"Morning Passages"

To J.

"Mephiboshet"

Your flickering eyes

Small birds suckling the nectars.

When you wept

The king hearkened not.

When you fell

The world did not return

To void-and-chaos.

Mephiboshet, you dreamt

Of a more innocent friendship.

You sickened at the wisdom

Of the ancient serpent,

O Son of Jonathan!

(Zelda Mikhovsky-Schneerson, translation is mine)

"I want to learn to be alone, to find it nourishing and not just a mere wait"

-Susan Sontag

The scenery seemed to have changed abruptly at the realization that there is no such a thing as an empty room, he conjured up images of Abyssinia, everything disappeared under the spell of unlikely sights. He sat across the blank page in the attempt to write something for himself that would not grow into a will of consolation, counting the hours on and on, imagining that that night would never end and that it would be possible to take posession of it well into the next morning, and the morning after and yet another morning after that. He could remember every detail, every practical detail, the journey from home all the way to the wooden panels that furnished the walls and the well-known inability to swallow the freshly baked goods so that he would not miss one single second of the conversation. Then strolling around the city jolts, the pleasure he could often take in the noise and the evening traffic as a mere spectator in the tireless search for a moment of beauty with himself; the fearless panic that devoured courageously the tips of the fingers and bruised the skin from beneath the fibers of tweed and wool, the unwillingness to let go of the scarf and other pieces of clothing; it was almost a matter of shame, this almost sensuous desire to want not to be seen in any way, hiding from the viewer across the table, the fibrilous pulsations of the blood running through the neck back and forth in between brain and heart, the delicate wrists that could have been made out of fresh bread and not of old flesh, even the eyes too eager to look always elsewhere, a rather frantic desire at mere contemplation, and that total avoidance of oneself.

Yet all of the essential details were elusive through and through, they seemed to form knots at the height of the throat, that were pulled back from displaying, by a forceful and naive serenity that rested around the belly but were never to be seen. The greatest gift that one receives from a stranger is always that warm sensation that there's no destination in plain sight, that the person, in spite of his covetousness, is not willing to let himself be seen at all, that absolute solitude is the greatest evening companion when it's shared with somebody else, that every fabric of the conversation is yet another desperate attempt to cling forcefully to one's solitude. This is how we set ourselves to spy on our fellow human beings in the companion of yet another veteran soldier, to realize that we have somewhat aged, and that it is a good thing because one of the most merciless demands of beauty is that it be contemplated with glee and love only after the moment when it's no longer in your posession, when it's no longer a presence, when its symbols become undechiperable to the hand that drew them and carelessly casted them into the world. This type of beauty has manifold shapes but in common between them all, it is only the fact that they deliberately avoid perfection and completion; the simplicity of the interminability resides precisely in that this beauty cannot be wholly grasped when observed from the outside, lest it become a corpse, a corpulent structure of dead matter that can no longer be touched or felt by the bare hand of the passer-by.

What a great melancholy there is, I thought for myself, in that kind of beauty in which you're allowed to participate but yet cannot keep even the simplest bread crumb, used-up napkin or vanishing cube of ice for yourself, "It seems that he was permitted to find the Archimedean point only under condition that he would use it against himself". Every form of modern art in the world is aimlessly attempting to do just that, to cling onto the rawest materials of our own consumption in order to create a memory that just like in classical art, could last forever, yet the enterprise is so completely futile because those are memories that we no longer want to keep; in the moment they are turned into memories they should be washed off from the basin at the top of the repository of things we find beautiful and not. There are elixirs too, easily available, sometimes in the shape of a glass but often times also in the shapes of faces and hands and strokes of the hair, elixirs that make ugliness disappear and turn every single second of the day into that kind of beauty we would like to participate in, joining this party of the dead, shortlisting the information and selecting what we find most nourishing. It is like the metaphor of loving someone at the airport, through the window panes that separate the different waiting rooms; imagining scenes of suffering from one to the next station of the Cross, out of the simplest glass of whiskey held by the hand, out of the watch missing from the wrist or the ring from the finger, thinking that maybe it was stolen by a lover or asked to be turned in after a sentimental disaster. This is a rather voyeuristic price to pay, that of the artist and the writer, the infinitely aesthetic pleasure of experiencing love and desire from the vantage point of the most absolute and impossible distance, there's no pity and no mercy in this loving observation, it's riddled by the most objective form of cruelty. The unwillingness to interfere in the slow lane of biological processes, avoiding the nearness of the lips with the only intention to avoid not a bad aftertaste but with the firm resolution to supress and surpass all guilt. Guilt must be supressed insofar as it is rememberable.

This could happen to anyone and anywhere, the geography is irrelevant when it comes to anatomy, this is no common sense like the astronomy of the planets, but not altogether irrational; the present is entirely dead just one minute thereafter, how can five years be rendered irrelevant by one single moment? It's easier to cancel out five years than one single moment, because the nature of time itself makes the momentarily far more fixed in our minds in the sense that attempts to understand what is just happening and suddenly has passed, are to no avail. If I had any talents with painting, the landscape of that very night, it would be more like a double-faced muse bleeding to death with a glass and a smitten smile in between her finger tips. To write even, it is like a little death, it would steal away everything that is essential to tell about a story and that's when a teller knows that he's ought to stop at the expense of making up a fairy tale that could be far more convincing that a list of deeds in the Stations of the Cross, for there's nothing more brutal and unlawful than stealing from oneself, from one's own pleasure, from one's own righteous sense of enjoyment and imperfect beauty, it's tantamount to observing one's own death. The next morning thus, was not different than it should have been, it wasn't entirely free of guilt or consumption, one day less of sun for you and one more for the world, the continuity had been broken like in every other possible art work, life hadn't changed and that's where the cruelty of making works of art out of such raw material resides, for the creator - it's God's own loneliness after the wrongdoings of the creation - life is not bereft of its own autonomous powers. Philosophers of history would however point a finger to the fallacy: Everything in the world is qualitatively changed, everyday, by every person, by every casual encounter, even in spite of the domineering fear, the fear of the stranger for each and every one of his own kind. The next morning was fresh like the beginning of the tides in summertime, it felt opulent, scandalously privileged, full of frenzy and bright as lust. That's why the story of a night not always needs to be told as such, this is the privilege of those who seek no consolation from life, and whose guiding principle is more risk than patience.

"If someone comes and declares "This will be the historical redeemer of mankind, I know its name" - then we might easily identify him as the prophet of the false Messiah. The prophet of the true Messiah remains silent. He does not know. But he knows one thing - that one should not say that the Messiah will never come. One should never let the empty chair be occupied by a pretender (and every occupant is a pretender), but it is better if one does not remove the empty chair. My conviction, or rather, my feeling, suggests that I leave the chair there, in the middle of the room at the head of the table, where it remains all the time exposed in its emptiness. The chair speaks to the denizens of the absolute present honestly only in its emptiness. My intuition suggests that only emptiness is fullness for the moderns, that there's no other kind of hope beyond hope, at least not for those who assume the position of reflected postmodernity".

