Proust has no taste for inventions, fakes, unjustified leaps and misleading invocations. He never establishes relations between two things which have none. I know of no finer meditation on absence, death and oblivion than THE SWEET CHEAT GONE: nothing more transparent, patient, supple, sincere and a more careful statement of genuine effects. If it existed, that would be metaphysics: that deepening of real life, that absence of sham, of complacency; that modesty, that calm manner of presenting oneself full face to a certain number of illuminations, where there is a sense of the meaning of life--things which fall to us of their own accord and our only course is not to run away from them.

Under the eyes of the placid hermit, comfortably established at the edge of the road, under the glance of this man, who calmly prepared himself by an untroubled life without care nor suffering for a blissful eternity, flowed the changefully coloured current of travellers, vagabonds, wayfarers, and wanderers. His benediction rewarded the generous passer; the hard look of the austere man did not suffice to disturb the blessed indifference. The life of others might rapidly consume, burnt by the sun, gnawed by care; his own endured in the shade of the trees, and continued without hurt, lulled by the rustle of human passions.

Now the fact that something can be at the same time obvious and incomprehensible is repugnant to us precisely because it places a brutal obstacle in the way of the exercise of our own subtlety. We need things that are true, but are explained; or alternatively, things which are incomprehensible, but enriched by an infinite number of commentaries. But only to be able to offer a banal commentary (at any rate so far as the content is concerned) on a thing which is incomprehensible is profoundly humiliating to us and we refuse to listen to anybody talking about it.

The overwhelming experience of the sacred is no doubt an essential element of any religion. But the week isn't made up only of Sundays;

To William, then, art was an extension and clarification of the fluid, fugitive deliverances of experience. It was a special, deliberate mode of 'taking'. It was creation also in the sense in which the mind creates all objects, but with inner and outer relationships offered in a form that gives the impression of complete novelty and a heightened reality. It satisfies a need not satisfied by work, play, thought, or worship. From such a sensibility one might expect a corresponding subtlety of perception and behavior in personal relations.

What I am writing is a confession. I saw those vistas with the wilful eye of protracted Innocence. Winnie the Pooh was closer to my heart than Christabel, and to say so is to confess myself not a child but a divided man who has trifled with visions of degredation and visions of exaltation without admitting either to the center of my heart. So I suppose now that center to be not known, and I flounder as I floundered thirty years ago, in shy love of a country innocent and personal as a piece of bread in my mouth, and like it silent, comforting, warm, and selfish.

Berberova said a beautiful thing about Muratov. "He was always in love in a balanced and quiet way." She also said that he was "a man of inward order who understood the internal disorder of others."

Anxiously the novice listened to the crisscrossing voices. Each seemed to him right, and a strange confusion overcame his spirit.

This last fact was the real issue, for the way grew straight from the moment one recognised that the poet essentially CAN'T be concerned with the act of dying. Let him deal with the sickest of the sick, it is still by the act of living that they appeal to him, and appeal the more as the conditions plot against them and prescribe the battle. The process of life gives way fighting, and often may so shine out on the lost ground...

Soon Robert . . . was erasing a drawing by de Kooning and declaring this act to be its own work of art. Yves Klein was inviting Parisians to an opening of an exhibition at which there was nothing to see. He called the show Le Vide (The Void), and a mob of 1,000 people jammed the empty Iris Clert Gallery, spilling onto the surrounding streets (the police and firemen had to be called in), drinking special blue cocktails, a mixture of gin, Cointreau, and methylene blue mixed for Klein by La Coupole, the famous brasserie, which caused the urine of drinkers to turn blue for about a week, roughly the planned run of the show.

An artist steps up to each person individually, whispers in his ear, and quietly demands that he recognize him. It has happened! I have one, even two, who have recognized me. I now have fifteetn, one hundred, four thousand of them. I begin to breathe deeply--so I am approaching seriousness at last! How many years it takes! My climb swallowed up thirty years of effort, poverty, and humiliation.

