Author: startind

André Breton

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“…, I have wanted to see some very special object constructed in response to some poetic fantasy. This object in its matter, in its form, I more or less predicted. Now I have chanced to discover it, unique, doubtless, among so many other fabricated objects. It was obviously this one, it always differed in every way from what I had foreseen. You might have said that in its extreme simplicity, which did not keep it from answering the most complicated needs of the problem, it put the elementary predictions of my character to shame[…]. In any case, what is delightful here is the dissimilarity itself which exists between the object wished for and the object found.”

Text reproduced from André Breton, Mad Love (L’Amour fou), 1987:pp:13

Image Breton by Man Ray c.1930 reproduced from http://briancarnold.wordpress.com/

Fernando Pessoa

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‘Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, it seeps into us with every experience of the flesh and of life and, like the web of the great spider, binds us subtly to what is near, ensnares us in a fragile cradle of slow death, where we lie rocking in the wind. Everything in us and we are everything, but what is the point if everything is nothing? A ray of sun, a cloud whose own sudden shadow warns us of its coming, a breeze getting up, the silence that follows when it drops, certain faces, some voices, the easy smiles, as they talk, and then the night into which emerge, meaningless, the broken hieroglyphs of the stars.’

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, 2010:pp11

Image reproduced from http://portugal.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=7051

Maurice Blanchot

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‘A word may give me its meaning, but first it suppresses it. For me to be able to say,
‘This woman’ I must somehow take her flesh and blood reality away from her,
cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it
to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness,
what is left of it when it has lost being – the very fact that it does not exist.”

Blanchot, The Gaze of the Orpheus: pp41-42

Text reproduced from pdf of Rachel Louis Clapham’s Study Room Guide in In (W)reading Performance Writing, Image reproduced from http://www.mauriceblanchot.net/blog/

Mount Analogue

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Image cropped from_Mount Analogue_René Daumal

Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing by René Daumal 1908-1944.

In Daumal’s unfinished symbolic Novella a group of explorer’s come together to embark upon a quest to find the Mount Analogue of the Novel in a Yacht named the Impossible. Mount Analogue, a peak that reaches toward heaven although real in every sense of the term in that it it exists, has geographic co-ordinates and a population that are completely hidden from view. It can only be bought into view when the sun’s rays hit the earth at a particular point of view. The exhibition’s leader is Father Sogol or in otherwords the Logos, both fantastic, allegorical and metaphysical, it is a journey of faith. Continue reading →