-Agnes Heller

The Discovery of Heaven

To Harry Mulisch

Now that you're far, from the questions asked by man, I cannot help but wondering what that heaven looks like, whether there are similarities at all between the rows of houses and the canals underneath, whether you can hear the waters all the while wars take place elsewhere. I wonder if the land was finally born in you, if there's any lands! If I could wish for something today, is for you to tell me that heaven looks exactly like the earth, that there's no other life, that the bricks smell the same when they're punctured by the bayonets. Are you still writing? Is it allowed to write? Sometimes it seems to me as if the earth is a heaven turned upside down, we are hanging from above glued to a crutch looking out into the vastness of the universe, as if the earth is that void that we see down below when we reach for the Wadden sea and imagine that that's where the world ends. I wonder if heaven has names, if heaven has hatred, because otherwise, what would be then of the language of love? I wonder what they think of the churches, what they think of the dead, that are buried somewhere, like Our Lord, that could never rise to heaven, because there's just too much soil sheltering them from this absurd vertiginous freedom, too much water dividing the places and the faces. My gut feeling says that heaven is very different, and that I wish not to go, that there're no super powers, that there're no higher truths, that you're just waiting for us there, to tell us to come back, to ride on the next bus, to land on the Zuiderduintjes, to go fishing for a while, to end at the same place where blue and white become one. That is why you painted it like this, like an afternoon, somewhere, in an apartment block, in those ugly streets of Rotterdam.

Neverland

I wished not go

Into the foreign land

I knew not

Where to find

The gardens

In its womb

Should I not

Remember

Could I but wish

What it looked like

In that point of the summer

Jotted with a brush

Patting fields of flowers

Distant from the houses

The dreams

That I harbored

Since that childhood day

When I saw the land

Friesland

When I felt the skin

Of the bruised earth

Growing under my feet

Timelessly

Regaling me

With showers of weak light

When will I see the land?

Will I be able to take pleasure in you?

Answer my call!

The land never forsaken

All at my bequest

One whole country for a child

When will I see you again?

When, Netherland?

November

Literature that is no longer readable

At the expectation

Of faintest love

The desperate agreement

With the laws of the world

Empty the sketchbooks

Ransacked by words of the hand

By movements of the fingertips

A vast field of greenery and flies

Telegrams, without address

Without recipient

By an unknown sender

Too much loyalty

In impossible faces of men

Too much serendipity

To sell for friendship

To expect reward

A silence more forceful

That rustling jolts

All the more forgetful

Swallowed by rivers

Watching over the planes

From the bottom of the waters

The legs bruised not by rocks

But by the soft touch of the fish

The algae

The softest pasture

Fallen into disgrace

In a winter morning

Next to a violin

In the abandonment

Of beauty

A lonely mirror

Trying to catch a glimpse of the woman

In another room of the palace

Imagining the vanity

Of aging gracefully

Brushing the hair

With linens of gold

Praying for innocence

While devouring the flesh

Of a sinful soldier

Or another murderer

Sarajevo

A sailor in the mud

Taking shelter from the truth

With yet another bullet

The little men

Made out of paper notes

Beheaded by the child

Unable to understand

The language

Of the poem jotted down

By an English woman

During a farewell afternoon

By the banks of the river

No longer watery of frost

Laden with a corpse

Followed by another

In unison

A new song

Not for anyone dead

But for the mightiest deed

Of our son of man

Of our bullets

Our children

Of bayonets

Prague

I am unable to dance to the tune

That smells beneath the earth

That hampers one from death

It is a long deterred muse

The landscape most unlikely

A fear of yet another shipwreck

Sounding aloof but verily

The lighthouse, the rows, the deck

Europe after the Rain...

So far it's been

From within a cave

Crafted with slow deeps

Underneath a stair

During my sleep

I endure visions

Of the mightiest port

The kinder skin of grass

And flowers in the fall

In my dream

The stench of the smoke

Pouring out of the skin

Into the cells of cement

Is transformed into waters

That navigate through the nails

Shun off the call of one's death

I see snails and rows of houses

But I hear only waters

They suffocate in the small islands

Twisted from their own thirst

To love the meadows of sand

The crave for piles of hay

Burning in spectacular yellows

Every scrap of paper, a riviera

Keeping the secrets

Of journeys yet undone

Everything vanishes into plaster

Into the smells of unwashed cloth

Into the distance

Kneeling down before the dreams

Begging for another minute

Of delusion

Of a better world

Or a real port

Where the cave

Is transformed into the light

Where the silence

Becomes louder than the tide

The elbows of the poet

Are visible at dusk

The young flesh bruised by the hours

Of the pen

Wearing the thinness of the lotus

Reaching out

Without dying

And also without falling

For kinder words

For another world

Response to Raphaël

"I want an absolute transformation, however minute, that the encounter with a person of a work of art will change everything" -Susan Sontag

The discovery of a new work of art, the musical piece or the painting, has the primordial quality of throwing us back into a simultaneity of times, usually the return to one's own origin that serves as well the purpose of advancing the nearness, however figurative, of one's own death. In spite of its greatest theoretical ambitions, philosophy has always lagged behind in the much sought-after purity of this experience, insofar as this discipline, as a science, has no immediate access to the eyes and the eyes of the world, death as the ultimate aesthetic experience is vetoed for the philosopher - The Absolute, insofar as it doesn't concern the individual parts, is unable to turn a glimpse on itself, lest it happens all too late and therefore, the philosopher knows no lifetime, in the nauseating madness, by-product of absolute vertigo, the philosopher, even if he has lived a very long life and has a fair amount of memories to recount, realizes that he has no past, as long as he's been a philosopher through the whole of his life. This has plagued not only Gilson, but everyone from Plato to Spinoza to Hegel. For the philosopher, the testimony of art, its quality as an artifact of the world, is preposterously ephemeral and the choices left as few, because in this "stans aeternitatis", the time of the creation of the world and withal, the urgency inherent to life, are as alien to the philosopher as silent the breathe of an evil spell. There's no progress in philosophy, no history of philosophy, no philosophical history or historical philosophy, as long as one hasn't surrendered to the faith that the world is being looked at from the quintessentially future perspective of a day after the advent of catastrophe; when the world as we know, has been helplessly destroyed, its morphology altered and the shape of its permanence, has ultimately passed. Philosophy is a science of death, and this had been apparently very clear to Plato himself who held philosophy happily liable to the charges of being the science of "how to die". In this sense the enmity between philosophy and politics and life, is less than a casual accident, it constitutes the most radical form of homelessness, or in the words of a medieval emperor, "That be world be destroyed, but truth shall prevail". There comes inevitably the Christian question over the use of the world, in this valley of tears, the desert of Egypt through which the People of Israel are ought to cross through the madness of Reed Sea; wouldn't it be better to be at home in the world and yet dispossessed of all possible truth? This curiosity over the world plagued even the pious and sterile Lessing who wrote once, "If God would hold all the truth of the world in one hand and in the other the interminable doubt and thirst over truth and would ask, Lessing, choose one of the two! Truth belongs to thee alone my Lord". Wouldn't it be better to reject truth for the sake of an abode in the world? It's not the eternal truth, it's certainly no truth, but why should we abandon the pleasures of the world for the sake of truth alone?