Over time, she built up and scraped away the paint, again and again, gluing the work to an even larger canvas to center it more precisely. Every day she went to work on what she finally decided to call The Rose, although it never resembled one. For years she did almost nothing else, surviving, it was said, sometimes on brandy and cigarettes. Increasingly, she withdrew from company. People started to talk. The work went through phases and names. . . . Finally, in 1969, eleven years after she had begun working on it, The Rose was exhibited, but by then the art world had changed. Conceived in the era of Jackson Pollock and the Beats, the painting, a massive gray monolith of strange delicacy and gloomy bohemianism, emerged in the age of Pop art and psychedelia. A reviewer dubbed it "a glorious anachronism." It was falling apart. Slabs of paint were sliding off it like lava from a volcano.

It is easier to forgive an author for not replying to the questions we ask ourselves than to treat as important those which do not concern us and which should in reality interest everybody. It is a proof of our own poverty of thought. Montaigne always offers us more than he announces. He is one of those writers like a Freud or a Proust from whom we may always hope for some unexpected observation, who always fill their nets all the more abundantly because they do not ask themselves in advance what principles they are going to rely upon in order to establish a connection between all the material they bring to the surface, or how they are going to reconcile it with some pre-existing explanation or moral attitude.

I suppose there is nothing / so good as human / immediacy // I do not speak loosely / of handshake / which is // of the mind / or lilies--stand closer-- / smell

For me, all of man's strivings to escape himself, whether they are pure aesthetics or pure structuralism, religion, or Marxism, are naive and doomed to failure. This is a variation on a martyrlike mysticism. And this drive to dehumanize (which I engage in as well) must inevitably accompany the drive to humanize, otherwise reality falls apart like a house of cards and threatens to drown in the verbiage of unreality. No, you will not satisfy man with formulas! Your constructions, your structures, will remain empty until Someone comes to live there. The more elusive man becomes, the more unattainable, abysmal, immersed in the other elements and imprisoned in forms, as if they were not articulated by his own lips, then the more urgent and burning becomes the presence of the ordinary man, just as we know him in our everyday experience and in our everyday feelings: the man from the cafe, from the street, given to us concretely. An attainment in the human peripheries must immediately be balanced by a violent withdrawal into ordinary humanity and into human everydayness. One can immerse oneself in the human abyss, but only under the condition that one returns to the surface.

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernal but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of those misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

I've been a moon / shiner / for seventeen / long years / I spent all / my money / on whiskey / and beer / I go to / some hollow / and sit / at my still / and if whisky / don't kill me / then I don't know / what will / I go to / some barroom / and drink / with my friends / where women / can't follow / and see / what I spend / god bless those / pretty women / I wish / they was mine / their breath is / as sweet as / the dew on / the vine / let me eat when I'm hungry / moonshine when I'm dry / green grass when I'm hard up / religion when I'm dying' / the whole world is a bottle / and life's / but a dram / when the bottle / gets empty / god it ain't / worth a damn

Montaigne and Proust know human nature because they are in themselves several different men, because there are few human feelings, already existing in embryo in themselves, that they cannot experience if they set out to do so. They have that spider's web kind of sensibility which enables them to penetrate another person's defences and discover exactly how he feels. It is a polymorphous sensibility which is the only true source of ideas in psychology, but which, in those who possess it, makes the acquisition of a personal equilibrium a difficult and always precarious business. Or rather, the equilibrium is constantly being broken from day to day, but the continuous rupture is simply the raw material of a general equilibrium extending over the whole of existence. We might say of both of them that out of days as psychopaths they constructed the lives of sages.

as a poet i was getting extremely tired of^^^^^what I considered an unnatural^^^language act^^^^^going into a closet^^^^^so to speak^^^^^sitting in front of a typewriter^^^^^because anything is possible sitting in front of a typewriter and^^^^^^^nothing is necessary^^^^^a closet is no place to address anybody

Any pipsqueak can roar like a lion on paper, because grand words cost little, whereas delicacy--the delicacy of Chopin for example, persevering to the extreme, tense, elaborate--requires effort and character.

