Without Lifting A Finger

Arnold Geulincx  ( Dutch pronunciation:   [ˈɣøːlɪŋks] ; 31 January 1624 – November 1669) was a  Flemish   philosopher . He was one of the followers of  René Descartes  who tried to work out more detailed versions of a generally  Cartesian philosophy .  Samuel Beckett  cited Geulincx as a key influence and  interlocutor  because of Geulincx's emphasis on the powerlessness and ignorance of the  human condition . *   He is cited by  Samuel Beckett , whose character  Murphy  remembers the "beautiful Belgo-Latin of Arnold Geulincx", and in particular the gloomy nostrum (frequently repeated by Beckett to inquisitive critics)  Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis  (roughly, 'Where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing'). In the novel  Molloy  (1950), Beckett's eponymous character describes himself as "I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on...

In the orthodox and largely unexamined conception of language that reigns in the classic novel, language is a communication system that people employ in order to control their environment, achieve their goals, and realize their desires. In Beckett, language is a self-enclosed system, a labyrinth without issue, in which human beings are trapped. Subjecthood, the sense of being a subject and having a self, dissolves as one follows the twists and turns of a voice which speaks through one but whose source is unknown (does it come from inside or from outside?). Why not silence, rather than endless monologue? Molloy has no answer: ‘Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.’ (p. 28)

I've moved on but here's one more fantastic "clip" on Holderlin. * This distinction between text and variant came to prove so contentious among Hölderlin scholars that in 1975 a rival and yet to be completed edition, the so-called Frankfurt Edition, was inaugurated on the principle that there can be no core Hölderlinian text, that we must learn to read the manuscripts as palimpsests of versions overlaying and underlying other versions. For the foreseeable future the notion of a definitive text of Hölderlin is thus in suspension. One reason for this contest of editions is that, in the ninety-two-page notebook that lies at the heart of the problem, Hölderlin went back and forth between new and old manuscript poems, using different pens and inks in an unsystematic way, dating nothing, allowing what one might at firs t glance call different versions of the same poem to stand side by side. A deeper reason is that in his last productive years Hölderlin seems to have...

Interrupting Flaubert & Sand and entertaining Coetzee. A friend sent me a sample: Beckett, the White Whale (White Wall), Kafka. How could I refuse? Anyway, these "clips" are from an essay on Holderlin, which may prompt (imminently) yet another rereading. * There is no doubting Hölderlin’s revolutionary sympathies – ‘Pray for the French, the champions of human rights,’ he instructed his younger sister – but his poems say nothing direct about politics. To a degree this was because he had no models for political poetry; but it was also because of a strong tradition among Germany’s intellectual class of not involving itself in politics. The writer with the strongest following among young idealists was Schiller, and Schiller’s political line after 1793 was that the consciousness of the people needed to evolve before true political change could take effect. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind of 1794–5 Schiller argued that the human spirit could best be ...

F. to Sand: They have so lost all sense of proportion, that the war council at Versailles treats Pipe-en-Bois more harshly than M. Courbet, Maroteau is condemned to death like Rossel! It is madness! These gentlemen, however, interest me very little. I think that they should have condemned to the galleys all the Commune, and have forced these bloody imbeciles to clear up the ruins of Paris, with a chain on their necks, like ordinary convicts. But that would have wounded HUMANITY. They are kind to the mad dogs, and not at all to the people whom the dogs have bitten. That will not change so long as universal suffrage is what it is. Every man (as I think), no matter how low he is, has a right to ONE voice, his own, but he is not the equal of his neighbor, who may be worth a hundred times more. In an industrial enterprise (Societe anonyme), each holder votes according to the value of his contribution. It ought to be so in the government of a nation. I am worth fully twenty electors of ...

Some fantastic "bruises" (camera doesn't tell the whole story) above the lagoon: Ragnarok or The Second Coming. Checked for the swan later in the morning and it was gone: Swan's Way. *

F. to Sand: I don't experience, as you do, this feeling of a life which is beginning, the stupefaction of a newly commenced existence. It seems to me, on the contrary, that I have always lived! And I possess memories which go back to the Pharaohs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practising different professions and in many sorts of fortune. My present personality is the result of my lost personalities. I have been a boatman on the Nile, a leno in Rome at the time of the Punic wars, then a Greek rhetorician in Subura where I was devoured by insects. I died during the Crusade from having eaten too many grapes on the Syrian shores, I have been a pirate, monk, mountebank and coachma n. Perhaps also even emperor of the East? Sand to F.: I have, every day, in two hours news from Milan by telegram. The patient is better; my children are only as far as Turin today and do not know yet what I know. How this telegraph changes one's idea of life, and wh...