We're confronted then with broken mirrors everywhere, every work of art manifests itself in the world in a two-fold manner: It constitutes the world-building activity par excellence while at the same time its permanence, the fact that just like the world, it was there before us, it will be there after we part, this fact alone destroys the unity of life, destroys the biological continuity of life, it points toward a sense of transcendence that can no longer be reached, it's perpetually melancholic, an image stolen from consciousness and yet unavailable within the repository of passing worldly artifacts and produce of human labor - necessary for survival of the species, otherwise it couldn't quality for a place of honor among the works of art. Historically, philosophy has demonstrated a certain aversion to consider the works of art, the temporary quality of artistic production was incompatible with metaphysics in the medieval period and in the modern period, unbearable for the utilitarian equation between means and results that has defined philosophy through the whole of the modern period since it is the artist alone the free man, the only individual in the hierarchy of society whose production is not necessary for functional survival and whose life does not depend on production alone. But the fascination about works of art has been as perennial as the enterprise of metaphysics itself, there has been no other source of philosophical imagination that the commentary on the extant works of art from different periods. Fascination and imagination however are not coeval with truthfulness and pleasure as such, as much as deceive, has never been a category of systematic thought unless we are taking for thought the abstract notions of pleasure derived Kant's Critique of synthetic judgments a priori rather than the unmediated and raw experience of art as it was bequeathed to us by the trembling and fear of the learned men of the Renaissance and the Baroque. The human eye of these men of science and virtue and their discovery of different worlds, inside and outside the earth, was radically affected by the infinite diminishing in the stature of Western man; they were only able to pull a survivor's trick - they laughed hysterically, but beneath this laughter hid their infinite tremor, their infinite vertigo as they stood in front of the abyss - "Oh the time is out of joint! Cursed spite, that thou wert borne to set it aright" (Hamlet). If such were in fact the dimensions of the universe, there could be no possible way to find out who we are or what the meaning of life is, for as long as we're alive and of this infinitesimally small world. It might be that this was the transitional period of art between forms and expressions, but yet the fact remained unchanged even at the times of WWII when Romain Rolland wrote in a letter to Stefan Zweig that art brings us consolation as individuals but it is powerless before reality. Nietzsche knew this well as his death loomed close and he only found consolation from his great physical pain as his sister played the piano.

Sweelinck was one of these men, for whom music was not only aesthetic pleasure but the impossible realization that there were no longer safeties in the world, the heraldic awareness that the choice between God and hell was not as paradoxical as we might have thought: It could have been a simple choice between leaving the world as we know it to be lifted up by the arm of the Holiest, or to stay in the world and reject paradise, to stay in the world and as in Kleist, deny the possibility of innocence once we can no longer choose ourselves for the god or the stone, we are barely witnesses. Christian art as such is in principle a little bit unchristian as all art is insofar as the representability of anything, is an immediate call to its ultimate mortality, the suffering of the Cross, the greatest burden ever borne by man was turned into an object of contemplation, into an object of beauty and as such into an object of death if one insists in remaining a Christian. The wolf is at the door, the close of times always at hand, and the struggle with the demon always in the greener grass: The violent force of Sweelinck lies on his similarity with Goethe, in the fact that he always stood at the gates, he looked at the abyss into the eye in a clear morning of the summer when the beauty of its shine was visible at peak of twilight, he saw the fires of hell consuming his soul; yet unlike Goethe he saw the danger, he saw Kleist and Hoelderlin and Nietzsche falling into the abyss, he wiped the sweat from their forehead, tended to their wounds, quenched their thirst with fresher waters, but he did not jump. This is the greatness and the burden of his realization. Unlike the four Protestant agitators that surrender to the endless reciting of a "Deus excelsis gloria", Sweelinck could not kneel down, he was the miracle and the wine but not the saint. His greatest sin: The silence before the Kingdom of Heaven. It was perhaps someone like Sweelinck behind the miracle of the Holy Cecile, the maker of this great impasse, it is the evil spell that he himself did not fall prey to. The great sin of the listener is that the more he listens to the magic, the more he is surrendered to this world with its ugly and endless pathways of graves extending along the grass that grows with the violence of life and wraps everything into a symphony of oblivion, this is perhaps what eternity is, the fact that we can't survive the hour of freedom even by one single hour. The listened kneels down but what comes closer is his death, and not the gates of heaven that are open only to those innocent, only to puppets and to gods. The sublime object is always an unchangeable artifact, that's the secret of its cruelty, that the sublime cannot be sublimated, not even by silence. Those who search for God in Sweelinck, just like in the Christian piety of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, are entirely doomed, because the anxiety is the symptom of traveling toward an impossible destination; Kierkegaard was clear about that: the Christian does not exist YET. The suffocating and toxic air derives not from its eternal rising into the clarity of the skies above, but from the fact that "the Church, that community of God in the future, eternally dissatisfied with the present" (Bloch) is still a descent, the place hasn't changed and if it would, we wouldn't know, because every self-proclaimed Messiah is a false of Messiah - even if the Messiah is a piece of music alone. The miracle is not so much the conversion of the water into wine but as in Rilke the maddening fact that the water is still water and the wine is still wine. The channels of friendship ought to remain open, they assure us to the practice of reality and ultimately define that we are not alone with God in the universe, if the ascent would be immediate, we would no longer need each other, but as the abyss deepens and tightens at the level of the neck to the point of strangling, the other, that is, the friend, is the insurance that there's no insurance for truth as long we we remain committed to the life of this world. There's then a way to circumvent the valley of tears and to be at home: To kneel down with the security that we shall not rise, but that, in order to be accomplished, it needs at least two.

The danger is not to fall, that would be too easy, the danger is to remain at the threshold, looking down, that's in fact, the greatest sin, that's why the aspiration to transformation is the only commodity that can save us not, only the fallen can be saved, the puppets and the gods.

