a past to come - Maurice Blanchot

"All our writing - for everyone and if it were ever writing of everyone - would be this: the anxious search for what was never written in the present, but in a past to come."

‎'drawing is a constant correcting of errors' - John Berger

The Speed of Light - Javier Cercas

p.54 - Everybody looks at reality, but few people see t. The artist isn't the one who makes the invisible visible: that really is romanticism, although not the worst kind, the artist is the one who makes visible what's already visible and everybody looks at and nobody can or nobody knows how or nobody wants to see. Probably nobody wants to see it.

p.83-4 - I already know that perfect happiness does not exist, but here I have learned that perfect happiness doesn't exist either...'

p.98 - On Pascal, no one is entirely saddened by a friend's misfortune. [...] this is mean and false but true. The problem is with the word 'entirely. Since I've been here I've seen several friends die: their death have horrified me, infuriated me, made me cry, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't felt an obscene relief, for the simple reason that the dead man was not me.

p.214 - But what I most remember about that conversation is the end of it, perhaps because at that moment, for the first time, I had the deceptive intuition that the past is not a stable place but changeable, permanently altered by the future, and that therefore none of what had already happened was irreversible.

p.217 - Treno is now one of those interchangeable cafes that American snobs consider European (from Rome) and European snobs consider consider American (from New York)

p.222- on the wall of fifteen years ago photos of baseball stars had changed, not the picture of John Wayne

p.239 - talked through the night till 'finally dawn surprised them both.'

Last page 278 - 'And how does it end?' he asked. I looked around the almost empty bar and, feeling almost happy, answered: 'It ends like this.'

Soldiers of Salamis - Javier Cercas

p.1 - lame joke about career

p.146 - 'To write novels you don't imagination,' Bolano said. 'Just a memory. Novels are written by combing recollections.'

p. 169 -

'It's different now,' I said. 'He's a successful writer.'

'Really? I'm glad: I always thought he was talented, as well as an out-and-out liar. But I suppose you have to be an out-and-out liar to be a good novelist, don't you?'

The Tenant The Motive - Javier Cercas

p. 94 - About the opposite apartment that is like a reflection, every single item

p. 123 - Reread whole of chapter one or remember
'He knew that a writer recognizes himself as such by his reading. Every writer must be, first and foremost, a reader. He swiftly and efficiently covered the volumes published in the four languages he knew, making use of translations only for access to fundamentals of classical or marginal literatures. However, he distrusted the superstition that all translations were inferior to the original text, because the original was merely the score from which the interpreter executed the work. This - he later observed - did not impoverish the text, but endowed it with an almost infinite number of interpretations or forms, all potentially valid. He believed there was no literature, no matter how lateral or trifling, that did not contain all the elements of Literature, all its magic, all its abysses, all its games. He suspected that reading was an act of informative indolence: the truly literary thing was re-reading. Three or four books contained, as Flaubert believed, all the wisdom to which man had access, but the titles of these books also varied for each man.

Singapore Sling

Singing staring at the dirty water of Singapore River and drinking a drink, named after an island that calls itself a country and a stone age weaponry, recommended by an SPG?

"Cada uno tenía su pasado encerrado dentro de sí mismo, como las hojas de un libro aprendido por ellos de memoria; y sus amigos podían sólo leer el título"

"Each had his past shut in itself, like the leaves of a book they learned by heart, and his friends could only read the title"

10.2.1927

In that old film
there was a new imperative for the actor:

to break his silence
as technology advances

reduced gestures
when we hear sound effects
with images uninterrupted by texts

not because
his words could readjust her smile

not because
future morning sun could colour the window amber

not because
we want to hear the voice of Hitler

no longer grey,
certain spots of the kitchen were warmed
without grease.

In diesem alten Film

Es wurde ein neues Gebot für den Schauspieler:



sein Schweigen brechen

Die Technologie macht Fortschritte

reduzierte Gesten

wenn wir hören, Sound-Effekte

mit Bildern ohne Unterbrechung durch Texte



nicht, weil

seine Worte könnten nachjustieren ihr Lächeln



nicht, weil

Zukunft Morgensonne konnte die Farbe der Fenster Bernstein



nicht, weil

wollen wir die Stimme des Hitler hören



nicht mehr grau,

bestimmten Stellen der Küche waren erwärmt

ohne Fett.

trust a Tartar
on the twenty-second
we should be ashamed of all our spontaneous reactions

the Tartar is always
mistaken for my father
and a young friend

Asiatic Barbarian laughs
and so a mad professor recalls,

'This is not a song. It's more. More than just a branch of science we experiment with our lives.'

