Little red berries on the tree.
‘Just in my life’ – is the just (‘de justesse’).
Relief on reading Beckett! Creatures of my own kind!
Great cycle rides of my life (even if at the time I was
feeling deeply unhappy, bored, tired). Mainly in France. With D.D., and
the petite bande. With N.-K., in
Normandy. Solus, in Burgundy.
A reference by B.D. to the Plaza de la Virgen in
Valencia. The Blessed Virgin. Sudden longing. Why not?
Torcello. Holiday
romance: but holy day.
‘This is just like in a film!’ – A frequent feeling. – Why
represent it? How represent it? (In a FILM?)
‘Another surviving
Elizabethan tree is displayed in the library. The family tree or pedigree of
Queen Elizabeth I dates from 1559. It is richly illuminated and gilded,
decorated with coats of arms and heraldic devices. It is a remarkable parchment
roll, 22 yards long, tracing Elizabeth’s ancestry back to Adam and Eve. Some of
the Queen’s ancestors who appear here are King Arthur, King Lear, Julius
Caesar, Romulus and Remus, Hector and Noah.’ (Hatfield House.)
He has the doodle bug.
Imagine Heideggerean as a
popular dialect. (A kind of German Rabelaisian?)
Casanova’s translation of the
Iliad into Venetian.
The superstition of (that is)
the other.
Life is too short for long
faces.
Comparaison n’est pas
raison. – BUT compare translations and you open worlds.
The Tingueley machine is at its most splendid as it
self-destructs.
My illness was deaf. It tied me to the mast and rowed me
past the collected works of Maurice Blanchot. I cried out to be landed on the island, but my illness
could not hear.
The Dark – in
James Herbert. (Note that he attended a Catholic School in Bethnal Green.) The
Dark is all the negativity in me and without. Critique. But: ‘The living people
who gave themselves up to the Dark could be controlled, killed, but the killing
itself allowed their energy to become stronger.’
Creation too was always a matter of scissors and paste.
Diesen Kuss der ganzen
Welt. – I ‘heart’ world? I ‘like’ world? I ‘friend’ world? But even Jesus
had his special friends. (I am uneasy about MacC. on friendship with God.)
The gîte in Alsace: poems of Ronsard, thoughs of the empty
room in Mallarmé. Something melancholy, sequestered, as so often in the French
provinces.
Draw on the past – yours, theirs – for energy, not
depletion. Gently dismiss the ‘bad’ images.
Books I read before QM. ‘The room started to go round and
round and burst into flames.’ There was a wonderful dudelsack of a monster in
it.
Beautiful pieces played by Gilels: ‘Lyric Pieces’ by Grieg.
Mirrors: get an assembly of them, make a mobile.
Poems – they are all good – why put them into order? Why
prefer? Or rather: on your preferences to base nothing (that would be an overgeneralization). I am the
anti-Leavis: or rather, I find life where he does not.
Evil must self-destruct? (The Nazis, the Daleks… turn
against themselves. Satan in Dante? The Dark in The Dark.)
A sudden flicker of remembrance of THOR and the other Marvel
comics. I cannot get it back and would not want to: here it is: the hero stands
on the edge of the gigantic space ship, against a backdrop of stars and
planets: he speaks of ‘THE HALCYON DAYS OF YORE’. Also
something Egyptian, mythological: the essay I wrote aet. 11 (and read out to M.
while she was cleaning the windows in the Front Room), a mythological fantasia
on the coming of night – the constellations all alive, the Crab reaching out
with its claws. Something Ovidian, no?
At E. Coll. – yet again – I haven’t been going in for my
Wednesday teaching session – not for weeks. Should I pretend that I’ve been
ill? Also, I need to mug up for ‘A’-level. And German prose. So I go to the UL.
The mediaevalist K. H., now distant from me, is there – I have to ask her if
she will look after F.L. (S.’s friend) for me. I’d e-mailed her about this: but
she has a conference to go to. The computers are very distant – I can barely
see. The ‘joke of the day’ is on show. But I am frustrated by the low
visibility – and frankly shocked when I see some young girls smoking – and
here, in the Library! Then I notice that many other people are smoking, too, in
the vast hall – where several scientific experiments seem to be in progress.
