“

Theodor Adorno: “It is barbaric to write poetry after the Holocaust.”

Adorno, when confronted by others, repeated: “After Auschwitz to write poetry is barbaric, I would not want to downplay this remark.”

Adorno, after reading Paul Celan’s broken and reassembled German, reconsiders: “It may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.”

”

— Ilya Kaminsky, in POETRY, January 2013

10:22 pm  14 notes

6:14 pm  45 notes

by Anonymous

“What can the possibility of an impossibility be? How can we think that? How can we say it while respecting logic and meaning? How can we approach that, live, or exist it? How does one testify to it?”

6:02 pm  4 notes

“No shepherds. No nymphs. Maybe just one:
the girl the fawn strips like a fisherman’s rose.
Death turns its mouth red. It can no longer lie
in the lilies. Not on my watch. The lake is filthy
with silver fish sticky with leeches. Lovesick,
I flick a feather into the water. No stones.
Only the one in my pocket, heavy as a tongue.”

— Beth Bachmann, “Elegy”

6:00 pm  19 notes

10:04 am  1,451 notes

“How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do so.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Philosophy and the Intellect”

10:19 pm  32 notes

“Eventually it comes to you: The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”

— Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black

(Source: postoutpost)

2:39 pm  46 notes

“Speech is irreversible; that is its fatality. What has been said cannot be unsaid, except by adding to it: to correct, here, is, oddly enough, to continue. In speaking, I can never erase, annul; all I can do is say “I am erasing, annulling, correcting,” in short, speak some more. This very singular annulation-by-addition I shall call “stammering.” Stammering is a message spoiled twice over: it is difficult to understand, but with an effort it can be understood all the same; it is really neither in language nor outside it: it is a noise of language comparable to the knocks by which a motor lets it be known that it is not working properly; such is precisely the meaning of the misfire, the auditory sign of a failure which appears in the functioning of the object. Stammering (of the motor or of the subject) is, in short, a fear: I am afraid the motor is going to stop.”

— Roland Barthes, “The Rustle of Language”

2:36 pm  80 notes

“I live in my suffering and that makes me happy. Anything that keeps me from living in my suffering is unbearable to me.”

— Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

2:29 pm  76 notes

“Studies into clinical depression have yielded similar findings, leading to the development of an intriguing, but still controversial, concept known as depressive realism. This theory puts forward the notion that depressed individuals actually have more realistic perceptions of their own image, importance, and abilities than the average person. While it’s still generally accepted that depressed people can be negatively biased in their interpretation of events and information, depressive realism suggests that they are often merely responding rationally to realities that the average person cheerfully denies.”

— Christopher S. Putnam

(Source: substantia-nigra, via a-weltanschauung)

2:20 pm  410 notes

by Anonymous

:(

2:18 pm  4 notes

“

BELOW FREEZING

We are at a party which doesn’t love us. Finally the party lets the mask fall and shows what it is: a shunting station for freight cars. In the fog cold giants stand on their tracks. A scribble of chalk on the car doors.

One can’t say it aloud, but there is a lot of repressed violence here. That is why the furnishings seem so heavy. And why it is difficult to see the other thing present: a spot of sun that moves over the house walls and over the unaware forest of flickering faces, a biblical saying never let down: “Come unto me, for I am as full of contradictions as you”

I work the next morning in a different town. I drive there in a hum through the dawning hour which resembles a dark blue cylinder. Orion hangs over the frost. Children stand in a silent clump, waiting for the school bus, the children no one prays for. The light grows as gradually as our hair.

”

— Tomas Tranströmer, from Robert Bly’s book, The Half-Finished Heaven: the best poems of Tomas Tranströmer

(Source: timeimmemorial)

10:27 pm  18 notes

“

Let’s take a walk
Into the world
Where if our shoes get white
With snow, is it snow, Marina,
Is it snow or light?
Let’s take a walk

Every detail is everything in its place (Aristotle). Literature is a cup
And we are the malted. The time is a glass. A June bug comes
And a carpenter spits on a plane, the flowers ruffle ear rings.
I am so dumb-looking. And you are so beautiful.

Sitting in the Hudson Tube
Walking up the fusky street
Always waiting to see you
You the original creation of all my You, you the you
In every poem the hidden one whom I am talking to
Worked at Bamberger’s once I went with you to Cerutti’s
Bar—on Madison Avenue? I held your hand and you said
Kenneth you are playing with fire. I said
Something witty in reply.
It was the time of the McCarthy trial
Hot sunlight on lunches. You squirted
Red wine into my mouth.
My feelings were like a fire my words became very clear
My psyche or whatever it is that puts together motions and emotions
Was unprepared. There was a good part
And an alarmingly bad part which didn’t correspond—
No letters! No seeming connection! Your slim pale hand
It actually was, your blondness and your turning-around-to-me look
Good-bye Kenneth.

”

— Kenneth Koch, from “To Marina”

10:25 pm  7 notes

“We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”

— Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”

(Source: konkretpolitik, via seraphmachine)

9:22 pm  70 notes

9:18 pm  229 notes