gives when our attention is distracted And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
t.s.eliot
That the giving famishes the craving
Gives too late. What’s not believed in, or if still believed, In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
What tears in eyes now weeping with anger and love Czechoslovakia’s tears
I refuse to be. In the madhouse of the inhuman I refuse
to live.
With the wolves of the market place
I refuse
to howl.
Among the sharks of the plain I refuse to swim down where moving backs make a current.
I have no need of holes for ears, nor prophetic eyes: to your mad world there is
Vladimir Mayakovsky
one answer: to refuse!
27 AUGUST 1968
People watch the sinking “Ship of Friendship.” [...] We just don’t know how to stop laughing, even when tears of pain press into our eyes.”
“You have raped us -- but we refuse to give birth.”
Those who refuse and who are tied by the force of refusal know that they are not yet together: the time of joint affirmation is precisely that of which they have been deprived. The friendship of this cer tain, unshakable, rigorous “No� is a solidarity that
maurice blanchot
belongs to a time out of joint.
The spirit of resistance found voice in wry Czechoslovak humor, notably in a cartoon that took a poke at all the new “temporary” Soviet-dictated restrictions. It shows one man winding up to punch another and explaining: “I am going to belt you in the mouth temporarily.”
[normalization]
[the unnameable]
It is upon losing what we have to say that we speak – upon an imminent and immemorial disaster [. . .]. We speak suggesting that something not being said is speaking: the loss of what we were to say; weeping
maurice blanchot
when tears have long since gone dry.
All I want to do now is to make a last effort to understand, to begin to understand, how such creatures are possible. No, it is not a question of understanding. Of what then? I don’t know. Here I go none the less, mistakenly. Night, storm and sorrow, and the catalepsies of the soul, this time I shall see that they are good. The last word is not yet said between me and - yes, the last word is said. Perhaps I simply want to hear it said
samuel beckett
again. Just once again. No, I want nothing.
And then the shower fell, sudden, profuse. No one had seen the cloud coming. There it was, black swollen, on top of them. Down it poured like all the people in the world weeping. Tears, Tears. Tears. ‘O that human pain could here have ending!’ Isa murmured. Looking up she received two great bolts of rain full in her face. They trickled down her cheeks as if they were her own tears. As they were all people’s
virginia wolf
tears, weeping for all people.
[solidarity of the shaken]
Here, now, taking this friendship with us into our innermost narrowness, a most delicate hiatus — the still point of a thought stroke.
It is not just that time ceases to flow, continuing a long tradition in which temporal stagnation is linked to nostalgia, but rather that time is lovingly distended and delicately swollen, it listens attentively like a hunted animal.
— to make contact with something powerfully at work within language, something which could not have been approached in any more direct or conscious manner, something which the work may perhaps act out and to which it strives to bear witness.
For what?
— The unexpected word.
[an] experience experienced under the threat of impersonality, of undifferentiated speech speaking in a vacuum, passing through s/he who hears it, unfamiliar, excluding the familiar, and which cannot be silenced because it is what is unceasing and interminable.
Yes, let’s speak — But don’t split off No from Yes.
Give your say this meaning too; give it the shadow. Give it shadow enough, give it as much as you see spread round you between
paul celan
midnight and midday and midnight.
m.m.
the time of work [lessness] ?
t.s.e
the inner freedom from the practical desire, the release from action and suffering, release from the inner and the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
— By a grace of sense,
[concentration without elimination, both
a new world and the old made explicit? ]
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
— Woven in the weakness of the changing body.
But now the place shrinks, where you stand: Where now, shadow-stripped, where? Climb. Grope upwards. Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer! And it is upon this same thread
paul celan
that the star above may in its turn descend:
[a thread on which the star wants to descend]
m.m.
the connective threads which, like the poem, lead to encounters?
p.c..
Yes, yet again as a point of departure.
I am again searching for the place from which
I come.
m.m.
Yet, the encounter is not with a once familiar place — Is perhaps a point of failed home-coming?
p.c..
I am looking for all this with my imprecise, because nervous, finger on a map
— a child’s map, I must admit.
None of the places is to be found.
They do not exist.
p.c.
If you will permit me yet another extreme formulation
—The poem, the artwork, maintains itself at the edge of itself: it ceaselessly calls and hauls itself back from its ‘already-no-longer’ into its ‘yet-still’.
The “yet-still” can only be found in the work of artists who do not forget that they speak from an angle of reflection which is their own existence, their own physical nature.
m.m.
It is in attuning ourselves to the surprisingly open-ended and double-edged nature of the work: its instants of absolute sovereignty of stasis and traumatic fixation are also instants of an uncertain opening — its angle of reflection.
“A snowflake falling on the bell.�
[Creaturely life]
Exemplary act? Now is a different moment, attunement to the occasion demands a particular touch, what resistance would be at this moment? From moment to moment. It is the friendship of the no. At what moment do we say no? A double and divided compulsion, an unconscious movement impelled to travel in two different ways at once: primarily back toward the sameness of an open wound in time but also “secondarily” and along the same paths toward the possibility of what is yet to come. Thus we may begin to understand the relationship between “hope” and “the anxious attentiveness” of the persecuted creature. This work constitutes evidence that it is possible to say no, non negatively, from the assertion of the power of making space for thought, which requires absence.
Excuse me — excuse me — I did not
say the pain is lifting. I said the pain is in
geoffrey hill
the lifting. No — please — forget it.
On either hand, there where stars grew for me, far from all heavens, near all heavens: How one’s awake there! How the world opens for us, right through the midst
paul celan
of ourselves!
Whatever may be meant by moral landscape, it is for me increasingly a terrain seen in cross-section: igneous, sedimentary, conglomerate, metamorphic rockstrata, in which particular grace, individual love, decency, endurance,
geoffrey hill
are traceable across the faults.
What occured? The boulder left the mountain. Who awakened? You and I. Language, language. Co-earth. Fellow-planet. Poorer . Open. Homelandly. The course? Towards the unsubsided. Your course and mine was the boulder’s flight.
paul celan
[...]
I know, I know and you know, we knew, we did not know, we were there, after all, and not there at times when only the void stood between us we got
paul celan
all the way to each other.
The angled areas between them then, cast in a range of hues that to speech are as distant, or dissonant,
Michael Palmer
matter.
[...]
Apart I fall to you, you fall to me, fallen away from each other, we see
paul celan
through
Outside the door the rain again turned the corner of the street
Ryuichi Tamura
creating a smell of fresh gauze
In the here and now of the work it is still possible — (the artwork) after all, has only this one, unique, punctual present—only in this immediacy and proximity does it let the (any) other’s ownmost quality speak its time: —the acute of the present—
A break has occurred. When we refuse, we refuse with a movement that is without contempt, without exaltation, and anonymous, as far as possible, for the power to refuse cannot come from us, nor in our name alone, but from a very poor beginning that
maurice blanchot
belongs first to those who cannot speak.
Even now, I tell myself, there is a language to which I might speak and which would rightly hear me; responding with eloquence; in its turn, negotiating sense without insult given or injury taken. Familiar to those who already know it elsewhere as justice,
geoffrey hill
it is met also in the form of silence.
pablo casals
Intonation, is a matter of conscience.
paul celan
there are still songs to sing beyond mankind
john keats
Heard melodies are sweet, those unheard, are sweeter
This is the force of faith:
Nobody gets what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself, also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go. I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
jorie graham
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.
[nebojรกcnฤ ]