technomadic
notes from the ever-emerging field
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In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.
— William Burroughs(Source: newtab)
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Writing novels is much the same. You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn’t make it a living breathing novel. A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the *other* side.
— Haruki Murakami -
It is the word that orders and organizes, that induces people to do, to buy, and to accept. It is transmitted in a style which is a veritable linguistic creation; a syntax in which the structure of the sentence is abridged and condensed in such a way that no tension, no ‘space’ is left between the parts of the sentence. The linguistic form militates against a development of meaning.
— Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 86. -
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.— T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding (4 Quartets) -
This is the kind of life that might commit you to dedicate your own life to writing (tirelessly, urgently, compellingly) about love and grief, forgiveness and justice, asylum and nationhood, literature and art, touch and sight.
[…]
And yet what remains secret, or at least difficult to know, is how this life works upon us and the ways in which it binds us to other people and places. Poetry discloses, but it discloses only how unspoken our unseen lives are, barely intimating the fullness of an interiority without end.
[…]
How do we love with neither the violence of consuming union, nor the separation of singularities?
[…]
Derrida tells us that life is not sacrificable and that it is love that renders it so. The beginning of love is gaze - the muted expression of a seeking touch that is not yet permitted and yet still sought. But the end of love is the unwillingness to let go. In love, we seek to be loved - but to love first, to love before I am loved, and to love without limit or end, is love’s best expression. In the beginning, love is my willingness to reach for you when I cannot be sure of you, though, in the end, love is only my courage to let you go first.
[…]
The stone would keep the grasses, its sure weight pressing to secure what would not be kept, but it cannot do so without crushing their fragile life. The stone tells Darwish to let go of what will not be kept, and sit, instead, as steady as the weight of existence, only holding up to the sky and its winds all that he treasures but cannot keep.
[…]
Darwish’s world contains ‘life worth living’ in every expression. If, at times, it is full and fragrant and vivid, then it is also frail and fraught with difficulty. It is, in any case, the kind of world that could not be easily relinquished - the only kind of world that could inspire its inhabitants to commit to living on.— Shahidha K. Bari. How to Live » How to Live On: After Derrida and Darwish. -
When one writes a book for a large audience, one doesn’t know to whom one speaks, one invents and creates outlines, but they no longer belong to us. Spoken or written, all these gestures leave us: they start to act independently of us, like machines or, at best, like puppets […]. At the moment that I allow “my” book to be published (no one makes me do it), I begin to appear-and disappear, like some unteachable ghost who never learned how to live. The trace that I leave signifies to me both my death, either to come or already past, and the hope that it will survive me. It’s not an ambition of immortality, it’s structural; it is the constant form of my life. Every time I allow something to go forth, I see my death in the writing. The extreme test: one expropriates oneself—one gives oneself away—without knowing to whom one confides the thing one leaves. Who will inherit it now and how? Will there even be inheritors?
— Derrida, Jacques. “Je suis en guerre contre moi-même.” Le Monde 18 Aug. 2004. -
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.
— Anais Nin
