Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Journal 19.05.10

Bram Stoker´s Dracula: A book written entirely out of letters and travel journal entries… But what with the quotations? They must certainly belong to an age different than ours.

Sad to say, funny to think: I am at present alive only under the predicament of writing in this journal and writing in other journals, besides self-asserting my complete lack of sexual gratification. Last night I was unable to live up to the discipline of the owl: I was way too exhausted but yet my mind had been taken adrift with Stoker´s novel. I have to find the way to do work through the daytime, there´s no other solution. Under the present conditions, unless I became mentally stronger, I shouldn´t force myself; at every single moment of the day I must remember what my predicament is: To get away from this house and from this country in order to be able to write. I feel this is somewhat a false predicament, because there´s no “in order to” when you write, but then again this is an emergency situation. We´re in the middle of bounty fire

As of reading Dracula: I was utterly bored when I began to read accounts which were not Jonathan Harker´s. I am waiting to see what has happened with him with a bated breath; I think the Count is very much homo-eroticizing him but much remains to be seen yet. I am not sure what will come out of the new version of Santiago´s “Transformation” which I am just about to start; I am no longer in control. Gillian Rose: I´ve told the tale – the Midrash is not beautiful, it is difficult. I think tomorrow I shall be hitting the library at long last. It will be such a great feeling unless I am even slightly faced by the recent past which isn´t that great. Sappho: “Everything must be borne upon”. When I say “I am not sure what will come up” in the writing, it also means “I´m scared of it”. Further consideration: Dracula is in but I think the song is out… I need an instinct that will be so absolutely modernist such as Yann Tiersen which anyway is the kind of music which is immediately associated with my old and new feelings about Mr. Munévar, or the silence of him that I was so cunningly smeared by. I think I am definitely starting to see what the essays, previously written, currently in the make and future ones, have in common… It is this antinomian thought with which I meant to discredit Taubes and whose echo Eveline made resonate in Buber: Everything from this world as it is… The little poem of M. Sussman. Furthermore this thought is: We ought not to change this world unless we refuse to accept it (condone it) or escape from it (condemn it). The revolution of everyday life is the öffene Vielfältigkeit (Simmel´s philosophy of culture) to try to change ourselves: Kierkegaard was a lot wiser than Marx but infinitely unhappier. One should never say “we have no other choice but to live in this world as it is” because this would be the exact political equivalent of saying “the Messiah will never come” and then saying “We must force him to come”; expecting him to show his face somewhere under the magic spell of Auschwitz – here we are deceived, Auschwitz´s hail is a “deus absconditus” (the unhappy knowledge of God in Simone Weil and Susan Taubes and Ingeborg Bachmann). Our decision must imply the free-standing qualities of modern freedom and its antinomies in saying “we want to have no other choice but to live in this world as it is”; then we ultimately choose ourselves for it and make ourselves transiently at home (Heller).

Another point: I shouldn´t embarrassed about epistolary writing.

Important thing to jot down in “Transformation”: I used to start the mornings out with Vermouth

Father: It is not hatred what I feel, but such compunction at his masterful use of violence, both physical and verbal – he is but such talented person for inflicting violence.

Why does Stoker insist so much on the gums? I think it might as well be nothing, just the taxing tiredness of prose. But it is certainly curious… Pale gums, as if speaking of a corpse

To-do-list: Paris – Veronika, Florence, Santiago; Danielle Cohen-Levinas

Utter lack of sexual gratification: By-product of abjection. Being too close to family and to my father has sexually turned me into an Angst-ridden teenager. My sexuality is no longer emotionally or physically mature; I even feel utter shame about it and could not be persuaded to deal with the situation with any kind of resolution. Running far away from home; it is the only thing that matters now. Everything else is secondary now, even if it is writing what is ought to be done by me in order to flee from this sexless and mindless imprisonment that so gratuitously offers me shelter under a stairway and on a puked-over mattress and the eternal Nietzschean vicious cycle of repetitive lunch menus meant to exasperate and to give into contentment much more than they are meant to nourish body or soul. Every spoonful of food is yet a bribery to buy in the paternal righteousness of “I do all what I can” in this kind of nonsense life, whose consumption into mindless old age could mean nothing but a blessing of sorts. The only productive activity of this lifestyle is rearing children in order to stretch the chain of educational and sexual miseries yet one generation more – we are not expected to suffer all this alone so that we bring children in order to make them responsible for our own inability to make anything out of our own lot.

My greatest delusion: The fine flattery of thinking that this journal will be read one day; perhaps it is only therapeutically delusional – that is, something that keeps me from the madness of sheltering under the loathsomeness of a paternal violent wing.

I can´t stand my younger brother (he´s not the youngest); it´s not plain loathe but rather despair at his complete lack of intellectual skills and withal, of interest in any such. He´s as ignorant in worldly, spiritual and academic matters as I should have been at the age of six; and as grumpy and androgynous and dependent as well; such godless people are making the world run a lot slower.

Reading Vathek reminds of an impasse: Pilgrimage to the Tomb of the Prophet Samuel in North-East Jerusalem and overlooking from there all the Orthodox neighborhoods to one end and the Muslim ones to the opposite.

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