Yoon Kim

“Joy is not something that can be found and gathered up. Joy is in the mourning for joy.”

— Jean-Luc Nancy, “Hyperion’s Joy”

“I wanted what I wrote to be the pleasure concealed within misery. My debt of joy to a world I do not find easy.”

— Lispector, Too Much of Life

and that only in the inexperienceable can courage, hope, and meaning be given foundation? Then the spirit would be free. But again and again life would drag it down because life, the sum of experience, would be without solace.”

(from “Experience,” 1913; trans. Spencer and Jost)

even if no one has done so yet. Such will cannot be taken from us by experience.

Yet—are our elders, with their tired gestures and their superior hopelessness, right about *one* thing—namely, that what we experience will be sorrowful… (2/3)

Walter Benjamin, writing as a student at 21 (under a pseudonym):

“We, however, know something different, which experience can neither give to us nor take away: that truth exists, even if all previous thought has been an error. Or: that fidelity shall be maintained, (1/3)

I love the boom! as it hits the seawall.

Thinking of Bolaño.

“…all horrors are dulled by routine.”

(By Night in Chile, tr. Chris Andrews)

. . . and Bartleby remained standing at his window in one of his profoundest dead-wall reveries.

#MelvilleMonday 🐳

Etel Adnan-

“…goes to language, wounded by reality, seeking reality.”

(“…zur Sprache geht, wirklichkeitswund und wirklichkeitssuchend.”)

— Paul Celan, “Bremen Speech”

“A new language is what responds to reality where a moral, epistemological jolt has occurred.”

— Ingeborg Bachmann

(from the first Frankfurt lecture)

“Mit einer neuen Sprache wird der Wirklichkeit immer dort begegnet, wo ein moralischer, erkenntnishafter Ruck geschieht, und nicht, wo man versucht, die Sprache an sich neu zu machen.”

— Ingeborg Bachmann

(from “Fragen und Scheinfragen,” the first Frankfurt lecture)

🧡🧡 🫠

Reading Celan, I was reminded of this:

“No new world without a new language.”
(“Keine neue Welt ohne neue Sprache.”)

— Ingeborg Bachmann, The Thirtieth Year

“…goes with his very being to language, stricken by and seeking reality.”

(“…mit seinem Dasein zur Sprache geht, wirklichkeitswund und wirklichkeitssuchend.”)

— Paul Celan

(from the closing words of his Bremen Speech; tr. Felstiner)

lolll 🥰

Standoff

“All literature knows that like Orpheus, it cannot, on pain of death, turn around to look at what is behind it: it is condemned to mediation—that is, in a sense, to lying.”

— Roland Barthes, “Workers and Pastors” (1960)

that reality breathes, walks, lives, heads toward the light of a meaning; but once literature turns around to look at what it loves, all that is left is a named meaning, which is a dead meaning.”

(from “Literature and Signification” tr. Richard Howard)

Roland Barthes, responding to a 1963 Tel Quel questionnaire:

“One could say that literature is Orpheus returning from the underworld; as long as literature walks ahead, aware that it is leading someone, the reality behind it which it is gradually leading out of the unnamed— (1/2)

“Listen to the light now…”

(Beckett, Embers)

I feel this new light
on an old presence

“Yes, what I’m writing you is nobody’s. And this nobody’s freedom is very dangerous. It is like the infinite that has the color of air.”

(Clarice Lispector, Água Viva)

“Sometimes I feel that it is the room that writes. But it needs the hot nib of my pronoun.”

(Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal)

Which also gave him, in the same instant, an impression of failure; and of resignation to the way he’d just sold himself to a phrase that had more beauty than truth.”

(trans. Benjamin Moser)

Lispector, The Apple in the Dark:

“His words had somehow surpassed whatever he’d meant to say. And, though feeling duped by them, he preferred what he’d said to whatever he’d really meant to say, because of the much more certain way that things surpass us. (1/2)

The Sawkill is unfrozen!

🥰 감사합니다, 선생님 🤍

💚🖤❤️

Georges Perec:

“To write: to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.”

(Species of Spaces, tr. John Sturrock)