and I even bite the fruit of your two nubile breasts
to find, in their swelling nipples, god
marvellously transformed into clear honey
to find, in their swelling nipples, god
marvellously transformed into clear honey
Emile Roumer
high yellow of my heart, with breasts like tangerines
you taste better to me than eggplant stuffed with crab
you are the tripe in my pepper pot
the dumpling in my pears
your fesse is a gorgeous basket brimming with fruits and meat
you taste better to me than eggplant stuffed with crab
you are the tripe in my pepper pot
the dumpling in my pears
your fesse is a gorgeous basket brimming with fruits and meat
Manuel Vazquez Montalban
when you are very old and I have died
one afternoon you will discover the special hours
the scent of setting suns
the profound darkness of the twilight air
on streets without return
you will wander eternally in search of the mirror
that restores happy moments
/ go out naked onto the balcony and piss on the world
before the closed windows execute you
Bartlomiej Zimorowic
the sun will faint from sudden fear
the face of the moon will be covered with gore
thrown from heaven by foul disease
terrified stars will fall and freeze
the earth’s foundations will jerk and rocks
like sea waves, will give each other knocks
all human craft, all human deeds
will be burnt up like moorland weeds
poets rape words. With ignorant dissonance
they croak away like magpies on a fence
my wedding dress is just a winding sheet
a handful of earth my dowry when I meet
the worm, my bridegroom: the grave, my marriage bed:
my children are the tears my parents shed
the face of the moon will be covered with gore
thrown from heaven by foul disease
terrified stars will fall and freeze
the earth’s foundations will jerk and rocks
like sea waves, will give each other knocks
all human craft, all human deeds
will be burnt up like moorland weeds
poets rape words. With ignorant dissonance
they croak away like magpies on a fence
my wedding dress is just a winding sheet
a handful of earth my dowry when I meet
the worm, my bridegroom: the grave, my marriage bed:
my children are the tears my parents shed
Ricardo Reis
The god pan isn’t dead.
In the disquiet that repose must bring to our lives
When all we do is think of what
We were, and outside
There’s just night.
The only freedom the gods grant us
Is this: to submit
How short a time is the longest life
And our youth in it! Ah Chloe, Chloe,
If I don’t love, don’t drink
And don’t instinctively not think,
The unmovable law weighs on me,
Time’s endless, imposed hour afflict me.
And the useless name that your dead body
Used, like a soul, when alive one earth
Is forgotten. This ode engraves
An anonymous smile.
Rule or keep quiet. Don’t squander yourself,
Giving what you don’t have.
What good is the Caesar you might have been?
Enjoy being the little you are.
The hovel you’re given is a better shelter.
Than the palace you’re owed.
Nothing of nothing remains. And we are nothing.
Calm because I’m unknown,
And myself because I’m calm,
I want to fill my days
With wanting nothing from them.
In the disquiet that repose must bring to our lives
When all we do is think of what
We were, and outside
There’s just night.
The only freedom the gods grant us
Is this: to submit
How short a time is the longest life
And our youth in it! Ah Chloe, Chloe,
If I don’t love, don’t drink
And don’t instinctively not think,
The unmovable law weighs on me,
Time’s endless, imposed hour afflict me.
And the useless name that your dead body
Used, like a soul, when alive one earth
Is forgotten. This ode engraves
An anonymous smile.
Rule or keep quiet. Don’t squander yourself,
Giving what you don’t have.
What good is the Caesar you might have been?
Enjoy being the little you are.
The hovel you’re given is a better shelter.
Than the palace you’re owed.
Nothing of nothing remains. And we are nothing.
Calm because I’m unknown,
And myself because I’m calm,
I want to fill my days
With wanting nothing from them.
Alvaro de Campos
It’s before I take opium that my soul is sick.
I’m atoning for a crime in a suitcase
That my grandfather committed for fun.
My nerves hang from the gibbet by the dozen,
And I’ve fallen into the pit of opium.
If you’ve got the truth, you can keep it!
Nothing holds me.
I want fifty things at the same time.
I long with meat craving anxiety
For I don’t know what…
Don’t worry: they won’t cry for long.
You can be happy in Australia, as long as you don’t go there.
I’m atoning for a crime in a suitcase
That my grandfather committed for fun.
My nerves hang from the gibbet by the dozen,
And I’ve fallen into the pit of opium.
If you’ve got the truth, you can keep it!
Nothing holds me.
I want fifty things at the same time.
I long with meat craving anxiety
For I don’t know what…
Don’t worry: they won’t cry for long.
You can be happy in Australia, as long as you don’t go there.
Alberto Caeiro
Love is a company.
I no longer know how to walk the roads alone,
For I’m no longer able to walk alone.
When spring arrives,
If I’m already dead,
The flowers will flower in the same way
And the trees will not be less green than last spring.
Reality doesn’t need me.
It makes me enormously happy
To think that my death is of no importance whatsoever
You can pray in Latin over my coffin, if you like.