Song

the novel within the duration of a song
the hurried prose about how

a country was turned into province.

a novel the length of a song
the experience only spoken with abbreviated slang
about how

a language is now a dialect

turned,
the plane is now a ship floating above the sea of clouds.
(I turned to page six and the writer is still stuck,
writing about how his eternal novel shall begin.)

a novel written according to the length of this song
this novel could be read within its duration
or listened
with repeated inattentiveness

Shotgun Blues

In this club, I told Renzi, one can drink and drink without anyone getting upset. Look at the man over there, the fat one with the jacket on: he gets drunk every night, always by himself, and yet preserves a strange dignity. There's a story about him, I tell Renzi, a painful story. While cleaning a shotgun he killed has wife of just three months. I told him that it was doubtless an accident and not a crime, for nobody kills his wife of three months in that fashion, with a shotgun blast in the face, unless he's crazy. And besides, I tell him, the man has been literally broken since the accident. He does nothing but get drunk and says that firearms are the work of the devil. Two glasses of gin, that's right, I tell the waiter. Oh, and please bring a bit more ice. You, I say to Renzi, have no doubt read my compatriot Korzeniowski, the Polish writer who wrote in English. A renegade, to tell the truth, a romantic of the worst sort. He spent his life fascinated by that sort of character. The man has a secret. But which of us does not have a secret? Even the most insignificant person,I say to him, if he had some listeners, could fascinate them with the mystery of life. It's not even necessary to have killed a woman with a shotgun blast. That other fellow - see? - the one over there, next to that column. His name is Iriarte; he has a watch shop, is the classic type of insignificant person, and yet I am sure that when he has had enough to drink he also dreams of the great man he almost became. At some moment in his life he must have witnessed something that he needs to keep hidden. That happens to all of us. Each one of us, I tell him, has his own repertory of extraordinary moments and heroic illusions. Everyone, Renzi says to me; the difference lies in that only some are able to realize those illusions. Illusions? That depends on one's age. After one's thirtieth birthday, I tell him, we are nothing but a sad collection of illusions and of women we have killed with shotgun blasts. Besides, I tell Renzi, what a man thinks of himself is of absolutely no importance.



Ricardo Piglia, Artificial Respiration, trans. Daniel Balderston, Duke University Press: North Carolina, pp.108-9

'those who hope to save themselves by opposing Marx’s real beard to Stalin’s false nose are wasting their time.' - Michel Foucault

Four Paragraphs in the Park

Not during the day when a tree in no other colours than green burns. On a humid night, the leaves – being two-faced – switched and betrayed its colour again like the chameleonic sky. Not bothered about the routine beauty of dusk, not fascinated with the palette of its clouds. Over-praised, over-painted, over-photographed.

It was hot not warm. You saw some middle-aged men praying publicly, half-naked, for the false respite of rain. You heard some young educated women making speeches, promising the party would change the weather. You thought they should shut up, pair up and find a hotel. The images of tropical beach resort posters from postcards and tour agencies crossed your mind.

While irritated by how eloquent and witty one could be, or fail to be, their use of certain words (such as ‘hope’, ‘belief’, ‘faith’, ‘care’, ‘future’, ‘change’ with words like ‘wish’, ‘unwind’, ‘relax’, ‘dream’, ‘holiday’, ‘plans’) either made you yawn or gave you goose bumps.

After the rain, the dark woods with dark leaves are wet – weighing a bit more. You kicked on the bits and stepped on the pieces, fallen from the trees, littering the concrete pavement. You thought about some snails you have killed. You picked and collected the twigs and sprigs as materials for a miniature park in a trite dystopia. You planted a branch as a bare tree, and related it to the tarnished name ‘Art’ and the ugly word ‘Design’.

Hai Zi 海子 (查海生) 【明天醒来我会在哪一只鞋子里】

【明天醒来我会在哪一只鞋子里】

我想我已经够小心翼翼的
我的脚趾正好十个
我的手指正好十个
我生下来时哭几声我死去时别人又哭
我不声不响的
带来自己这个包袱
尽管我不喜爱自己
但我还是悄悄打开

我在黄昏时坐在地球上
我这样说并不表明晚上
我就不在地球上 早上同样
地球在你屁股下
结结实实
老不死的地球你好

或者我干脆就是树枝
我以前睡在黑暗的壳里
我的脑袋就是我的边疆
就是一颗梨
在我成型之前
我是知冷知热的白花

或者我的脑袋是一只猫
安放在肩膀上
造我的女主人荷月远去
成群的阳光照着大猫小猫
我的呼吸
一直在证明
树叶飘飘

我不能放弃幸福
或相反
我以痛苦为生
埋葬半截
来到村口或山上
我盯住人们死看
呀, 生硬的黄土 人丁兴旺

Gu Cheng

一代人
黑夜给了我黑色的眼睛
我却用它寻找光明
A Generation
The dark nights gave me my dark eyes
I, however, use them to search for light

Maurice Blanchot on Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities' (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften)

The man without particularities, who does not want to recognise himself in the person he is, for whom all the traits that particularise him make him nothing in particular, never close to what is closest to him, never foreign to what is exterior to him, chooses to be this way because of an ideal of freedom, but also because he lives in a world - the modern world, our world - in which particular deeds are always about to be lost in the impersonal conjuncture of relationship, of which they mark only the temporary intersection. In the world, the world of great cities and great collective masses, it is immaterial whether something has truly taken place and in what historical event we suppose ourselves to be actors and witnesses.

'Musil', The Book to Come, Maurice Blanchot, p.138

Election - Chien Swee-Teng

'I will vote for them tomorrow. Actually everyone should. Hoping that things will progress from bad to worse... thus, forcing an eventual revolution than illusionary parliamentary reforms!'

'I shall vote for whichever party that promise to change the weather here!' (written on a hot and humid day)

'There is nothing political talking about politics when it is merely political gossiping.'

Dreaming, dreaming the night, the street, the staircase and the shout of the statue as it turns the corner. Running toward the statue and finding only the shout, wanting to touch the shout and finding only the echo, wanting to grasp the echo and finding only the wall, and running toward the wall only to touch a mirror...