Problems of Literature

My problem with the idea of writing is perhaps not necessarily an issue of craft, of literary craft - whether we are able to write at all, or not, for it's become evident that somehow I'm able to write, it's more like perhaps I don't quite want to hear what I'm in need of writing, it frightens me so often to hear myself. If it were an issue as simple as that of evoking the imagination, of surrendering the provocation of the invention, the repository of fantasy, then it could be easily overcome, but the repository of the memory is a lot more demanding, it's not simply an issue of aesthetics, but the fact that it's impossible to avoid the memoryhouse of experience. I'm equally unable to write or read too much, I swallow bits of the world with much paucity and care, trying not to miss anything, because the openness required for sincerity of writing is not that of simply trying to sketch a travel log of worldtime, but rather to depart from the repository of the strictly personal - experiences, acquired tastes, stories that might be of our interest or might not, stories that we have heard from other people or that we believe we have heard, in order to create a sense of the story (be it a critical or philosophical essay, a poem, a short story, a journalistic article) that appeals universally to the demands of the reader, of the people, of the world, how do you transform the raw material into something universally readable? Authors often tend to think it has to do with themselves and that's why confession it's always such a stumbling block to depart from in the making of literature. You're not so important after all and the possibility to tell a story in which you're not the most important part, even if it's a story about yourself, it is in this possibility that lies the loyalty to poetics and to creativity. It shouldn't be a deadly enterprise to write neither the good will to curb a suicide attempt on the part of the writer; insofar as this is supposed to be an art, there must be in it more enjoyment than pure salvation, because in the end, art is necessarily powerless before life and the act of transcending that is enabled by the production of literature is not based upon an avoidance of life on the one hand, or the plain excruciating literality on the other, both literatures, those of avoidance and of literality, however interesting, lack in every single way the power to evoke and are therefore false. You must be able to take a step back, to withdraw, to position yourself beyond and prior to attachment, both at the same time. That there's "something" to tell, it is a fact of life, part of the recognition that we find on other people and that we call friendship and love, stems from the fact that we share in this language of lips and hands, and why should one story be of superior quality to another doesn't necessarily procede from the content but from the ability of the writer to enable the reader to take part even if it is at the price of forgetting that the story isn't his own. Because there's an aesthetic appeal to which we resort, whenever we're ought to think about art at all, the categories that we use, to think of this "art" are always somewhat abstract and in that sense it's not only that they fail to engage the audience but also that we fail to be engaged ourselves. There's no position more dangerous in literary production than the idea of considering the reader infinitely inferior or dumb, in which case, the worldliness of the work of art becomes a great fallacy, and does it happen ever that we write only for ourselves? I doubt it, even in the most precarious cases, sometimes we write for the silent eye of God, or for an anynonymous recipient or for sometimes who can't read us for one reason or another, but I don't think we ever write only for ourselves. Some people have the ability to reflect upon their experiences within the traditional voices of narrative, time after time, sometimes even as the events are taking place, defying all concepts of time and space, whereas for me, differently enough, it takes years to consider the effect of the simplest passages, or the loneliest alleys or of very harmless yet beautiful, moments of the day.

Note

I sweat like an animal even though I can't feel the smell but deep inside me the turbulent waters come afloat and wrap my body in their motions of vertail lines falling from my head, it is not a summer day, it is a very different kind of sweat, I'm overcome by shame, by the lies of my body that speaks in signals that I would never want to hear, there's so little time, so they say, the lines of expression in my forehead and the newborn tiredness of my eyes, if I'm unable to write now, I shall never be able to do it. The imprisonment takes a toll on me, I keep dreaming but the waves of the clouds that trace my daydreaming seem to come from too far away, from a place where I never requested anything, not even a passing moment. The body is so often tired, especially one of the eyes, and yet, it could perfectly have been a summer day, the beautiful rays of sun which I hadn't seen for such a long time, the unwillingness to settle down for one place alone and the tender breezes of the grass, the joyful motions of the passers and the jokes, the pleasures of friendship, the painless thoroughway by the side of the cement buildings sprang forth as a river from which I obtained yet one moment more of life.

It's not normal, one should say to himself, that he's ought to ask permission to live, as if it were to no avail to try on one's own, to tell the real story, so uninteresting in itself and more than anything, so painful, not from the bruises and the wounds caused by father but more the bruises caused by the total dearth of knowledge, the little deaths when certain conversations take place, the unsuccessful attempts to run away with their periods of injustice, hunger and especially sleeplessness, the idea that danger looms too close, the exposition to the perils of the street and the mercilessness of the stranger in whose eyes one's looking for a little bit of comfort, nowhere to be found. Nowhere, other than in oneself and there it's no longer comfort and consolation, it's become already vital energy once it's found.

The guilt is unavoidable, the sterile guilt of having done something wrong or of not having done anything at all, suffocated by the sweat, the reminder of this sin, the impossible language without lips and without arms, it's an army of events that all the more disjointed make the world collapse into his eyes, he's no longer there, he's already parted to the far away land.

Silence

It is not out of tiredness
That I have ceased from speech
It is not the weather
Nor is it the world
What forces me to lay on the water
Without musing a word
In a little death

It is not the solitude
That brings me to the meadows
What provokes this silence
It is not the strength of northern winds
What loses the direction home
Along the trodden paths of the forest

It is not hunger
That bruises lips and fingertips
What keeps me from the certitude
Of a poet

It is not the rain
That destroys the crops in the fields
What loots delight from little pleasures

It is not something tragic
That learned men understand not
What is at the root of this evil


It is yet something so simple

That a stranger in the street
Did not wave back
At the right time

That a friend did not stay
For a minute in the sun
That my feet are cold
That a friend does not write
That he remains entrusted
To higher wisdoms
Than the rapture in the pasture

It is a reason strong enough
Not to write
In the expectation
To be written to
At a later date

Pasture

The green pastures of rapture
Grow from undernearth the faces
Of heroes and fathers of the land
They tilt up their arrows and arms
As if they had bodies of their own
Surrounding the the lips and the handshakes
Of friend ever so childish
There's nowhere distraction
From the silence
Of disinterest
In wisdom twice bathed
In different versions of the morning

There's no spell other than laughter
Under the eye of an inspecting Saturn
Descending into the highway
Bidding farewell at noon
As if they were brothers
That had never seen each other
So free from the excesses of love
Unready to part, unwilling to stay
The station is just temporary
He reminds himself
As if there were other faces
Opening somewhere his letters

All day long, a navigation map
Without the stare of fantasy
How cruel had the pasture been
How deserted that afternoon after the summer
So insensible the rapture to the water
That had wanted to stay
To mend the world from down upwards
Moisturing the wounds of the garden
That one day would grow trees eventually
That would answer all the questions
In spite of those innocent hands
In the abscence of the friend that was

The young Franz (I)

That night, as it rained upon, he thought that what might come is no sense a work of art, since there were no powers of the imagination that could be gentle enough to seduce the awareness of his newfound belly, it wasn't necessarily a belly or protrusion even but the fact of having adopted the position, not of someone bellyached, but of somebody imaginarily fat and ugly, althoug he could in no possible sense consider himself either because his spiritual narcissicism would make it then impossible that he could ever sleep again with himself without the disgust manufactured by the impossibilities of physics to keep a body within the right proportions - If he would have a belly himself, he wouldn't be so worried about the belly as much as he would be, about the sweat that would run in between the wrinkles of the flesh and the hairs that would grow around his neck and all through the surface of his back as if it were corn overgrowing the grass in the pasture of a beautiful plateau. He was as slim as ever and perhaps because his ever increasing abandonment of the world, slimmer and dimmer, there was no longer a spark of light to gaze into at the height of noon with that glow of glimmer; everything had become so much less obvious, there were other places in his body and other smells that stood in lieu of what had been once a natural gift for curiosity and surprise in the eyes. It wasn't that the eyes were no longer beautiful and it is the case that the eyes of the person that is loved, are always eyes of the beautiful even if the aesthetic faculties of imagination and sensibility, would fail to reach the same conclusions. Those faculties from their part, very philosophical in nature are therefore, necessarily blind, and that's why he's always reconciled with their opinions; there's nothing further removed from his wishes than to allow the sense of things to pervert the ultimate perfection of the concept. Everything seems to have a concept for him, the most basic assumptions about reality are not to be taken for the granted, this is however not the consequence of inner evil, but a side effect of an illness so completely external to him and to his world that it becomes so manifest in the outside world that one might then it is a matter of inwardness, thus he begins to search deep inside him for the root of his pale sorrow.

