Spurious

 

Walser’s assistants are made of the very same stuff – these figures who are irreparably and stubbornly busy collaborating on work that is utterly superfluous, not to say indescribable If they study - and they seem to study very hard – it is in order to become big fat zeros. And why should they bother to help with anything the world takes seriously? After all, it’s nothing but madness. They prefer to take walks. And if they encounter a dog or some living creature on their walks, they whispers: ‘I have nothing to give you, dear animal; I would gladly give you something, if only I had it’. Nevertheless, in the end, they lie down in a meadow to weep bitterly over their ‘stupid greenhorn’s existence’.

Agamben, Nudities

… when he was twenty-eight, Nijinsky stopped dancing and choreographing. He began his last recital, which he declared to be about the horrors of the First World War, by telling his audience, ‘I will show you how we live, how we suffer, how we artists create’. He then sat on a chair onstage for half an hour without moving. When he was encouraged by the spectator to begin his dance, he retorted angrily: ‘How dare you disturb me! I am not a machine, I will dance when I feel like it’.

from David Kishik's The Power of Life

WORLD FIXER:

Two very small eyes

appear to a very small child

in a pitch black night

and suddenly the child realizes

that the very small very kind eyes

are the lights of a locomotive

 

History digests all those people

The biggest monsters

the greatest atrocities

have already been digested by history

History has a good stomach

 

Voltaire I said

but they only gaped

When I say France

or Ireland

or Paraguay

they only gape

 

I can't stand strangers

They do everything wrong

nobody obeys

They don't hear anything

they don't see anything

but they incessantly demand

exorbitant payments

 

My tractate does not demand anything other 

than total abolition

but nobody has understood that

I want to abolish them

and they honour me for it.

from Thomas Bernhard, The World-Fixer 

FRAU ZITTEL:

Suddenly one day you discover your own children

are non-humans he said

we think we're raising human beings

and then they're just carnivorous cretins

hysterics megalomaniacs chaotics

 

PROFESSOR ROBERT:

I never contemplated suicide

your father toyed with the idea of it even as a child

I didn't even know what suicide was

when he was already thinking about it

 

the world today is all destroyed

and altogether unbearably ugly

go anywhere you like

the world today is just ugly

and meaninglessness through and through

everything ruined wherever you look

everything gone to the dogs wherever you look

one would rather not wake up any more

in the last fifty years the people in government

have destroyed everything

and it can never be put right

the architects have destroyed everything

with their stupidity

the intellectuals have destroyed everything

with their stupidity

the masses have destroyed everything 

with their stupidity

political parties the church

have destroyed everything with their stupidity

which has always been base stupidity

this Austrian stupidity is utterly repulsive

Industry and the church are to blame

for Austria's misfortune

the church and industry have always been to blame

for Austria's misfortune

governments are nothing but puppets

of industry and the church

it's always been like that

and in Austria it's always been the worst

people have always run after stupidity 

and trampled intelligence underfoot

Industry and clergy are behind

the Austrian sickness

Really I can understand your father very well

I'm surprised the entire Austrian people didn't commit suicide long ago

 

The Austrians were condemned to death long ago

they just don't know it yet

they haven't yet noticed

the judgement was passed long ago

the execution is just a matter of time

if you ask me it's imminent

 

The tragedy is not

that my brother is dead

but that we are left behind that's what's terrible

from Thomas Bernhard Heldenplatz

MINETTI:

We actors are constantly searching

trageduy

or comedy

if you really think about tragedy

with a clear head

you can see at heart it's really comedy

and vice versa

 

My creative instinct

has been butchered by too much thinking

now I'm facing catastrophe

 

I hate the Baltic sea

I love the north Sea

Ostend you know

Dunkirk

pivotal

very pivotal

 

One New Year's Eve

not far from Folkestone

I was thrown into the English Channel

by a pub owner

I was clinging on to the weekend edition of The Times

and they used it to pull me out of the water

so you could say I owe my life

to The Times

I have often asked myself

madam

if it might not have been better

had I let go of The Times

It would have saved me from all this

 

Life is a farce 

which the intelligentsia call existence

 

The artist is only a true artist

when he is absolutely mad

when he has dived head first into madness

into the abyss

to discover a way of working

from Thomas Bernhard, Minetti

He was a man like you and me, or rather he was a man, but not like you, because he was ‘The God Man’. If he suffered, it was almost as if He only seemed to suffer, because he could not stop suffering when he wished (which you cannot do!) and because even in his suffering he had the beatific vision. God can cheat like that and get away with it. But you can’t get away with anything. On the contrary: this suffering has become your condemnation to suffer without reprieve. All his life long, then, he was looking around at the men he has come to save, knowing he was not like them. Death could not hold him. He did not really have to pray. He just pretended. And by pretending, he set a trap for man. He made all suffering final and inexorable.

Rimbaud

Not abstraction but subtraction.

The fullness of nothingness. That is the reason for the insistence on the zero point.

Against the term ‘absurd’. It presupposes the meaningful as the normal. But that is precisely the illusion[;] the absurd is the normal.

Everything so meaningless, yet at the same time the way one speaks is so normal, i.e. modern language may have shrunken – compared with Kafka’s epic language, brought as it were to the point of indifference with the absolute subject – but [it is] never replaced by linguistic absurdity

Criticism of B[eckett] amounts to the statement: but all that is terrible, it simply cannot be. Answer: it is terrible.

The fact that B[eckett] retains the label ‘novel’. What has become of the novel.

Something infinitely liberating comes from B[eckett] vis-à-vis death. What is it?

From Kafka the most effective motif [is] that of the Hunter Gracchus. Death, silence, without voices, as the unattainable goal. Living is dying because it is a not-being-able-to-die.

Adorno on Beckett

… suddenly, amidst the sadness, the darkness of soul the pressure, his brain would momentarily catch fire, as it were, all his life’s forces would be strained at once in an extraordinary impulse. The sense of life, of self-awareness, increased nearly tenfold in these moments, which flashed by like lightning. His mind, his heart were lit up with an extraordinary light; all his agitation, all his doubts, all his worries were as if placated at once, resolved in a sort of sublime tranquillity, filled with serene, harmonious joy, and hope, filled with reason and ultimate cause.

Prince Myshkin, from Dostoevsky's The Idiot

Very sorry to hear of Mark Wood's death.  Like many others, Wood s lot was my first port of call whenever I connected to the internet.