Spurious

Barbara Rose: In all your imagery, there is no death. ... It’s interesting that in all your years of producing new directions in your art, you have never gotten into death imagery. Is that something you ever think about?

Robert Rauschenberg: Not often. I have always said that life has nothing to do with death. They’re two separate things, and that’s the way it ought to be. If that’s innocent, so be it. Innocence is not like virginity. Virginity you can only have once. Innocence you have to nourish every day.

Rauschenberg, interviewed (cited here)

Writing for a newspaper is not so demanding. It is light. It must be light, even superficial. Those who read newspapers have neither the will not time to read in depth.

But to write something intended for a book often demands more strength than one seems to possess.

Especially if it means devising one’s own writing habits, as in my case. When I consciously decided in my early teens that I wanted to become a writer, I immediately found myself in a void. And there was no one to help or advise me.

I had to emerge from that void, to try and understand myself, and to forge, as it were, my own truth. I made a start, but not even at the beginning. The sheets of paper began piling up – nothing I wrote seemed to make sense, my frustration as I struggled to write something worthwhile became one more obstacle in the path of success. What a pity I destroyed the interminable narrative I then started writing under the influence of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. I tore it up, contemptuous of my almost superhuman efforts to master the craft of writing and come to terms with myself. And no one knew my secret. I did not tell a soul. I lived through that sorrow alone. One thing, however, did occur to me. It was important to carry on writing without waiting for the right moment, because the right moment never comes. Writing has never been easy for me. I knew from the outset this was my vocation. Having a vocation is not the same as having talent. One can have a vocation and no talent – in other words, feel compelled to write without knowing where to start.

Clarice Lispector, a 'chronicle' for the Jornal do Brasil, 2nd May 1970

Note: Benjamin Moser partially translate the chronicle in his biography of Lispector as follows:

When, consciously, thirteen years old, I consciously claimed the desire to write - I wrote as a child, but I had not claimed a destiny -, when I claimed the desire to write, I suddenly found myself in a void. And in that void there was nobody who could help me. I had to lift up myself from a nothingness, I myself had to understand myself, I myself had to invent, in a manner of speaking, my own truth. […] Writing was always difficult for me, even though I had begun with what is known as vocation. Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not talent; one can be called and not know how to go. 

Who in that age [the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries - LI] could be strong enough to refrain from murder? Who didn’t know that the worst was inevitable? Here and there someone whose glance had during the day met the savoring glance of his murderer, would be overwhelmed by a strange foreboding. . . . The eyes of the dogs, as they looked up at him, were filled with doubt, and they grew less and less sure of his commands. From the motto that had served him all his life, a secondary meaning quietly emerged. Many long-established customs appeared antiquated, but there didn’t seem to be any substitutes to take their place. . . . And then, before the late supper, this pensiveness over the hands in the silver washbasin. Your own hands. Could any coherence be brought into what they did? any order or continuity in their grasping and releasing? No. All men attempted both the thing and its opposite. All men canceled themselves out; there was no such thing as action.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

I died … There had been rehearsals … When the time came I knew all about the lung heavy with water that the heart could not negotiate, so that not enough blood circulated in the alveoli, and there was oxygen starvation as well as drowning … Let me see. What was happening when I died? My prayer had been answered. I was alive when I died. That was all I had asked for and I had got it.

Pencil notes by Donald Winnicot on the inner- flap of a notebook, discovered by his wife, Clare, on the day of his death, in 1971 (cited)

In the Duino Elegies, Rilke’s resistance to the forces of modernization is marshaled not as resistance against loss but rather as mournful resistance against the disappearance of the space and symbolic resources in which loss could still be experienced and worked through. The Duino Elegies are, in a sense, second-order elegies: elegies for the passing of the space in which elegy is still possible.

Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life

Life is an anarchy of light and dark: nothing is ever completely fulfilled in life, nothing ever quite ends; new, confusing voices always mingle with the chorus of those that have been heard before. Everything flows, everything merges into another thing, and the mixture is uncontrolled and impure; everything is destroyed, everything is smashed, nothing ever flowers into real life . . . Real life is always unreal, always impossible, in the midst of empirical life. But suddenly there is a gleam, a lightning that illumines the banal paths of empirical life; something disturbing and seductive, dangerous and surprising. The accident, the great moment, the miracle ; an enreachment and a confusion. It cannot last, no one would be able to bear it, no one could live at such heights – at the height of their own life and their own ultimate possibilities. One has to fall back into numbness. One has to deny life in order to live.

Lukacs, 'Metaphysics of Tragedy'