It never occured to him that the world should be inspected even if only as a precaution - some questions need to be asked, enquiries are ought to be run throughout and the questionnaires must be completed in full. It wasn't having a belly or not having a belly what tortured him and what led him after all, being an adventurous young man, to a mysterious choice such as classical music, but rather the fact that being free as he was, he was completely deprived from the most basic choices in life, it could have been an idyllic life for Adam before the Fall, which wasn't a fall as much as it was a problem of uncertainty, it was perhaps Adam the first atheist, otherwise had he cared much, he could have brokered a deal with his creditor; Adam would have then loved the day we had just been told about when it began to rain: So free from any worldly responsibility, the young man arose everyday to fulfill the commandment of love toward parents and brothers, he could spend the whole day in sweet surrender to the most delirious intellectual pursuits, perhaps learning a tongue now forgotten, like Heinrich Schliemann, who is said to have studied and mastered Russian among other languages in a matter of weeks while being left on his own in a Greek villa without any chairs to sit whereon, thus the man, thirsty of acquiring wealth of worldly knowledge studied the grammar books of the most diverse languages running pacing back and forth through the house. How could anyone not find solace in this kind of life? It is a monasticism without religion and without faith of any kind, because, different from Schliemann, this young man didn't believe in Homer, nor in his own omein. What kind of monasticism was it then, that it was music, his ultimately choice?

He had thought of himself primarily as an artist although there were no specific talents that those close to him could recognize from the outside, he had some abilities for writing, he had them since he was a very young child but they were never specifically treasured as a talent, neither were they developed or pointed out anywhere; his problem was not that he didn't believe in Homer or the fact that he didn't believe but rather the spurious fact of how ordinary his life was, or at the least, how ordinary it had become, after he had chosen himself for such a destiny of greatness out of which he had fallen not because of incapability but because of the unrest fixed in the palms of his hands and the crystalline fog of his eyes were advancing much faster than the world and this caused him to become extremely anxious about being understood by people, what had to be understood, is not that he was extraordinary, which he was not, or perhaps only as a story-teller, what was extraordinary is that he, the son of a nobody, of town's folk without the slighest indication of being cursed or blessed by the Lord - they were just left on their own, without any major afflictions but also without much symptom of what people call happiness; this son of a nobody, could, in theory, become whoever he had desired. It was perhaps this transformation, this effacement of whatever the world had prescribed for him, this inability to march with the seasons, what had become entirely an art with him - the difficulties began to arise when this spiritual strength, noble as it was, failed to produce any material results; it is not only that he had never written a poem worthy of admiration but also that he had not been able to assert the allegedly self-earned position and near the age of thirty, he had no other income that some coins that his father pitily regaled him so that he wouldn't go into raving madness in the abscence of tobacco. He thought then, that night, that no art could come out of him, no art that wouldn't be manifest in the form of this transformation into another person, into another fatherland, into another language of sorts.

It wasn't that he couldn't write, but so quite unlike many of the chidish fable writers, his imagination was so very poor.

Der höhere Frieden - Heinrich von Kleist

1792

Der höhere Frieden

Wenn sich auf des Krieges Donnerwagen,

Menschen waffnen, auf der Zwietracht Ruf,

Menschen, die im Busen Herzen tragen,

Herzen, die der Gott der Liebe schuf:

Denk ich, können sie doch mir nichts rauben,

Nicht den Frieden, der sich selbst bewährt,

Nicht die Unschuld, nicht an Gott den Glauben,

Der dem Hasse, wie dem Schrecken, wehrt.

Nicht des Ahorns dunkelm Schatten wehren,

Dass es mich, im Weizenfeld, erquickt,

Und das Lied der Nachtigall nicht stören,

Die den stillen Busen mir entzückt.

Peace

In the thunderbox of wars,

At the call of discord, to arms men hold fast,

Men that carry in their chest hearts,

The hearts created by God in love last.

Methinks, dispossessed I cannot by thief,

Not from peace, on its own right preserved,

Not from innocence, not from the god of belief

That hate and terror, he hath not served.

Not from the dark shadow of the maple,

That freshens me on the cornfield,

Or to disturb the song of nightingale

Delight of the heart that in silence it yields.

Was ist die Welt? - Hugo von Hofmannsthal

To my friend Tundama

Was ist die Welt? Ein ewiges Gedicht,

Daraus der Geist der Gottheit stahlt und glüht,

Daraus der Wein der Weisheit schäumt und sprüht,

Daraus der Laut der Liebe zu uns spricht

Und jedes Menschen wechselndes Gemüt,

Ein Strahl ists, der aus dieser Sonne bricht,

Ein Vers, der sich an tausend andre flicht,

Der unbemerkt verhallt, verlischt, verblüht.

Und doch auch eine Welt für sich allein,

Voll süss-geheimner, nievernommner Töne,

Begabt mit eigner, unentweihter Schöne,

Und keines Andern Nachhall, Widerschein.

Und wenn du gar zu lesen drin verstündest,

Ein Buch, das du im Leben ergründest.

What is the world? A poem of the eternal

Out of which the spirit of the godly glows with the stars,

Out of which the wine of the wisdom foams and sparks,

Out of which the sound of love speaks to all!

And of every man, the ever changing mind,

It is the radiant light, out of which the sun shines,

It is a verse, that among thousand others, reigns and rhymes,

Unnoticeable, away it dies, whiters to unwind,

A whole world in himself,

Full of sweet unveiled and never ending tones,

Gifted with its own seamless crown,

Else, no reverberations or reverberant sounds.

And if you understood enough, to read it from the inside

Be it a book, that life it fathoms from outside.

Die gestundete Zeit - Ingeborg Bachmann

Es kommen härtere Tage.

Die auf Widerruf gestundete Zeit

wird sichtbar am Horizont.

Bald musst du den Schuh schnüren

und die Hunde zurückjagen in die Marschhöfe.

Denn die Eingeweide der Fische

sind kalt geworden im Wind.

Ärmlich brennt das Licht der Lupinen.

Dein Blick spurt im Nebel:

die auf Widerruf gestundete Zeit

wird sichtbar am Horizont.

Drüber versinkt die die Geliebte im Sand,

er steigt um ihr wehendes Haar,

er fällt ihr ins Wort,

er befiehlt ihr zu schweigen,

er findet sie sterblich

und willigt dem Abschied

nach jeder Umarmung.

Sieh dich nicht um.

Schnür deine Schuh.

Jag die Hunde züruck.

Wirf die Fische ins Meer.

Lösch die Lupinen!

Es kommen härtere Tage.

Harder days are coming.

