“Why render that experience through fiction? First, because we are only fiction.
We are only the idea we have of ourselves.”
-Edmond Jabes-
Excerpt from the Book of the Dead – Jabes (replete with traces)
Tag: quotations
Writing: Resonance and Quotation
Resonance: Reverberations: The Nature of Quotation
“Awake O sleeper!…”
(Ephesians 5)
“…life is but a dream”
(children’s rhyme)
“The Tao that can be spoken…”
(Tao te Ching)
“From the way I say your name I always know…”
(???)
“In the beginning was the Word…”
(John 1)
“To be or not to be”
(Hamlet)
“Try again. Fail again. Try again. Fail better.”
(Sam Beckett)
“I went to the word to make it my gesture. I went, and I am going”
(Edmond Jabes)
Color stained into fabric woven into rug. Of a piece, as they say, indistinguishable from the object itself. So the words flow into us, saturate and stain us, are absorbed and resurface as we ourselves. Like echoes in the cranium, or instinctual responses of the body. Resonant reverberations.
“And so it was…” (A.A. Milne?)
“Once upon a time..” “In the beginning…”
Countless appearances, an abyss of sources, the word lives on.
Who first used “love” or “light”? “To be” or “not”? “Hello,” “yes,” “a”?
Our life is quotation, interpretation, paraphrase.
We shelter in a common blanket.
We’re covered with a shared snow.
We drink of one great water.
Languages one to another, stained and woven rug.
N Filbert 2012
ex nihilo…to begin (crisis / catharsis)
“So the books are waiting. Of this you may be confident: they’ll be ready when the whim strikes you.”
-Alan Jacobs-
Living Traces – Paul Valery
“In the strange faculty of doing certain things irrelevant to life with as much care, passion and persistence as if one’s life depended on them…there we find what is called ‘living.'”
-Paul Valery-
Reminder…
“”I write.” This statement is the one and only real “datum” a writer can start from. “At this moment I am writing.” Which is also the same as saying: “You who are reading are obliged to believe only one thing: that what you are reading is something that at some previous time someone has written; what you are reading takes place in one particular world, that of the written word. It may be that likenesses can be established between the world of the written word and other worlds of experience, and that you will be called upon to judge upon these likenesses, but your judgment would in any case be wrong if while reading you hoped to enter into a direct relationship with the experience of worlds other than that of the written word.” I have spoken of “worlds of experience,’ not of “levels of reality,” because within the world of the written word one can discern many levels of reality, as in any other world of experience.”
-Italo Calvino-
p.s….
“A work of literature might be defined as an operation carried out in the written language and involving several layers of reality at the same time”
“The preliminary condition of any work of literature is that the person who is writing has to invent that first character, who is the author of the work”
(further Calvino’s)
The Open
“What to write on the blank sheet of paper, already blackened with every conceivable handwriting?
Choose, why choose?”
-J.M.G. LeClezio-
“There seem endlessly those situations of particular experience wherein one knows and doesn’t know, all at the same instant, which is to say, the information is inherent, actual, in the given system, but (itself a word of this qualification) we cannot step out of its context to see ‘what it is’ we thus ‘know'”
-Robert Creeley-
“I speak now and shelter in the tent of language or writing”
-Michel Serres-
Some goods to get you through
“Coincidences depend not so much on desire as on the density of existence”
-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-
“The full meaning of the adage Humanum est errare, we have never woken up to”
-Charles Sanders Peirce-
“Act your heart. There’s nothing else”
“The world is where we fling it”
–Theodore Roethke-
“To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it”
–Wallace Stevens-
“Action painting – action writing – the process is the same, with emphasis less on the finished product than on the author’s process of creation”
-Jerome Klinkowitz-
a personal p.s.: I love the poetic world of Mr. Scott Krieger, and the music of Mark Kozelek (ahhhh)
“The poet feels abundantly the poetry of everything”
-Wallace Stevens-
(for Scott)
All my Words are Silent 