Talmud

L’ecrit vain.

A choice between two things that already exist is no choice at all. – Disdain for the (otherwise harmless) passivity of ‘record review’ etc. The listener saying: ‘Do it right!’ – in other words: ‘Do me right! Give me that thrill I crave!’ – And yet (there’s often an and yet), the work of comparison is itself highly intellectual, as much as sensuous – a true ars erotica mentis.

‘Carburettor’. For words are like clothes pegs.

Love of the asperity of the Talmud. – Its irreverence. – The voices from nowhere. – Of course, this is the view of an outsider. Tant mieux.

Barthes, Derrida… this weird intimacy. A lure? (Un leurre?) As if, in spite of their theories, it was a relation between subject and subject that was being developed: as if one were being encouraged (or forced) to be a subject. – Too late; no doubt. 

‘And this call is in regards to your computer.’

The echoes – muffled, as if in a dream – of Wagner in Debussy’s Pelléas. ‘Je dormirai comme un enfant’ sings Golaud: ah, if only! For that is the dream.

Sanctus Januarius Sweet Sixteen

‘I am too weak to help’ – The leitmotiv of The Magic Flute. Voices on all sides, in the dark.

Truth as reminiscence – of childhood, before ‘it’ happened.

There is a book who runs may read. – My jogging puns.

Equations: the score of the universe.

Wolfgang Rihm writes: ‘I have been reading John Updike’s Seek My Face (Penguin Books 2003, page 14): “Interviewers and critics are the enemies of mystery, the indeterminacy that gives art life”. And now I am asked to write a text on my new composition…’

The distinction between ‘objective culture’ in the more literary arts (the poem, the play, the film, the review, the novel) and the rest (not exactly subjective: it can be non-objective, unfinished, scrappy, inchoate – tweeted and snapchatted) is surely ruined? Can you live amongst these ruins? – The old distinction is of course threatening – so why not undermine it even further? Why this nostalgia for something (a recognizable form; the form of a recognition) that hurts? Think of so many philosophers who are admired for not writing treatises. Leibniz and his letters and opuscules, Nietzsche and his fragments and dithyrambs and aphorisms, Wittgenstein and his bullet points… and even Hegel (who exists to some extent as students’ transcriptions) and Heidegger and Lacan (ditto) and perhaps Derrida, for all the archness of his writing, introduce an element of – what? Improvisation? Winging it? Off-the-cuff remarks? – Remarks may not be literature: they can, however, be poetry. (They can even found a religion.) 

Writing as victimless vengeance.

Before sunrise: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. ‘What’s the point of scarpering? The best thing to do is to be cunning and stay where you are. You see, I’ve gonna let them think they’ve got me ’ouse-trained, but they never will, the bastards.’ – The sense of a lost world – almost unimaginably monochrome – coexists with the politician on television saying that Britain now faces the challenge of prosperity… that what brings the country together is an event like the Coronation or a royal birth… (The same politician seems to be talking about existentialism and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and not in a friendly way.) - As Colin Smith runs, he relives his life; or, he lives. – ‘Chariots of Fire’: what is it about this music and running? – The film (technically verging on Carry On at times with the embarrassing speeded-up sequences, no doubt meant to ironize any revolutionary pedagogy) ends, however, with a still. Before this, there are odd moments where the film falls silent (in the sense that something initially seems wrong with the sound: odd flashback to silent movies?). Amusing: the Borstal boys are taken aback at what they hear about the public school: ‘You pay to go to this school?!’

Pathos of knowledge: essentially what is transmitted from one generation to the next. Or, in less abstract terms: love of gorillas because your children watch a TV documentary about them.