The time due at the turn of the hour

becomes visible in the horizon.

Soon you will have to lace your shoe

and march the dogs back into the marshyards.

For the innards of the fish

have turned cold in the wind.

The lupines burn with miser flame.

Your gaze leaves marks in the haze:

The time due at the turn of the hour

becomes visible in the horizon.

Yonder sinks your beloved into sand,

it ascends through the wafts in the hair

it pierces her words through,

commanded her to silence,

encounters her mortally

all too willing to part

after every embrace.

Do not look behind.

Lace up your shoe.

March in the dogs.

Throw the fish in the sea.

Away with the lupines!

Harder days are coming!

Begegnungen - Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Wo ist das Entzücken des Ruderers auf dem dunklen See? In ihm oder in dem Beschauer - dem Wanderer der die Gewitterwolke sieht und den Gischt aufbrausen hört oder in dem Falken der nichtachtend dahinstürmt? In dem Fischer der seine Netze hereinnimmt und sein Herdfeuer sieht zwischen den Netzstangen? In dem Knaben der eins ins Schilf gelegte Tonne zunagelt und durch Gitter hineinspäht?

Where is the delight of the rower in the dark lake? Is it in him or in the observer - in the wanderer who sees the cloud of the thunder storm and hears the spray flaring up, on in the falcon that in dishonor squalls? In the fisherman pulling back his net and seeing the fire in his hearth between the rods of the net? In the boy hidden in the reeds, nailing a barrel shut and peering in through the grating?

Es könnte viel bedeuten - Ingeborg Bachmann

Es könnte viel bedeuten - wir vergehen

wir kommen ungefragt und müssen weichen.

Doch dass wir sprechen und uns nicht verstehen

und keinen Augenblick des andren Hand erreichen.

zerschlägt so viel: Wir werden nicht bestehen.

Schon den Versuch vedrohen fremde Zeichen,

und das Verlangen, tief uns anzusehen,

durchtrennt den Kreuz, und einsam auszustreichen-

It could mean much - that we should not last

we are coming uninvited and then must be passed.

Though we are speaking, but understanding, we can´t

and never a moment, in another hand, we can hold steadfast

So much as battered - upright we shalln´t stand.

Already effort and might, twisted with oh´s and and´s,

and the craving, tearing through the Cross with a hand

To look deep into our hearts, in solitarily withstand.

Farewell to Tundama Ortiz

"Illusie"

Niet om afscheid te nemen,

Of om mij op reis te begeven,

ben ik het station ingegaan,

maar om tussen de mensen te staan

die voor een bestemming leven,

om ergens heen te gaan.

[To the train station I went,

Not to begin a journey myself,

Or even to bid you farewell,

But to stand between all people

Who are living for some goal

For a somewhere to go.]

- Ed Hornik, 1960

"Does he learn like a god or like a stone? I can't be befouled, it's a tale about seduction", led astray from my own metaphors of preoccupation, I couldn't be sure at the time of what he meant, as Tundama greeted me in the jolts of the day when I could no longer turn my attention to the choices between trees, but it was him perhaps the only loyal comrade in my Prussian battlefield where the language of the powers that be laid slain and beheaded under the sign of a volcano. The sights had been very pleasurable in spite of my cold feet and the numbing greys that hovered over the hole in my shoe as a healing malaise, replacing every wound with a different color of sore - Ten years back I had assembled myself just as comfortably as Raphaël in the certainty of the instruction of the wisest minds, weighing heavily toward the obligation of truth and rowing against a tide of possible questions that kneeled down before the curiosity of men with arrogant defiance; the fissures in the skin of the poet had grown thinner and thinner, watered down by the raving impulse of laughter, he could not longer afford the mad frenzy of the notebooks and found little pleasure in this wisdom, that of its own accord now resembled more the map of a shipwreck than a travel plan. Yet so many thousands of kilometers, I thought, the places remain unchanged by the will of man more than by the time, this merciless and godly enemy of the body.

It was an illusion in its own right to re-live the past merrily and without tiredness, awake in the nightmare of the mirror without falling in the water, chancing alike into the eyes of friend and foe rather than a self-inspection and in avoidance of guilt - guilt not about death, you're guilty of nothing but unhappiness. But how beautiful these illusions are when they do not come at the expense of contemplation but in the exercise of the most cruel maturity of language already blinded to the flamboyance of the demands of history and ever returning, even ten years later, after a battle fought with the war, to lay peacefully on the grass that grows toward the present and is prescient with gifts of adoration offered not to the men of this earth but to the Janus-faced skin of god and stone as they interchangeably surface on the edged nails and fingertips of the miracle, they're objects of pleasure and praise that dance in tiptoeing motions around the corpses of older words that seemed once ideal, that befouled the unrest and mishappened as sciences of an undercover life, the secret would lift its veil once and offer the mysteries of reality as it were - bereft of interpretations and clean from intermediaries, be them heroes or saviors, unfolding and branching out as a tree of love ripe in fruits and overgrowing the fallacies of Paradise. This all seems stale now, beauty has proven a perverse companion of youth when it appears not as a gift of the gods but as a remedy and elixir against the displeasure of walking over the sharp edges of the stones.

Tundama was just like that, fleeting as a bird but without the presumptuousness of flight, no longer concerned with the therapeutic rhythm of knowledge for life - it seemed as if the world was no longer in the obligation of letting himself be used for survival. In this language of paucity and slow depth, the words didn't descend from above as a gift from heaven but rose from below as in the transformation of the stone into a glyph forgotten somewhere inside the thick forest of womb-shaped trees in an ancestral mountain, its whole grammar had been once already destroyed and its beauty ransacked for the sake of hearsay. The luxury of his abode was all too perplexing for me coming out of my own little inferno, my wooden prison cell from which I was able to move out freely into a house of strangers, yet it reminded me a bit of myself when I was running against the time of the universe before I had learnt the walking ways of the simple and wet earth; more than anything the shelves and the books and the scars from the wounds in the pages and to the side of the lungs, I was no longer in the posession of any books being a traveler as I now am, but there was no feeling of animosity or jealousy, only the rather felicitious contentment of looking outside a window that doesn't stare into the accumulated fat of the kitchen ceiling and the thread of hangers for laundry that seems to extend infinitely into the pierced heart of heavenly bodies that somewhere up there in their own abode, hold the lives down below in the kind of contempt typical of very talented writers.

There was so little time and so little distance yet in the restful space of the shelved room, if told about it, one would be inclined to believe it was an airport affair, but so tied to this earth those brief moments were, so appropriating of this land, no walls separated the room from the rest of the universe, so that even the airplanes would resemble little birds flying from mountain to mountain over and over and tirelessly with the only effort in mind to lay a nest along the paw-looking branches of a tree without science and on the banks of an ancestral lake. The universe, however, seems to last for a long time, impossible to conceive of in the limited scope of cab rides and lunching times, crushed under the weight of something as simple as a wristwatch, crushed under the heavy weight of all the lightest wristwatches in the world! The jerky and expressionless talk of nervous travelers sketching a plan to conquest the world in a distant time, to conquer the wristwatches and the crush down the effect of a thousand pages in an hour and within the course of a simple conversation in which no philosopher would take the pleasure of distinguishing truth from untruth and rainfall from storm; I kept wondering where the blue would end on that day, pretending to sleep through the restful city lines, imagining another time, once again, thousands of kilometers behind and ahead, in times of unrest.