If you like, you can sing and dance in a circle around it.
I have no preferences for when I can no longer have preferences.
What will be, when it is, is what it will be when it is.
One, like a child, I suddenly got tired.
I closed my eyes and fell asleep.
I no longer know how to walk the roads alone,
For I’m no longer able to walk alone.
When spring arrives,
If I’m already dead,
The flowers will flower in the same way
And the trees will not be less green than last spring.
Reality doesn’t need me.
It makes me enormously happy
To think that my death is of no importance whatsoever
You can pray in Latin over my coffin, if you like.
If you like, you can sing and dance in a circle around it.
I have no preferences for when I can no longer have preferences.
What will be, when it is, is what it will be when it is.
One, like a child, I suddenly got tired.
I closed my eyes and fell asleep.
Dan Pagis
I died with the first blow and was buried among the rocks of the field
The raven taught my parents what to do with me
If my family is famous, not a little credit goes to me.
My brother invented murder, my parents invented grief, I invented silence.
We might imagine that the most terrible thing was Job’s ignorance; not understanding whom he had defeated, or even that he had won. But in fact, the most terrible thing of all is that Job never existed and was just a parable.
My teacher, the gorilla, is severe; does not approve that I’m a modest youngster
In the cage of the Siberian snow fox,
a distinguished prisoner,
they have installed the freedom machine.
In the blank space below, state
how long you have been awake and why you are surprised.
The raven taught my parents what to do with me
If my family is famous, not a little credit goes to me.
My brother invented murder, my parents invented grief, I invented silence.
We might imagine that the most terrible thing was Job’s ignorance; not understanding whom he had defeated, or even that he had won. But in fact, the most terrible thing of all is that Job never existed and was just a parable.
My teacher, the gorilla, is severe; does not approve that I’m a modest youngster
In the cage of the Siberian snow fox,
a distinguished prisoner,
they have installed the freedom machine.
In the blank space below, state
how long you have been awake and why you are surprised.
Sadegh Hedayat
What comforted me was the prospect of oblivion after death. The thought of an after-life frightened and fatigued me. I had never been able to adapt myself to the world in which I was now living. Of what use would another world be to me? I felt that this world had not been made for me but for a tribe of brazen, money grubbing, blustering louts, sellers of conscience, hungry of eye and heart - for people, in fact, who had been created in its own likeness and who fawned and grovelled before the mighty of earth and heaven as the hungry dog outside the butcher’s shop wagged his tail in the hope of receiving a fragment of offal.
The pressure which, in the act of procreation, holds together two people who are striving to escape from their solitude is the result of this same streak of madness which exists in every person, mingled with regret at the thought that he is slowly sliding towards the abyss of death…
Only death does not lie.
The presence of death annihilates all superstitions. We are the children of death and it is death that rescues us from the deceptions of life.
Generally speaking, it is ordinary stupid conduct that makes one laugh, but this laughter of mine arose from a deeper cause. The vast stupidity that I saw before me was part of the general inability of mankind to unravel the central problems of existence and that thing which for her was shrouded in impenetrable darkness was a gesture of death itself.
The pressure which, in the act of procreation, holds together two people who are striving to escape from their solitude is the result of this same streak of madness which exists in every person, mingled with regret at the thought that he is slowly sliding towards the abyss of death…
Only death does not lie.
The presence of death annihilates all superstitions. We are the children of death and it is death that rescues us from the deceptions of life.
Generally speaking, it is ordinary stupid conduct that makes one laugh, but this laughter of mine arose from a deeper cause. The vast stupidity that I saw before me was part of the general inability of mankind to unravel the central problems of existence and that thing which for her was shrouded in impenetrable darkness was a gesture of death itself.
Morris Rosenfeld
the groans of slaves, when they are tired
awake my bitter songs
it’s only when I’m inspired
I reckon up their wrongs
don’t look for me where fountains splash!
Not there, my darling, shall I be
where tears are shed, where teeth are gnashed
that’s the only place for me
there’s steam and smoke and madness here
there’s no place for a guest to stand
I can’t so much as touch you, dear
for I have hired out my hand
Be careful! I’m a lion, sir!Don’t play your games with me
for all I have to do is stir
and mincemeat’s what you’ll be
awake my bitter songs
it’s only when I’m inspired
I reckon up their wrongs
don’t look for me where fountains splash!
Not there, my darling, shall I be
where tears are shed, where teeth are gnashed
that’s the only place for me
there’s steam and smoke and madness here
there’s no place for a guest to stand
I can’t so much as touch you, dear
for I have hired out my hand
Be careful! I’m a lion, sir!Don’t play your games with me
for all I have to do is stir
and mincemeat’s what you’ll be
Shumpo Soki
No single bone in my body is holy
it is but an ash heap of stinking bones
dig a deep hole and there bury these remains
thus, not a grain of dust will stain
the green mountains
it is but an ash heap of stinking bones
dig a deep hole and there bury these remains
thus, not a grain of dust will stain
the green mountains
Aubrey Beardsley
I have no doubt that the keener scent of animals must make women much more attractive to them than to men; for the gorgeous odour that but faintly fills our nostrils must be revealed to the brute creation in divine fullness. Anyhow, Adolphe sniffed as never a man did around the skirts of Venus. After the first charming interchange of affectionate delicacies was over, the unicorn lay down upon his side, and, closing his eyes, beat his stomach wildly with the mark of manhood.