In every instance, he must instantiate his Cynicism by means of physical gestures and acts. He insists on eating in the marketplace and in the temples, drinks out of his hand and eats scraps of food from the floor, and urinates in the presences of baffled witnesses. . . walks backwards through the streets, enters theaters only when people are leavng, embraces statues covered with snow . . . points to people whom he dislikes with his middle finger, clears the plegm from his throat on the face of someone he thinks is worthless, sleeps in a tub or in the porticos of the temples, accepts disciples only if they are willing to cary a large fish or a piece of cheese in public . . . plucks a chicken to demonstrate the senselessness of Plato's ideas . . . folds his ragged cloak to expose his nakedness, and so on.

Above all, his supreme mastery of verbal satire served to prove that satire is not a view of life. It can be a useful and even necessary by-product of one, but it can have no independent existence, because the satirist hasn't either. Any writer who finds the height of human absurdity outside himself must find the wellspring of human dignity inside, and so lose the world. The secret of a sane world view is to see virtue in others, and the roots of chaos within ourselves.


2.

It was yesterday waistdeep in the drifts. I have quite forgotten what I may have said. . .

making use of the void to think the full

You drunken / tottering / bum // by Christ / in spite of all / your filth // and sordidness / I envy / you // It is the very face / of love / itself

...we must be, above all, capable of 'seeing' another person--simply opening one's eyes will not do. One needs a peculiar kind of initial curiosity which is much more integral, deep-rooted and broad than mere curiosity about things... or even about the particular acts of people (for example, gossip). One must be vitally curious about humanity, and more concretely, about the individual as a living totality, an individual modus of existence... But note that such curiosity, in truth, presupposes many other things. It is a vital luxury which only organisms with a high level of vitality can possess. The weak individual is incapable of disinterested, initial attention to what occurs outside of himself... This paradox of 'disinterested' interest permeates love in all its functions and actions...

The staircases, galleries, bopeeps are inexpressible: it takes a fortnight to learn them. Pipes of affliction convey lukewarm water of affliction to some of the rooms, others more fortunate have fires. The garden is all heights, terraces, Excelsiors, misty mountain tops, seats up trees called Crows' Nests, flights of steps seemingly up to heaven lined with burning aspiration upon aspiration of scarlet geraniums: it is very pretty and airy but it gives you the impression that if you took a step farther you would find yourself somewhere on Plenimmon, Conway Castle, or Salisbury Craig. With best love to detachments stationed Hampstead believe me your loving son

According to Meister Eckhart: he who has renounced all things finds them again in God, like the man who turns his back on a landscape and finds it incorporeally reflected in the smooth and illusory surface of the lake... The mystic, a sponge of God, is slightly overwhelmed by things until God, a liquid, seeps in and glosses them... But it would be mistaken to thank the mystic or the lover for this 'generosity'. They applaud people simply because they view them without involvement.

Oh kids life is feelings like these it's the talk of it / drawing / the others outside to our house: the news is throughout us / the mondial flames of hell, the funniness, we are / unironized. // Yet I keep not being able to be there.

According to him, a heart in the right place, rather than a mind in a high state of training, was the more likely source of truth, and the only source of creativity. Art, far from being the furthermost refinement of intelligence, came before thought, and was as natural as breathing. Croce's guess was that the first human beings sang before they spoke. He was certainly right that they drew before they wrote, and wrote poetry before they wrote prose.

How songs start / is in a thing seen not seen / before, now held / not with the eyes / but a breath / comes off the heart / like a wind off the river / & says its name

1.

Our eyes were too full of tears during his life to leave us any for his death.

As the image wears away, there is a wind in the heart, the translated men, disappear into what they have translated

feelings [can] become promiscuous too; that is, no longer in proportion with the things that arouse them.

I hated waiting. It I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected—an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows. That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind.

R.I.P. SHYKU

At least for me anyway.

The reason is simple: I've been writing from a different angle lately and have ceased to think in shyku. No more perspectival shifts, semantic mutations, winks and feints, etc. The quasi-mysterious thing--and maybe you'll have some opinions on this--is how the impulse to write shyku left me almost immediately as summer ended and school started.

As for what we should do now, I suggest we post excerpts from whatever we're reading. Except, and here's the thing, we should try to make each passage follow the one that preceded it so in the long run they form a kind of gradually improvised supercollage. Our Fall project. What should we call it?

My suggestion: "THE BOOK OF TALLEST WEATHER".