The street that I thought narrow, had become impossibly wide and the options manifold, it's just that I didn't know of a somewhere to go, only in order to escape from the silence that the conversation with Tundama had turned prohibitive and sinful, nihilistic even; images of other kinds were conjured up in the short ride home, I could have perfectly made myself at home in his little palace never to return again to my little inferno, but in the abscence of a battlefield, of a favorite reader, there's no mischance or mischief, the pages that were once destroyed with the intention to wage a war against the wristwatch were now blank and filled by footnotes written by a man several years my junior, those pages were not bloodied thus I couldn't destroy them or water them down as mistakes, they rather marked another age in the world, one that it takes much effort to live happily with: how to survive in a world where there's no longer war, how to survive when survival is no longer required and when the power of enticing of the man who was once a soldier is now a marblestone of pleasures for art rather than an evil god. The problem is not the abyssmal void left by a God gone in retirement but the weakness of current evils, the fact that even without the friend of an hour and a half, one still has to write something, oh god! This is what we learnt though, that writing is not bleeding, it has to be sustainance and livelihood without swallowing up the whole world, this is why we still look for the goddamn tree, in ancestral lakes, in places older by ten years or in friends younger by as much, because there's absolutely no point in returning to Paradise, there's no point in writing for the end of the world; it is after all an issue, that we still want to be read.

Looking for Tundama

Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.

"Does that mean", I said in some bewilderment, "that we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence?"

"Of course", he said, "but that's the final chapter in the history of the world."

Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theater”

“With the passage of time and the intervention of newer, more difficult works, the artist's transgression becomes ingratiating, eventually legitimate. Goethe accused Kleist of having written his plays for an "invisible theatre." But in time the invisible theatre becomes "visible" The ugly and discordant and senseless become "beautiful." The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions.”

Susan Sontag, “Aesthetics of Silence”

Dearest Katherina,

For a long time I had wanted to write you and to warn you as well about a certain young writer whose company I haunted while he was still alive and before his untimely departure for Siberia, where I’ve been looking for his sights already for a long time; now it would be presumptuous to believe that he’s dead and the idea itself is most repulsive – a writer that is posthumously born in anonymity by a human pen, on a free ride through the universe hopping from one tree of knowledge to the other as the possessor and professor of a truth so infinite that it cannot be grasped literarily, stretching beyond the limits of one’s own literality, an unsettling language of lips and lives. That there are places in the world that forbid the kind of language that is usually taken advantage of by literature, it is something I could never deny; there’s no longer an appeal in going into painful technicalities to describe an erotic scene that takes place in a public bathroom – this kind of fantasies are as devaluated as the currency of promises because the image is no longer unsettling or chaotic, it could speak for a lack of moral ambition but no longer has the paucity of a stare of fantasy. The favorite language of the artist is today a very simple perversion – silence, and it is nowadays perverted not because it has lost its age-old religious metaphors but because it is silence what constitutes the deliberate attack on the part of the artist against the society that has nurtured with bureaucratic care and loving excesses the pretensions of his own aesthetic debauchery, the aesthete is modeled not after the curious contemplation of an ever belligerent world but against its orderliness – inside out. This artist does not want to be read against the overwhelming innocence and fertile wordiness of an advertisement – in his natural apprehension to surrender to the world as will and representation (and what is the modern advertisement, if not the enshrining of the image as will and representation of the world but cleaned free from the serendipity of a Christian struggle?) he turns his mind to the only place safe from the certainty of the Cartesian window-shopper and the managerial inquisitions of publishers and galleries, it is a priestly geography of imperial capitals and flat worlds; while trying to distract the shopper from the raving madness of consuming his art (art is after all his only life, there’s no biography outside a work of art even when the work of art functions as a biography of unwillingness) he’s also actively engaged in making the reader or the spectator disappear together with his art in a transaction that transforms the artist into his own enemy – he wants to be no longer an artist and his silence is a fundamentally elitist and paternalist attitude that enables him to sit in the public, as unrecognized as a true Messiah but with the Pharisee demeanor of a false Messiah that refuses to produce art that is not for art’s sake (give to the Caesar what belongs to the Caesar) while lecturing the ignorant mobs about a correct reading of art – there’s no meaning in the chamber but only a paradox in which the empty room and the solid air of the vacuous space is supposed to stand in lieu of the most extreme aesthetic experience; the death of the Romantic writer turns out to be a most vivid confirmation of life whereas the silence of the modern artist, bereft entirely of religious pathos, cannot aim higher than the line between life and death, it is only extreme insofar as it is a desire to be noisily overheard amidst the thrift of raving noise.

Tundama Ortiz was one of these writers that being dead as he was (although he was born on the same year that I was) – and perforce of necessity silent, he was still able to sign copies of his books to the very select following that he had, believing what would have been unthinkable to the genius of Frans Hals – that the good works would reach their desirable public by means of a magic devise, perhaps it had to do with a more refined sexual morality than that of a Calvinist painter who sold the opprobrious looks of moral superiority to an aristocracy of refined taste that would pay for it the same way one would pay today in order to spend the night with a beautiful maiden – Tundama Ortiz was certainly no prostitute. I became aware of this that night when I became acquainted with him in that small room that served the purpose of his posthumous revelation to the world amidst the noise of glasses and flatteries, that are necessarily present as well in the funerals of writers, both good and bad ones. As a ghost of sorts he paved around flamboyantly greeting the hordes of guests in this untimely scenario and while he didn’t have any of the priestly traits of the ever so silent artists that scream out loud from a place of both fame and contempt, it’s the same transgression that pretends to elevate a form of art in the moment of its most critical destruction and it is a fine irony that one could say that destruction could be ever critical, as if it were not in a protest but through a laboratory procedure that the destruction is effected – trying to dismantle the work of art with such care so that it is still whole and possible. Moreover the problem with aesthetic destruction is that it can only last for a single moment, that’s why it is perhaps easier to embody in the pen of somebody else other than yourself, the terrorist writer becomes a subtext in a larger and more grandiose story that the living writer is telling and because he is at best only telling a story there’s still a chance for survival of the person – none of the promised boundaries of life have been eroded and therefore one shouldn’t be held accountable for the consequences of the unspeakable, the place of the sublime is still unmovable.