Venus caught that stunning member in her hands and laid her cheek along it; but few touches were wanted to consummate the creature’s pleasure. The queen bared her left arm to the elbow, and with the soft underneath of it made amazing movements upon the tightly strung instrument. When the melody began to flow, the unicorn offered up an astonishing vocal accompaniment…
Adolphe had been quite profuse that morning
Venus knelt where it had fallen, and lapped her little apertif.
Venus caught that stunning member in her hands and laid her cheek along it; but few touches were wanted to consummate the creature’s pleasure. The queen bared her left arm to the elbow, and with the soft underneath of it made amazing movements upon the tightly strung instrument. When the melody began to flow, the unicorn offered up an astonishing vocal accompaniment…
Adolphe had been quite profuse that morning
Venus knelt where it had fallen, and lapped her little apertif.
Robert Musil
Cities can be recognised by their pace just as people can by their walk
So no special significance should be attached to the name of the city
The lady has a disagreeable sensation in the pit of her stomach, which she felt entitled to take for compassion; it was an irresolute, paralysing sensation
Modern man is born in hospital and dies in hospital - hence he should also live in a place like a hospital
All these old fashioned songs little songs were about love, sorrow, constancy, loneliness, woodland whispers and twinkling trout
So Ulrich decided to call her Leona, and it seemed to him that possession of her was as desirable as that of a large lion-skin rug
And precisely prostitution is a thing in which it makes a great difference whether one is looking at it from above or from below
And when one is no longer capable of something that one used to be capable of, no matter how silly it is, the situation is, after all, just as if a stroke had paralysed one’s arms and legs.
He was enjoying the thought that perhaps they were not hooligans at all but good citizens like himself
and so it cannot be denied that man’s most deeply felt association with his fellow men consists in dissociation from them.
a brawl always leaves a bad taste in the mouth, a taste, so to speak, of over hasty imtimacy
Boxing, or similar forms of sport that put all this into a rational system, was therefore a kind of theology
Two weeks later Bonadea had already been his mistress for a fortnight
it was only that a genius was always regarded as a lout, but never, as sometimes happened elsewhere, that a mere lout was regarded as a genius
Nor had anything real ever been the matter. It was nothing more than the fact that every human being’s dislike of every other human being’s attempts to get on - a dislike in which today we are all agreed - in that country crystallised earlier, assuming the form of a sublimated ceremonial that might have become of great importance if its evolution had not been prematurely cut short by a catastrophe.
Es ist passiert
the magic mandrake root more beautiful than a telegraphed picture, to have eaten of one’s mother’s heart and so to understand the language of birds more beautiful than an animal psychologist’s study of the expressive values in bird song. We have gained in terms of reality and lost in terms of the dream.
There were people who were prophesying the collapse of European civilisation on the grounds that there was no longer any faith, any love, any simplicity or any goodness left in mankind; and it is significant that these people were all bad at mathematics at school.
These younger people have always noticed that the moral stupidity of their elders is just as much a lack of any capacity to form new combinations as is ordinary intellectual stupidity, and the morality that they themselves have felt natural has always been one of achievement, heroism and change. Nevertheless, by the time they reach years of fulfilment they have forgotten all about it and are far from wishing to be reminded of it.
He had nicknamed her Bonadea, the Good Goddess, because of the way she had come into his life and also after a goddess of chastity who had a temple in ancient Rome, which by a queer reversal later became a centre of all debaucheries. She did not know that.
The truth is that science has developed a conception of hard, sober intellectual strength that makes mankind’s old metaphysical and moral notions simply unendurable, although all it can put in their place is the hope that a day, still distant, will come when a race of intellectual conquerors will descend into the valleys of spiritual fruitfulness.
On his last visit she had told him about a terrible dream she had had: a slippery creature has tried to overwhelm her in her sleep, a belly soft, tender and atrocious great frog, and it was a symbol of Walter’s music.
There is no example of inevitability that can compare with the sight of a gifted young man narrowing down into an ordinary old man - not through personal misfortune, merely through the process of dehydration to which he was predestined.
And he become increasingly violent in his assertion that in a time so poisoned at its spiritual roots as the present an artist of real integrity must abstain from creation altogether.
The long and the short of it is, there is no important idea that stupidity does not know how to make use of, for it can move in all directions and is able to wear all the garments of truth
p71 72 73 98
His spinal cord was paralysed by the narcotic influence of this music, and his lot grew lighter.
