Christina Tudor-Sideri

Aris Fioretos in the early hours. “Filled to the brim with void and silence.”

“Their hands were so cold they were touching illusorily, only in intention, in order to be fulfilled, for the sole reason that it should be fulfilled, otherwise, it was no longer possible. Their hands remained like that, frozen in their funereal pose.”

Moderato Cantabile, Marguerite Duras

With Oskar Kokoschka’s plays and poems. In his Orpheus and Eurydice, “a swarm of the departed.”

Happy publication day to @tobiasvryan.bsky.social's hauntingly beautiful debut novel, Glantz. (Equus Press)

“I am breaking open and the storm and the wind and the sea are breaking in into my gaping chest and I can hear the way the wind and the storm are speaking, something seductive, of course, we are only interested in hearing seductive things, you and I”

(tr. Roslyn Theobald)

(oh, lift me up out of this heavy ink…) Friederike Mayröcker

At night—

A dual sense of impermanence emerging from Didi-Huberman’s Survival of the Fireflies and Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, the material ruins of time alongside the lyrical evanescence of being. Insomnia, eternal muse.

At night, Bataille and echoes of the book to come. “The object of my desire was illusion first of all.”

In nature’s excessive game it makes no difference whether I exceed her or she exceeds herself in me (she is perhaps entirely excess of herself), but, in time, the excess will finally take its place in the order of things (I will die at that moment). It was necessary, in order to grasp a possible within an evident impossibility, for me to imagine the opposite situation first. The Impossible, Georges Bataille. Translated by Robert Hurley.

the impossible and other excesses

tea and oranges and the memory of what has not happened

The Years from You to Me Your hair waves once more when I weep. With the blue of your eyes you lay the table of love; a bed between summer and autumn. We drink what somebody brewed neither I nor you nor a third: we lap up some empty and last thing. We watch ourselves in the deep sea’s mirrors and faster pass food to the other: the night is the night, it begins with the morning, beside you it lays me down.

“The night is the night.”

Paul Celan; tr. Michael Hamburger

A wide field of tall green grass filled with red poppies and scattered wildflowers stretching toward low tree-covered hills beneath a sky of large, soft clouds.

On Paul Celan’s birthday, a memory of my own—the red poppies of childhood years.

“Paul, your birthday is near. I cannot make the post be exact to the day and the hour, but we can be. It is so quiet here. Half an hour has passed since the first sentence, and last autumn is forcing its way into this autumn.”

Ingeborg Bachmann to Paul Celan; tr. Wieland Hoban

Yes you’re right, Clare. Looking forward to hearing how it went. 💙

One evening we sat together at a café she says suddenly, “You remember you talked about dreaming that you kissed me and that your kiss devoured Death’s cold lips” Yes I say The Private Journals of Edvard Munch translated by J. Gill Holland

Life—angst has raved inside me ever since I caught the idea—like an illness—since I was born—doubly inherited. It has lain like a curse which has haunted me. Still I often feel that I must have this life—angst—it is essential to me—and that I would not exist without it—

Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics as a poem in the private journals of Edvard Munch

In November, in the cold and in the evening, although I smell like figs and sea salt and the Island of Hydra, I read Rilke aloud and say, “I am dark; I am forest.” I read Rilke aloud and say, “Often when I imagine you, your wholeness cascades into many shapes.”

If Trees Were Lone Women What Would They Sound Like: Clare Archibald ‘If trees were lone women what would they sound like’  is an opportunity for those on site to track, trace and immerse themselves in the audio of women from around the world whispering in word…

More about the project, for which I recorded myself reading fragments from the Mad Forest chapter of Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, and the 2021 event here:

sanctuarylab.org/artists-2021...

How magical to be a voice in a far away forest on the day ghosts walk the earth…

Clare’s project is very dear to me and I am honored to be a part of it.

As Time pours from the sky, I borrow words from Hélène Cixous and say “I return to writing around this missing instant, I play with the trace as Mahler’s Earth begins again to begin again.”

“Against the solid backdrop of what is given and certain, against the backdrop of the definitiveness of existence”—or, as Paul Celan would say (has said), “at the gates of everything that is in vain, in spite of it all.”

This is what having a soul is for Jan Patočka, having “a sense of the eternity in which we unceasingly are.”

🖤

This November, I am spending most of my time with Jan Patočka. “We are not only who we are [when] engaged in this or that activity,” he writes, “but ephemeral humans living in the face of the universe, in relation to its eternity, and therefore sub specie aeterni alone.”

As good a day as any for a brief return. Rain pours endlessly, night exhales blue smoke. We mourn Proust and trace how he has marked us. Commemorations and silent anniversaries, and all around, the world suspended in a melancholic dream of remembered time.

Some time away. To listen to the quieter parts of myself. To work on the book. To be (with) wind and water.

🖤

October goes, leaving the heaviness of the world in its place. You think you’ve known grief—until you have to pick up a shovel and mend your loved one’s sunken grave.