That night it appeared to me as a surprise that he could be a dead writer and this I didn’t learn from the book but from the natural talent of the writer to tell stories; one wonders time and again, why people who are able to tell stories, are ought to write anything at all! Maybe the answer is not that we are not understood but that we don’t necessarily want to be understood as we are but rather through a sequence of mirrors that make it impossible to resort to the silence we claim to practice but are in no position to demand from the world. The most suffocating ideal of aesthetic silence arises when a writer makes a deliberate choice for silence, looking at his craft as an intermediate step between the ultra mundane existence in unfreedom or constriction and the disappointment over the failure of art to meet his demands; the freedom in the choice of aesthetic silence could be a great deal of help if the renunciation would not come with the added value of guilt, not the typical case scenario of guilt about living and dying but rather the fact that even after Rimbaud went to Abyssinia and Duchamp turned to chess, they still considered themselves as artists in the most primordial sense. The silence is not abandonment but a continuation of the cycle of linguistic misunderstandings in which the use of language heretofore has become judicial evidence for the case against oneself in which, Kafkaesque speaking, the person stands as a puppet judge in his own trial. The transgression, even the transgression of Tundama Ortiz as a rather sympathetic critic of his own genre – and in this sense his renunciation is not different than mine, in my adamant refusal to write at all, has to turn at some point into an aggression not against the literary but against the literality of a life that is lived without writing and without telling but as embedded in the same language of scripture and writing as the advertisements and flatteries of sociability are. In theory we all should be able to write novels but we choose a management career over the writing of novels, this theory is most fallacious though because it seems that most men of letters who wrote novels did it almost against their own will as if the fact that one has to write a novel or a work of art at all only attests to something very lacking in the world of literality which is the favorite trope of the writer – unlike the philosopher who has outright condemned literality as untruth.

“It’s indeed a problem”, we used to say in the past as if speaking of the symptom of a well known malaise, when speaking of the fact that this unliterary literality seems to have the ability to walk at a pace much faster than that of beauty, while the irruption of beauty as a part of literality which begins as a transgression is at some point bound to become an ideal, the poets have been all too keen on explaining how it’s been them who taught men about colors and landscapes even before the painters did since in general poets are blind and painters are staring straight into the sun – both positions are very uncomfortable in life. The denial of art and its conventions for the sake of art itself seems like a confirmation of the powerlessness of the artist and the independence of his works from his own life, lest he turns to the world as a laboratory not of life but of work and when this happens, then his own life becomes ownerless. I only realized the extent of this powerlessness while talking to the young Raphaël, who surprisingly is still able to read Kleist for example, without being particularly harmed by life, and while I have so little respect for this attitude my jealousy is so overpowering that it’s turned into a silent admiration – I’m of the faith, as you are, that there’s no possible appropriation of Kleist unless it’s for the sake of armed and violent guerrilla warfare against the world, there’s no place for aesthetics there unless one has realized beforehand that the limits between the work and the artist are no longer stable and whenever the balance is shifted toward the work, the artist is forced to leave the world as we know it, its relationships of happiness and property and the ownership of ideals becomes illusory unless they’re embodied in an intensity of language for which the work of art is nothing but a bland footnote. It’s impossible to write without being unmediated harmed by life during the process and the exemplary renunciation of writing or of writing in one’s own name seems to overcome the difficulty not by avoiding harm but by placing it elsewhere, elsewhere outside and at a distance: it’s an Oriental prince who paints, it’s not me! It’s a philosopher who composes, it’s not me! It’s a writer exiled in Russia who sketches short stories, it’s not me! But you see, Raphaël, he reads Kleist, and he’s still himself! So completely assembled in reality in a way that has never been possible for me, reading without cruelty and without despair, translating within science and without bleeding, without exile and without war; do you think that it is maybe the reason why Tundama Ortiz chose Siberia?

I traveled all the way to Siberia to look for him without any other directions than some story he had told us that night about a friend and I tried telling the story to all the people that I had met along the way in order to find out whether they had heard it themselves; to my own demise every time I told the story I was sent in a different direction toward a person who was exactly like Raphaël and who reacted to me with the same calm, contentment of the eyes and certainty of fingertips, people who were able to read literature without having to respond to the challenge of being changed. That night when I met Tundama Ortiz I didn’t know Raphaël at all but overtime here in Siberia I’ve learnt pretty much everything about him, things that I can’t even tell you because they’re not exactly literal, it’s a story I’ve told you many times, how difficult it is to turn a person into a Cain when they no longer recognize the difference between life and science, between tree and tree, between word and word, world and word. I want to respond to friendship always with silence but in turn I respond with fruits from the tree of science that are mute enough to deafen any possibility of life, any offerings from the tree of life that demand nothing different from what God demands – to be infinitely unconscious and unfulfilled, precisely what all the Abels and the Raphaëls offer without demands. In Siberia you can make no difference between the trees because they’re all covered by thick layers of snow and then I thought that maybe this is what happened in Paradise, a confusion of tongues, an inability to translate affections, and this is why ever since we’re directed toward the unharmed as if queuing at the train, in between the stations, without destinies and destinations, only heavenly innuendoes and illiterate deliverance. My problem is not that the world was freed from God with whom I didn’t have particularly strong networking precisely because we demand from people just about the same, my real problem is that we no longer believe in the devil either, thus it can make no different which tree we choose and the result of this is almost always unequivocally the most terroristic devise of Christian theology: Life is eternal. This is the issue at the root of the silence of every modern form of art; death is no longer a charade to play on the Lord, it’s another commodity, the renunciation of life as much as the appropriation of science can no longer be a topic of conversation and as such, truth, unless be it topic of conversation, it can’t become a trope for art. That’s where the charm of an invisible theater is at home, the invisibility is the insurance against topics of conversation and once it becomes visible the transgression is over and with it the attention of the audience; there’s no audience for art without a modern-day transgression – this is why Tundama wrote the criticism of his own literary genre before he wrote anything in that literary genre.

Tundama I have met only once whereas Raphaëls I have met on the thousands while looking for Tundama in Siberia, but it’s strange, you know, I no longer remember Tundama – there’s something explicitly expressionless in him and that’s why I’ve come to adopt so much of what those questions marks demand from beauty and world as if nothing had been ever eroded; whereas Raphaël I remember distinctly as if I were speaking a life-long enemy while at the same time it’s difficult to loath people that haven’t themselves written anything at all; there’s nothing you can accuse them of with the exception of a charge for protecting themselves from the world behind nothing but laughter and there’s no acquittal for such a serious charge which is not as deserving of contempt as it is of love. What angers me is not the friendliness in the appropriation of murderous devises for the sake of entertainment as much as the endless innocence with which everything is carried through, the paucity of mind and the care, the ability to work unmolested by the facts of the world. I can take no pleasure in Kleist’s warfare unless it’s for the sake of its destruction. Has he eaten of the tree of knowledge in order to return to this state of innocence that enables one to read Kleist without harm? No, I don’t think so, this is not his mortal sin, his sin is that he hasn’t realized that there was a tree of love as well and that God with rapacious voracity ate all the fruits and the branches of the tree in heroic viciousness while Adam was still busy trying to figure out what to do with his body in the moment of self-awareness and has ever since mistaken the fruits of life for fruits of love and the fruits of science for fruits of life. This is precisely the reason why Tundama is nowhere to be found, he’s still there, with his little book, in the beginning of everything, trying to find the right tree, while in the greater consciousness of things, the Raphaëls of the world, down below, are either gods or stones, never trees.