A way of happening, a mouth

2013-06-04

‘Don’t let that bastard Tolstoy ruin your life,’ Pamela tells me.

2013-06-03

And although this cannot be portrayed artistically, then let your consolation be, as it is mine, that we are not to read about or listen to or look at what is the highest and most beautiful in life, but are, if you please, to live it.

— “Esthetic Validity of Marriage,” Either/Or

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Pride can be portrayed very well, because what is essential in pride is not sequence but intensity in the moment. Humility is hard to portray precisely because it is sequence, and whereas the observer needs to see pride only at its climax, in the second case he really needs to see something that poetry and art cannot provide, to see its continuous coming into existence, for it is essential to humility to come into existence continuously, and if this is shown to him in its ideal moment, he misses something, for he senses that its true ideality consists not in its being ideal at the moment but in its being continuous. Romantic love can be portrayed very well in the moment; marital love cannot, for an ideal husband is not one who is ideal once in his life but one who is that every day. If I wish to portray a hero who conquers kingdoms and countries, this can be done very well in the moment, but a cross-bearer who takes up his cross every day can never be portrayed in either poetry or art, for the point is that he does it every day. If I imagine a hero who loses his life, this can be concentrated very well in the moment, but the daily dying cannot, because the point is that it goes on every day. Courage can be concentrated very well in the moment; patience cannot, precisely because patience contends against time. You will say that art nevertheless has portrayed Christ as the image of patience, as bearing all the sin of the world, that religious poems have concentrated all the bitterness of life in one cup and had on individual empty it at one moment. That is true, but that is because they have concentrated it almost spatially. But anyone who knows anything about patience knows very well that its real opposite is not intensity of suffering (for then it more approximates courage) but time, and that true patience [Taalmod] is that which contends against time or is essentially long-suffering [Langmod]; but long-suffering cannot be portrayed artistically, for the point of it is incommensurable with art; neither can it be poetized, for it requires the protraction of time.

— “Esthetic Validity of Marriage,” Either/Or

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How, then, can the esthetic, which is incommensurable even for portrayal in poetry, be represented? Answer: by being lived. It thereby has a similarity to music, which is only because it is continually repeated, is only in the moment of being performed. That is why in the foregoing I called attention to the ruinous confusing of the esthetic and that which can be esthetically portrayed in poetic reproduction. Everything I am talking about here certainly can be portrayed esthetically, but not in poetic reproduction, but ony by living it, by realizing it in the life of actuality. In this way the esthetic elevates itself and reconciles itself with life, for just as poetry and art in one sense are precisely a reconciliation with life, yet in another sense they are enmity to life, because they reconcile only one side of the soul.

Here I am at the summit of the esthetic. And in truth, he who has humility and courage enough to let himself be esthetically transformed, he who feels himself present as a character in a drama the deity is writing, in which the poet and the prompter are not different persons, in which the individual, as the experienced actor who has lived into his character and his lines is not disturbed by the prompter but feels that he himself wants to say what is being whispered to him, so that it almost becomes a question whether he is putting the words in the prompter’s mouth or the prompter in his, he who in the most profound sense feels himself creating and created, who in the moment he feels himself creating has the original pathos of the lines, and in the moment he feels himself created has the erotic ear that picks up every sound—he and he alone has brought into actual existence the highest in aesthetics.

— “Esthetic Validity of Marriage,” Either/Or (Kierkegaard)

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Tolstoy’s view is…real life is lived in the small and ordinary moments. It is both prosaic and undramatic and is lived best when there is no story to tell. The reason that all happy families resemble each other whereas each unhappy is unhappy in its own way is that unhappy families, like unhappy lives, are dramatic; they have a story and each story is different. But happy families and happy lives, filled with undramatic incidents, do not make a good story; and it is in this sense that they all resemble each other. In his notebooks and letters of the period, Tolstoy at least twice quotes a French proverb: “Happy people have no history.” Plot, especially when known in advance, is an index of error.

— Gary Morson on Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (via hellojamie)

(via nools)

Source: hellojamie

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theparisreview:

“You know that dream of Tolstoy’s where he’s in some sort of bed contraption suspended between the abyss below and the abyss above? You know that one? Well, I gave it to him, the Lord said.”

This week, we will be running a series of pieces from Joy Williams’s new book, 99 Stories of God. Read more of today’s excerpt here.

Source: theparisreview

2013-05-31

eto-ee-eto:

when we all hang out with roger again

Source: russian-and-soviet-cinema

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Then the pulse.
Then a pause.
Then twilight in a box.
Dusk underfoot.
Then generations.

—

Then the same war by a different name.
Wine splashing in the bucket.
The erection, the era.
Then exit Reason.
Then sadness without reason.
Then the removal of the ceiling by hand.

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Then pages & pages of numbers.
Then the page with the faint green stain.
Then the page on which Prince Theodore, gravely wounded,
is thrown onto a wagon.
Then the page on which Masha weds somebody else.
Then the page that turns to the story of somebody else.
Then the page scribbled in dactyls.
Then the page which begins Exit Angel.
Then the page wrapped around a dead fish.
Then the page where the serfs reach the ocean.
Then a nap.
Then the peg.
Then the page with the curious helmet.
Then the page on which millet is ground.
Then the death of Ursula.
Then the stone page they raised over her head.
Then the page made of grass which goes on.

—

Exit Beauty.

—

Then the page someone folded to mark her place.
Then the page on which nothing happens.
The page after this page.

Then the transcript.
Knocking within.

Interpretation, then harvest.

—

Exit Want.
Then a love story.

Then a trip to the ruins.
Then & only then the violet agenda.

Then hope without reason.
Then the construction of an underground passage between us.

— “Burial Practice” by Srikanth Reddy

2013-05-29

newyorker:

“Two Rivers,” Carolyn Drake’s upcoming book, is a photographic record of the area in Central Asia that follows the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, the region’s major rivers. Elif Batuman, a staff writer for The New Yorker, who wrote the introduction and the captions, explains, “Drake’s Central Asia is a place where political allegiances, ethnic bonds, national borders, and even physical geography are in such flux as to seem, at times, like fictions.”

Click here for a look at photographs from the book, with captions by Batuman:

Source: newyorker.com

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The philosopher must say is.

The world is legion.

The self is a suffering form.

Is is.

Waves rise and fall, but the sea remains.

— Srikanth Reddy, Voyager (via heteroglossia)

(via heteroglossia)

Source: hypocrite-lecteur