The reporters had described in detail a throat wound extending from the larynx to the back of the neck, as well as the stabwounds in the breast, which had pierced the heart, the two others on the left side of the back, and the cutting off of the breasts, which could almost be detached from the body.
Now, one must imagine what that means. Something one craves for just as naturally as one craves for bread or water is only there to be looked at. After a time one’s desire for it becomes unnatural. It walks past, the skirts swaying round its ankles. One looks into its eyes and they become opaque. One hears it laughing, turns around swiftly and looks into a face that is round and unmoving as a hole in the ground where a mouse has just disappeared.
What would you do now if I were a Moosbrugger?
For even a cleverer man could not have expressed his strange shadowy arguments. They came directly out of the bewildered solitude of his life, and whereas all others lives exist a hundredfold, being seen in the same way those who lead them as by all the others who confirm them, his true life existed only for himself.
Yet somehow Ulrich could not help thinking: if mankind could dream collectively, it would dream Moosbrugger.
Damn it all, one could hardly put it otherwise than that it simply was surprisingly real
but fame, such as if acquired by intellectual achievements, melts away with remarkable rapidity as soon as one associates with those to whom it attaches
It reminded him of that stupidly profound, exciting sensation, touching immediately on the self, that one had when sniffing at one’s own skin
Ulrich always puts tremendous energy into doing the very things he doesn’t consider necessary. He remember it at this very moment and thought: That could be said about all of us today.
There is another country where one is at home, where everything one does is innocent.
By the time so far gone in love that he no longer had any wish except to get as quickly and as far as possible from the proximity of the origin of that love. He travelled blindly on and on until a coast-line put an end to the railwaytrack, had himself taken over in a boat to the nearest island he saw, and there in unknown place chosen at random, he remained, poorly lodged and boarded, and in the very first night wrote the first of a series of long letters to the beloved, letters that he never posted.
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders and said nothing. He had long ago forgotten what she was talking about; at any rate he found it impossible to endure her at this moment.
Ulrich, who guessed at her resolve never to return, did not interfere with it.
After all, by the time they have reached the middle of their life’s journey few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change any more. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated.
I give you my solemn word, Ulrich replied gravely, that neither I nor anyone else knows what the true is. I can assure it is on the point of realistion.
Obviously because snow is at times disagreeable to him, he compares it to women’s glimmering breasts, and as soon as his wife’s breasts begin to bore him, he compares them to glimmering snow.
His highness believed he noticed that all the people who have no money make up for it by having an unpleasant crank tucked away somewhere inside them. This obstinate man within the man goes along to the office with him every morning and, being quite unable to protest in any effective manner against the way of the world, makes up for it by keeping his eyes glued, his whole life long, on a secret dot that everyone else refuses to see, although it is so very obviously the very dot from which originate all the calamities of a world that will not recognise its savour.
Clarisse was gnawing at the root of love. It was a forked root, a thing of kissing and of biting, of glances clinging to each other and of a tormented last minute aversion of the gaze.
But, oddly enough, what is considered superior intelligence in boxing is called cold and callous as soon as it occurs, from a liking for an intellectual attitude to life, in people who cannot box.
He had a respect for rights when he did not respect those whose rights they were, and that happened rarely.
It is, after all, very natural to think that man, who lets himself be treated by professionally qualified doctors when he is ill, and not by shepherd lads, has no reason when in good health to let himself be treated, as he actually does in his public affairs, by windbags whose qualifications are no better than those of shepherd lads.
Spent the rest of his life in the conviction that although perhaps everything ought to be different, there was certainly no point in thinking about it.
Ulrich got the feeling that now a second infinity was unfolding, in the course of which the constellations went on their predestined cycles, without his being in the world at all.
One thinks it, feels it, has premonitions of it all the time, naturally, in the most various kinds of surrogates and according to one’s temperament.
For only fools, the mentally deranged, and people with idees fixed, can endure unceasingly in the fire of the soul’s rapture. A sane man must content himself with declaring that life would not seem worth living without a flake of that mysterious fire.
God is in the profoundest sense old fashioned. We are incapable of imagining Him in tails, clean-shaven with a parting in His hair.
Supposing we had a new Homer…Let us ask ourselves with complete candour whether we would be capable of listening to him at all. I think we must answer in the negative. We have not got him because we do not need him!
A shared bedroom, however, particularly when the light is out, puts a man in the situation of a man who has to play, before an invisible audience, the rewarding but by now thoroughly worn out part of a hero snarling like a lion.
But he was not afraid of death. There is a great deal that one has to put up with in life that definitely hurts more than being hanged, and whether one lives a few years more or less doesn’t really matter at all.
It’ll all be for the best, I dare say, to be shut of it all at last.
The superiority of a man who has freed himself from the wish to live is enormous.
Knowledge is an attitude, a passion. Actually an illicit attitude. For the compulsion to know is just like dipsomania, erotomania and homicial mania, in producing a character out of balance.
