Quotes from books that have lit you up

luka

Well-known member
As the circumstances around you change and develop, if you don’t change and develop, you get stuck. You get left behind with yourself. You find that you’re in the company of somebody who’s not any longer very interesting. You maintain a kind of dummy interest by simply performing similar antics.

prynne again.
very important this particularly as you enter middle age. the world has a tendency to move on without you unless you are very vigilant and strict with yourself.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
prynne again.
very important this particularly as you enter middle age. the world has a tendency to move on without you unless you are very vigilant and strict with yourself.

I feel like this is happening to me already, and I'm 33.

Your personality is formed as a sort of protection against anxiety, it becomes as thick as a cocoon.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I've felt like this a long time really. I suppose some ppl come up against their limitations earlier.

It's why Wild Strawberries is my favourite film that hasn't got superheroes or talking animals in it.
 

luka

Well-known member
theyre actually not limitations. it just means none of this stuff comes easily. you have to engage fail, try again, keep looking for the entry points. it's a case of getting inside not standing outside looking at it and wondering what the fuss is about. environments are for living in.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Yeah I mean more like the defensive walls you've erected around your vulnerability, the force-field you've put up to keep emotion out, which becomes a prison.

It all makes sense, when you're a child and growing up particulary life is like an emotional minefield.

I'm talking about myself. Many people seek out adventure, danger, risk, on a daily basis. Which comes with its own costs ofc.

This all translates into the intellectual sphere too. There are ideas I instinctively shy away from as threatening to my sense of stability.
 

luka

Well-known member
all of us who have been in toxic environments round toxic people have had that problem. we make a fortress for self-preservation, and it's absolutely essential. we wouldnt have survived without it but then nothing can get in. like you say, we're walled up in there. we've kept some part of ourselves inviolate and unreachable but when the situation changes and we are safe we have to learn to open up again. it's not easy.
 

version

Well-known member
Joyce and Pynchon. There seems to be something on every page with those two.

Thinking about it, Gravity's Rainbow might be the book that's lit me up the most. It's been seven or eight years since I read it and I still think about it on an almost daily basis.

It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home — only the millions of last moments... nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.

The angel appearing over Lübeck during the bombing raid is an image I often come back to:

Basher St. Blaise’s angel, miles beyond designating, rising over
Lübeck that Palm Sunday with the poison-green domes underneath its feet, an
obsessive crossflow of red tiles rushing up and down a thousand peaked roofs
as the bombers banked and dived, the Baltic already lost in a pall of incendiary
smoke behind, here was the Angel: ice crystals swept hissing away from the back
edges of wings perilously deep, opening as they were moved into new white
abyss. . . . For half a minute radio silence broke apart. The traffic being:

St. Blaise: Freakshow Two, did you see that, over.

Wingman: This is Freakshow Two—affirmative.

St. Blaise: Good.

No one else on the mission seemed to’ve had radio communication. After
the raid, St. Blaise checked over the equipment of those who got back to base
and found nothing wrong: all the crystals on frequency, the power supplies
rippleless as could be expected—but others remembered how, for the few
moments the visitation lasted, even static vanished from the earphones. Some
may have heard a high singing, like wind among masts, shrouds, bedspring or
dish antennas of winter fleets down in the dockyards . . . but only Basher and
his wingman saw it, droning across in front of the fiery leagues of face, the eyes,
which went towering for miles, shifting to follow their flight, the irises red as
embers fairing through yellow to white, as they jettisoned all their bombs in no
particular pattern, the fussy Norden device, sweat drops in the air all around its
rolling eyepiece, bewildered at their unannounced need to climb, to give up a
strike at earth for a strike at heaven . . . .
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
at once the most correct and the most tragically depressing thing imaginable:

Stuart: A kind of playfulness brings the continuum into being. It works
as an acknowledgment of the contingency, of what cannot be closed,
of what cannot be foreseen, of what will continue to move us on which
is already present in this situation. Although it may not be in a complete,
positive, affirmative voice, but the ironic thing is that there is already
a negative presence already there which we can see around the corner
of the formation that one is working within for the time being. That
is extremely important because so many of the essentialist patriarchal
forms of politics which are without this dimension of pleasure, irony
and play, can’t see that it recapitulates its own forms of exclusion, but
they always do. All of the movements that we have been involved in
have come to that moment of seeing who is not within, of moving
themselves on to those people who consciously have been excluded.
That outside then comes back to trouble and disturb the settled form
of the subject the politics were once engaged in. That happened profoundly
in relation to race in feminism. It is race that is outside of the
discourse. Then it comes back, and allows some people to be sufficiently
troubled by its inclusion, to rethink where they are. The static nature
of essentialist politics depends very much on excluding that modality.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Too many to mention right now, but I'm reading Rilke's 'Letters to a Young Poet' right now (which is unexpectedly hilarious in places, as well as more expectedly being very good):

"To keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your while development; you couldn’t disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to question that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.”

"Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.”
 

luka

Well-known member
Rilke meant so much to me as an adolescent im scared to read him as an adult.
im sure he's right about almost everything though. it's just the level of earnestness
and the language its couched in im wary of. like you say, theres an impulse to laughter.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
i never read rilke because Adorno categorised him as the literary end of authentic jargon. and authenticity is the enemy of what constitutes good literature for me. i don't think authenticity and purism are necessarily the same thing...

Was teddy wrong?
 

luka

Well-known member
i've got no idea what that could possibly mean and the idea of letting adorno tell you what poetry to read is as crazy as letting him tell you what jazz records to listen to!

it takes about 2 minutes to read the first duino elegy and get a feel for the project. i don't think it helps to frame it political terms particularly, certainly not straightaway in any case.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
yes, but adorno was protesting against shitty german jazz and probably state mandated nazi swing. cos it wasn't all degenerate music in those days, as long as the culture industry could function, black music could be utterly divested of its signifiers and serve strictly utilitarian ends.

whereas with literature i always took him to be more grounded in the tradition. everything he says about heidegger is correct, for instance. a philosophy of thinking and not theorising, and of fetishising specific temporary configurations in the absolute whole, without thinking about the absolute is reactionary and fascistic. you can't just surrender everything to the moment, and posit the subject as essentially static. then that creates precisely what is jargon, the ability to take normal every day language we talk in, and emphasise meanings which are buried in it, which express forms of cultural exclusion, of an inhibition of play, of a re-segmentation of fictive categories.

I'll read the elegies though.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
i'd actually say music is the master discourse that unites poetry and philosophy. only through the universalness and tangibility of sound can you even begin to conceptualise higher cosmic dimensions. it's like an alchemical process, it burns off the excess but leaves a high note. those high arp strings in jazz funk or the high end percussive trickery of dub for instance. incidentally this is also why dub isn't merely echo but a total reconfiguration of how we approach space.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Rilke meant so much to me as an adolescent im scared to read him as an adult.
im sure he's right about almost everything though. it's just the level of earnestness
and the language its couched in im wary of. like you say, theres an impulse to laughter.

"You must pardon me, dear Sir, for waiting until today to gratefully remember your letter of February 24. I have been unwell all this time, not really sick, but oppressed by an influenza-like debility, which has made me incapable of doing anything."
 

luka

Well-known member
"You must pardon me, dear Sir, for waiting until today to gratefully remember your letter of February 24. I have been unwell all this time, not really sick, but oppressed by an influenza-like debility, which has made me incapable of doing anything."

a truly delicate flower.
 
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