Recently, a vast geography:
Latin-American/Italian/Mediterranean. Vast sunshine, wings of planes.
The Dutch Mountains. The forests around this town. In those
days… Forests, steppes and swamps. East: why not? Smoke rising from clearings.
Philosophy is not the present age captured in thought:
philosophy is yesterday’s philosophy captured in thought.
Proust: but jealousy is a failure of the imagination too.
I am a mere page boy.
Mosaic – Seurat – Klee. Byzantium linked to impressionism
and high modernism.
‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ = ‘Why?’
Dull as dishwater. Have you ever really looked at dishwater? – Think of Pnin doing the washing
up. (This morning, 14 December 2013, I drew a sketch of the washing up as it lay in the bowl: a cubist assemblage.)
Men: gonads without windows.
Herbst im Herzens
Sommeruntergang.
FW – found etymology (as they say: found object).
I’m just not up to Being.
Strangeness: be in places where you cannot judge.
If I were to try and express my sense of the mystical
(‘hearing my daughter sing in San Marco’, for example) it would sound utterly
banal. But that is the mystical! You
want it to sound like Hegel?!
The mystical is for me
alone – but it also means that there
is no longer any me. (‘Vor dem Gesetz.’)
I cannot know what I believe in – in two senses. (If I
believe in X, I cannot know X, and I cannot know what my belief of X really
involves.)
So many books, plays, films that you barely remember: and so
many of them are about the fragility of memory! (This thought gives you a
sudden sense of relief.)
I like writing on a soft
background (in a notebook, with a good 2B pencil. Or on the rubber cloth on the
kitchen table.) Too much pounding on the keyboard has damaged my hands. –
Handwriting is then like sketching.
Get away from the knowingness of PM.
PM, yes, the afternoon nap of thought.
Relics: GB’s merde
as madeleine.
I am luxorius.
Mad Men versus
Burroughs. No contest.
Language opens up to the world, of language. Not.#
Nature is tamed, will.
For the only objective thing is freedom. Subject: Scylla AND
Charybdis.
Locate the conservative moments in JD and LW. (Are they
perhaps the same?)
Citalopram was my drug of choice.
Imagination: the Zoroastrian mage in Tokyo.
Stanford, Symphony no. 5 ‘Symphonic Fantasia’ a lot of the
music is much fresher than I had imagined. The finale doesn’t work.
Relive and rewrite – e.g. the loneliness of Saturday
mornings in the École.
Yes, my problem with film: you can’t (in the cinema) stop
it, freeze the frame, rewind, say ‘sorry, could you say that again?’
Pugin, Ruskin, Newman – the form that ‘revolution’
assumed among the English.
Translation as critique and demystification of original.
My Atlas – Cadaster – Domesday.
IT goes back to when I was very young. – Coming back home to
P. St, discovering the gate was locked. I think I had got the date/time wrong
for a service at St. Matthew’s. – M. was very cross. She’d had to rush all the
way up the hill, all the way back… be there for K… she was probably working at
the time, too. – I slumped against the locked gate, in tears. ('Vor dem Gesetz'.)
Refer every minute to the eternal thing.
The Walkers Along H. Road.
Bagatelles.
I was doing more teaching – supervisions – at K. Coll. – in
K. Lane. The college had given me a room there: tall, lighted, Londonesque. In
K. Lane I discuss the question of ‘fat nails’ – what is the medical term for
this? – I try ‘pinguis’ but an intelligent male student says ‘pinguis’ means
‘fat’, ‘oily’. I’m impressed and say I need to look this up. There are
attractive women students too, and I end up living in a student community. I
can banter with them, in a human way. [Maybe humanity would be fully deployed,
realized, after death? – Kafka.]
Slight warm eros for the women. They have put my chest of drawers behind a bed,
where I need to gain access to it.
Klemperer’s Bruckner’s 6th is abominable – slow and flaccid. Marcus Bosch is better!