Ulrich asked him what he really needed meaning for. One got along all right without it, he commented.
There is in fact no longer any such thing as a universal education in Goether’s sense. But that is why today to every thought we also have a counter thought and to ever tendency an immediate counter tendency. Today, every act and its opposite are accompanied by the subtlest intellectual arguments, with which one can both defend them and condemn them. I can’t understand how you can bring yourself to speak up for such a state of things!
But how, Diotima wondered, can humanity provide itself even roast chicken without violence?
How many people look into the same loved face day in, day out, but when they shut their eyes could not say what it looks like!
In this way man is distinguished from the animals - and, it may be added, also from the insane - by the fact that, having intellectual and moral faculties, he is capable of acting contrary to law and committing a crime
It is well known phenomenon that the angel of medicine, when he has been listening to the expositions of lawyers, very often forgets his own mission. Then he folds his wings with a metallic clang and behaves before the court like a reservist-angel of jurisprudence.
The state would in the end kill Moosbrugger because, considering the imperfection of things, that was simply the cheapest, safest, and most clear cut way of dealing with him.
Knowledge was beginning to be old fashioned.
He was no philosopher. Philosophers are violent and aggressive persons who, having no army at their disposal, bring the world into subjection to themselves by means of locking it up in a system. Probably that is also the reason why there have been great philosophic minds in times of tyranny, where as times of advanced civilisation and democracy do not succeed in producing a convincing philosophy, at least so far as one can judge from the lamentations one commonly hears on the subject. That is why nowadays there is a terrifying amount of philosophising done in small slices.
The teachings of the inspired crumble into dust in the rationality of the uninspired, crumble into contradiction and nonsense;
Are great ordeals the privilege of great personalities?
The Baroque of the Void
A flea favours the same areas as a lover.
It is simply my conviction that thinking is an institution all on its own, and real life is another one
I told him that realisation always attracts me less than non-realisation, and by that I mean not only realisation of, say, the future, but also the past and its lost opportunities.
It often happens that brothers and sisters loathe each other in a manner far in excess of anything that could possibly be justified by the facts
Thank goodness there are still some people who are capable of believing in simple things, in spite of having great experience.
All his relationships with women since then had been somehow wrong. With a certain amount of good will on both sides that unfortunately happens very easily.
Water in excessive qualities is a pleasure less pleasing, by precisely the difference between drinking and drowning, than it is in small qualities
There is something of the cult of the dead about it these days when a man is referred to as a genius.
So no special significance should be attached to the name of the city
The lady has a disagreeable sensation in the pit of her stomach, which she felt entitled to take for compassion; it was an irresolute, paralysing sensation
Modern man is born in hospital and dies in hospital - hence he should also live in a place like a hospital
All these old fashioned songs little songs were about love, sorrow, constancy, loneliness, woodland whispers and twinkling trout
So Ulrich decided to call her Leona, and it seemed to him that possession of her was as desirable as that of a large lion-skin rug
And precisely prostitution is a thing in which it makes a great difference whether one is looking at it from above or from below
And when one is no longer capable of something that one used to be capable of, no matter how silly it is, the situation is, after all, just as if a stroke had paralysed one’s arms and legs.
He was enjoying the thought that perhaps they were not hooligans at all but good citizens like himself
and so it cannot be denied that man’s most deeply felt association with his fellow men consists in dissociation from them.
a brawl always leaves a bad taste in the mouth, a taste, so to speak, of over hasty imtimacy
Boxing, or similar forms of sport that put all this into a rational system, was therefore a kind of theology
Two weeks later Bonadea had already been his mistress for a fortnight
it was only that a genius was always regarded as a lout, but never, as sometimes happened elsewhere, that a mere lout was regarded as a genius
Nor had anything real ever been the matter. It was nothing more than the fact that every human being’s dislike of every other human being’s attempts to get on - a dislike in which today we are all agreed - in that country crystallised earlier, assuming the form of a sublimated ceremonial that might have become of great importance if its evolution had not been prematurely cut short by a catastrophe.
Es ist passiert
the magic mandrake root more beautiful than a telegraphed picture, to have eaten of one’s mother’s heart and so to understand the language of birds more beautiful than an animal psychologist’s study of the expressive values in bird song. We have gained in terms of reality and lost in terms of the dream.
There were people who were prophesying the collapse of European civilisation on the grounds that there was no longer any faith, any love, any simplicity or any goodness left in mankind; and it is significant that these people were all bad at mathematics at school.
These younger people have always noticed that the moral stupidity of their elders is just as much a lack of any capacity to form new combinations as is ordinary intellectual stupidity, and the morality that they themselves have felt natural has always been one of achievement, heroism and change. Nevertheless, by the time they reach years of fulfilment they have forgotten all about it and are far from wishing to be reminded of it.
He had nicknamed her Bonadea, the Good Goddess, because of the way she had come into his life and also after a goddess of chastity who had a temple in ancient Rome, which by a queer reversal later became a centre of all debaucheries. She did not know that.
The truth is that science has developed a conception of hard, sober intellectual strength that makes mankind’s old metaphysical and moral notions simply unendurable, although all it can put in their place is the hope that a day, still distant, will come when a race of intellectual conquerors will descend into the valleys of spiritual fruitfulness.
On his last visit she had told him about a terrible dream she had had: a slippery creature has tried to overwhelm her in her sleep, a belly soft, tender and atrocious great frog, and it was a symbol of Walter’s music.
There is no example of inevitability that can compare with the sight of a gifted young man narrowing down into an ordinary old man - not through personal misfortune, merely through the process of dehydration to which he was predestined.
And he become increasingly violent in his assertion that in a time so poisoned at its spiritual roots as the present an artist of real integrity must abstain from creation altogether.
The long and the short of it is, there is no important idea that stupidity does not know how to make use of, for it can move in all directions and is able to wear all the garments of truth
p71 72 73 98
His spinal cord was paralysed by the narcotic influence of this music, and his lot grew lighter.
The reporters had described in detail a throat wound extending from the larynx to the back of the neck, as well as the stabwounds in the breast, which had pierced the heart, the two others on the left side of the back, and the cutting off of the breasts, which could almost be detached from the body.
Now, one must imagine what that means. Something one craves for just as naturally as one craves for bread or water is only there to be looked at. After a time one’s desire for it becomes unnatural. It walks past, the skirts swaying round its ankles. One looks into its eyes and they become opaque. One hears it laughing, turns around swiftly and looks into a face that is round and unmoving as a hole in the ground where a mouse has just disappeared.
What would you do now if I were a Moosbrugger?
For even a cleverer man could not have expressed his strange shadowy arguments. They came directly out of the bewildered solitude of his life, and whereas all others lives exist a hundredfold, being seen in the same way those who lead them as by all the others who confirm them, his true life existed only for himself.
Yet somehow Ulrich could not help thinking: if mankind could dream collectively, it would dream Moosbrugger.
Damn it all, one could hardly put it otherwise than that it simply was surprisingly real
but fame, such as if acquired by intellectual achievements, melts away with remarkable rapidity as soon as one associates with those to whom it attaches
It reminded him of that stupidly profound, exciting sensation, touching immediately on the self, that one had when sniffing at one’s own skin
Ulrich always puts tremendous energy into doing the very things he doesn’t consider necessary. He remember it at this very moment and thought: That could be said about all of us today.
There is another country where one is at home, where everything one does is innocent.
By the time so far gone in love that he no longer had any wish except to get as quickly and as far as possible from the proximity of the origin of that love. He travelled blindly on and on until a coast-line put an end to the railwaytrack, had himself taken over in a boat to the nearest island he saw, and there in unknown place chosen at random, he remained, poorly lodged and boarded, and in the very first night wrote the first of a series of long letters to the beloved, letters that he never posted.
Ulrich shrugged his shoulders and said nothing. He had long ago forgotten what she was talking about; at any rate he found it impossible to endure her at this moment.
Ulrich, who guessed at her resolve never to return, did not interfere with it.
After all, by the time they have reached the middle of their life’s journey few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change any more. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated.
I give you my solemn word, Ulrich replied gravely, that neither I nor anyone else knows what the true is. I can assure it is on the point of realistion.
Obviously because snow is at times disagreeable to him, he compares it to women’s glimmering breasts, and as soon as his wife’s breasts begin to bore him, he compares them to glimmering snow.
His highness believed he noticed that all the people who have no money make up for it by having an unpleasant crank tucked away somewhere inside them. This obstinate man within the man goes along to the office with him every morning and, being quite unable to protest in any effective manner against the way of the world, makes up for it by keeping his eyes glued, his whole life long, on a secret dot that everyone else refuses to see, although it is so very obviously the very dot from which originate all the calamities of a world that will not recognise its savour.
Clarisse was gnawing at the root of love. It was a forked root, a thing of kissing and of biting, of glances clinging to each other and of a tormented last minute aversion of the gaze.
But, oddly enough, what is considered superior intelligence in boxing is called cold and callous as soon as it occurs, from a liking for an intellectual attitude to life, in people who cannot box.
He had a respect for rights when he did not respect those whose rights they were, and that happened rarely.
It is, after all, very natural to think that man, who lets himself be treated by professionally qualified doctors when he is ill, and not by shepherd lads, has no reason when in good health to let himself be treated, as he actually does in his public affairs, by windbags whose qualifications are no better than those of shepherd lads.
Spent the rest of his life in the conviction that although perhaps everything ought to be different, there was certainly no point in thinking about it.
Ulrich got the feeling that now a second infinity was unfolding, in the course of which the constellations went on their predestined cycles, without his being in the world at all.
One thinks it, feels it, has premonitions of it all the time, naturally, in the most various kinds of surrogates and according to one’s temperament.
For only fools, the mentally deranged, and people with idees fixed, can endure unceasingly in the fire of the soul’s rapture. A sane man must content himself with declaring that life would not seem worth living without a flake of that mysterious fire.
God is in the profoundest sense old fashioned. We are incapable of imagining Him in tails, clean-shaven with a parting in His hair.
Supposing we had a new Homer…Let us ask ourselves with complete candour whether we would be capable of listening to him at all. I think we must answer in the negative. We have not got him because we do not need him!
A shared bedroom, however, particularly when the light is out, puts a man in the situation of a man who has to play, before an invisible audience, the rewarding but by now thoroughly worn out part of a hero snarling like a lion.
But he was not afraid of death. There is a great deal that one has to put up with in life that definitely hurts more than being hanged, and whether one lives a few years more or less doesn’t really matter at all.
It’ll all be for the best, I dare say, to be shut of it all at last.
The superiority of a man who has freed himself from the wish to live is enormous.
Knowledge is an attitude, a passion. Actually an illicit attitude. For the compulsion to know is just like dipsomania, erotomania and homicial mania, in producing a character out of balance.
Ulrich asked him what he really needed meaning for. One got along all right without it, he commented.
There is in fact no longer any such thing as a universal education in Goether’s sense. But that is why today to every thought we also have a counter thought and to ever tendency an immediate counter tendency. Today, every act and its opposite are accompanied by the subtlest intellectual arguments, with which one can both defend them and condemn them. I can’t understand how you can bring yourself to speak up for such a state of things!
But how, Diotima wondered, can humanity provide itself even roast chicken without violence?
How many people look into the same loved face day in, day out, but when they shut their eyes could not say what it looks like!
In this way man is distinguished from the animals - and, it may be added, also from the insane - by the fact that, having intellectual and moral faculties, he is capable of acting contrary to law and committing a crime
It is well known phenomenon that the angel of medicine, when he has been listening to the expositions of lawyers, very often forgets his own mission. Then he folds his wings with a metallic clang and behaves before the court like a reservist-angel of jurisprudence.
The state would in the end kill Moosbrugger because, considering the imperfection of things, that was simply the cheapest, safest, and most clear cut way of dealing with him.
Knowledge was beginning to be old fashioned.
He was no philosopher. Philosophers are violent and aggressive persons who, having no army at their disposal, bring the world into subjection to themselves by means of locking it up in a system. Probably that is also the reason why there have been great philosophic minds in times of tyranny, where as times of advanced civilisation and democracy do not succeed in producing a convincing philosophy, at least so far as one can judge from the lamentations one commonly hears on the subject. That is why nowadays there is a terrifying amount of philosophising done in small slices.
The teachings of the inspired crumble into dust in the rationality of the uninspired, crumble into contradiction and nonsense;
Are great ordeals the privilege of great personalities?
The Baroque of the Void
A flea favours the same areas as a lover.
It is simply my conviction that thinking is an institution all on its own, and real life is another one
I told him that realisation always attracts me less than non-realisation, and by that I mean not only realisation of, say, the future, but also the past and its lost opportunities.
It often happens that brothers and sisters loathe each other in a manner far in excess of anything that could possibly be justified by the facts
Thank goodness there are still some people who are capable of believing in simple things, in spite of having great experience.
All his relationships with women since then had been somehow wrong. With a certain amount of good will on both sides that unfortunately happens very easily.
Water in excessive qualities is a pleasure less pleasing, by precisely the difference between drinking and drowning, than it is in small qualities
There is something of the cult of the dead about it these days when a man is referred to as a genius.
Kenneth Rexroth
Nobody knows what love is anymore. Nobody knows what happened to god (some will guess. I will guess). After midnight the lesbians and fairies sweep through the streets of old tenderloin, like spirochetes in a softening brain.
Edouard Roditi
the stranger walks into the dark room where the two men sit at the table and talk of travel. The stranger joins in the conversation, saying ‘I have also travelled’
Gottfried Benn
look at the drunk Silenus: through his beard
from his loud blood for ever drowned in roars,
shivered by alien music and unique,
wine drips into his sex!
The brain eats dust. Our feet devour the dust
if but the eye were round and self-contained
then through the lids sweet night would enter in
brushwood and love
from you, the sweetly bestial
from out your shadows, sleep and hair
I must bestride my brain
all loops and turns
the ultimate duologue
from his loud blood for ever drowned in roars,
shivered by alien music and unique,
wine drips into his sex!
The brain eats dust. Our feet devour the dust
if but the eye were round and self-contained
then through the lids sweet night would enter in
brushwood and love
from you, the sweetly bestial
from out your shadows, sleep and hair
I must bestride my brain
all loops and turns
the ultimate duologue
Henri Michaux
whoever rejects his demons badgers us to death with angels
dwarves are born continually
It soon became clear (from adolescence on) that I had been born to live among monsters
Despite so many efforts in somany directions all through his life to change himself, his bones, without paying any attention to him, blindly follow their familial, racial, Nordic evolution
I met an oaktree: as tall as my finger, and it was suffering.
The fight was over, at least for the day
Then I put myself inside an apple. What peace!..
When I arrived in the apple, I was ice-cold
in this country, they do not use women. when they want pleasure, they go into the water, and then toward them comes a creature rather like an otter, but bigger, even more supple (and have you ever seen an otter go into the water? it slips in like a hand), toward him come these animals and fight over him.
and what if the poor were given pies of stewed ball-bearings?
and your bread turns into a bear demanding its share and ready to kill
People who dream have always seemed to me superficial sleepers. Probably afraid to ‘lose their man.’
Mediocrities, boring women, some brute I could have gotten rid of a hundred time over – I kept them around for the session with the sack.
But the Nonese are patient. God will not stand for this indefinitely, they say. He is waiting for his time to come.
Of course he’s waiting.
The god Mna is the deafest and the greatest. They are sure that is he could only hear them, it would be the end of all their miseries – which are countless
‘do come in,’ said the shark, and he ate him. The shark was a man-eater, but the era was polite.
In Siam they use the tiger’s docility in following his cruel instincts to lure him on to a bleating lamb over a deep ditch in which he will then perish, fuming with rage at having stupidly let himself be found out by little cowardly bastards so inferior to him in every way.
In this century, the phallus is becoming dogmatic.
He who sings in a group will put his brother in prison when asked.
To understand, the intelligence must get itself dirty. Above all, before it even gets dirty, it has to get hurt.
dwarves are born continually
It soon became clear (from adolescence on) that I had been born to live among monsters
Despite so many efforts in somany directions all through his life to change himself, his bones, without paying any attention to him, blindly follow their familial, racial, Nordic evolution
I met an oaktree: as tall as my finger, and it was suffering.
The fight was over, at least for the day
Then I put myself inside an apple. What peace!..
When I arrived in the apple, I was ice-cold
in this country, they do not use women. when they want pleasure, they go into the water, and then toward them comes a creature rather like an otter, but bigger, even more supple (and have you ever seen an otter go into the water? it slips in like a hand), toward him come these animals and fight over him.
and what if the poor were given pies of stewed ball-bearings?
and your bread turns into a bear demanding its share and ready to kill
People who dream have always seemed to me superficial sleepers. Probably afraid to ‘lose their man.’
Mediocrities, boring women, some brute I could have gotten rid of a hundred time over – I kept them around for the session with the sack.
But the Nonese are patient. God will not stand for this indefinitely, they say. He is waiting for his time to come.
Of course he’s waiting.
The god Mna is the deafest and the greatest. They are sure that is he could only hear them, it would be the end of all their miseries – which are countless
‘do come in,’ said the shark, and he ate him. The shark was a man-eater, but the era was polite.
In Siam they use the tiger’s docility in following his cruel instincts to lure him on to a bleating lamb over a deep ditch in which he will then perish, fuming with rage at having stupidly let himself be found out by little cowardly bastards so inferior to him in every way.
In this century, the phallus is becoming dogmatic.
He who sings in a group will put his brother in prison when asked.
To understand, the intelligence must get itself dirty. Above all, before it even gets dirty, it has to get hurt.
Ono Tozaburo
There
is someone waiting
A white horse walks, hanging its head low
by the evening seashore
where not a soul is seen
across its bare back, the horse carries
a prostrate man in a prison uniform
His dangling hands are tied
almost reaching the ground
the blood dripping along his fingers
falls, dotting the sand
I know not where the horse is going
it just keeps walking down the long, long deserted beach
is someone waiting
A white horse walks, hanging its head low
by the evening seashore
where not a soul is seen
across its bare back, the horse carries
a prostrate man in a prison uniform
His dangling hands are tied
almost reaching the ground
the blood dripping along his fingers
falls, dotting the sand
I know not where the horse is going
it just keeps walking down the long, long deserted beach
Roland Penrose
Dragomir Stanescu wants to see you.
He has got the ice with eggs painted
on it, made specially for the peasants.
But he knows that we shall not need
it nor anything else. It will be dark
these crops grow in human blood they
are the finest in Europe
He has got the ice with eggs painted
on it, made specially for the peasants.
But he knows that we shall not need
it nor anything else. It will be dark
these crops grow in human blood they
are the finest in Europe
Gisele Prassinos
for the speech of early morning
and its muscular taste of rebirth
even if daylight arriving should choke it
I would open the flowers of poison unaided
and let the last day dawn
I function, fertile
uselessly repeat
cannot offer oblivion
its gone way beyond tears
where are the flowery phrases of yesteryear?
and its muscular taste of rebirth
even if daylight arriving should choke it
I would open the flowers of poison unaided
and let the last day dawn
I function, fertile
uselessly repeat
cannot offer oblivion
its gone way beyond tears
where are the flowery phrases of yesteryear?