Without Lifting A Finger

I visited my father a few days ago. Although visit isn’t quite the right word, since he’s not present mentally. Not only does he not recognize me; I always come away with the impression that his gaze no longer retains concrete images, it doesn’t focus on any single object. My father lies in bed and sleeps for days on end. He’s still in his apartment, in his room, he’s well cared for. These visits are so sad. And once I fell into despair because he left without saying goodbye.  * * *  Cioran reports that Dylan Thomas was seized by convulsions and threw himself on the floor when someone once tried to interpret one of his poems in the poet’s presence.  * * *

Found this snippet from an interview (by Jason Weiss) at Itineraries of  a Hummingbird yesterday. *  

A few final excerpts from the last few essays (all centered on Cioran's thoughts, observations re various people). On an anonymous woman ( She Was Not of Their World . . .): Adieu was the sign and the law of her nature, the flash of her predestination, the mark of her passage on earth; hence she bore it like a nimbus, not by indiscretion, but by solidarity with the invisible. * On F. Scott Fitzgerald: Thus Fitzgerald's admirers deplore the fact that he brooded over his failure and, by dint of ruminating so deeply upon it, spoiled his literary career. We, on the contrary, deplore that he did not remain sufficiently loyal to that failure, that he did not sufficiently explore or exploit it. It is a second-order mind that cannot chose (sic) between literature and the "real dark night of the soul." * On Weininger (from a brief letter): In Weininger it was the dizzying exaggeration that fascinated me, the infinity of negation, the denial of common sense, the ...

I should've known: There had to be a connection between Cioran and Celan. The very last text of A/A is "Rereading . . ." The brief intro goes: "Translated into German by Paul Celan, my Precis de Decomposition ( A Short History of Decay ), was published by Rowolt in 1953. When it was republished in Germany in 1978, the editor of Akzente asked me to introduce it to the magazine's readers. That is the origin of this text."

Going through a Cioran withdrawal, but I've pulled myself away to start something new. Still reading the intro but it promises to be a good read (another selection from NYRB), perhaps revealing the author (whom I know next to nothing about) as much as the object of his friendship: Benjamin. * An excerpt from the Introduction (taking a slice which also includes another big name: Hannah Arendt, who apparently also wrote an important essay on Benjamin): Arendt's denial of Benjamin's religious nature was not the only thing that must have incited Scholem. Her insistence on "bad luck" as the guiding force behind Benjamin's life must also have provoked him. Benjamin's idea of history as "one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage" becomes in Arendt's perspective Benjamin's projection of his own unluckiness, the "pile of debris" that fate kept throwing across his path. "Benjamin's suicide," she...

The Iron Guard ( Romanian : Garda de fier pronounced  [ˈɡarda de ˈfjer]  ( listen ) ) is the name most commonly given to a far-right movement and political party in Romania in the period from 1927 into the early part of World War II . The Iron Guard was ultra-nationalist , anti-communist , anti-capitalist and promoted the Orthodox Christian faith. It is also considered an antisemitic organization. When Ion Antonescu came to power in September 1940 he brought the Iron Guard into the government. Under the dictatorial rule of Horia Sima , the Guard launched a murderous attack on Jews. In January 1941, however, Antonescu used the army to suppress a revolt of the Iron Guard . He destroyed the organization, as its commander Horia Sima and some other leaders escaped to Germany. Background Romanian antisemitism had deep roots and was generally accepted, as it was a religious conception in which Christians and Jews were very different and should live independent to eac...

     One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well. *      "My children, salt comes from water, and if it comes in contact with water, it dissolves and vanishes. In the same way, the monk is born of woman, and if he approaches a woman, he dissolves and ceases to be a monk." This Jean Moschus, in the seventh century, seems to have understood better than either Strindberg or Weininger the danger already pointed out in Genesis. *      Every life is the story of a collapse. If biographies are so fascinating, it is because the heroes, and the cowards quite as much, strive to innovate in the art of debacle. *      Each of us clings as best he can to his unlucky star.     

Excerpts: I first met Eliade around 1932, in Bucharest, where I had just finished some sort of studies in philosophy. He was at that time the idol of the "new generation," a magic formula we were proud to invoke. *  I have never been able to read Balzac; to tell the truth, I stopped trying on threshold of adolescence. His world is closed to me, inaccessible; I never manage to enter it; I am refractory to it. How many times has Eliade tried to convert me! He first read the Comedie humaine in Bucharest; he reread it in Paris in 1947; perhaps he is rereading it in Chicago now. * Since Pascal and Kierkegaard, we can no longer conceive of "salvation" without a procession of infirmities, and without the secret pleasures of the interior drama. * We are all, Eliade first of all, ci-devant believers; we are all religious spirits without religion. 

Mircea Eliade ( Romanian:  [eliˈade] ; March 9 [ O.S. February 24] 1907 – April 22, 1986) was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago . He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. [1] One of his most influential contributions to religious studies was his theory of Eternal Return , which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but, at least to the minds of the religious, actually participate in them. [1] His literary works belong to the fantastic and autobiographical genres. The best known are the novels Maitreyi ("La Nuit Bengali " or "Bengal Nights"), Noaptea de Sânziene ("The Forbidden Forest"), Isabel și a...

     In the deserted church, the organist was practicing. No one else there, except a cat that wreathed itself around me. . . . Its eagerness was a shock: the inveterate tormenting questions assailed me. The organ's answer did not seem satisfying to me, but in my condition, it was an answer nonetheless. *      Under an incomparably desolate sky, two birds, indifferent to that lugubrious background, pursue one another. . . . Their obvious delight is more apt to rehabilitate an old instinct than the entire body of erotic literature. *      Music is an illusion that makes up for all the others. (If illusion is a term doomed to disappear I wonder what will become of me.) 

Can you imagine running into Beckett from time to time in the Luxembourg Garden? I cannot. * The endgame of Cioran's essay on Beckett:      I find him as obstinate as any fanatic. Even if the world crumbled, he would not abandon the work under way, nor would he alter his subject. In the essential things, he is certainly not to be influenced. As for the rest, the inessential, he is defenseless, probably as weak as all of us, even weaker than his characters. . . . Before collecting these notes, I had intended to reread what Meister Eckhart and Nietzsche wrote, from their different perspectives, about "the noble man." I have not carried out my project, but I have not forgotten for a single moment that I had conceived it. 

When one has emerged from the circle of errors and illusions within which actions are performed, taking a position is virtually an impossibility. A minimum of silliness is essential for everything, for affirming and even for denying.

Still restless in my literary wanderings, though still interested in Cioran. Ergo: mixing in Anathemas and Admirations (late Cioran) with Decay . * From the forward to A/A (by Eugene Thacker of "dusty planet" fame) comes an interesting biographical fragment (fitting?) re Cioran's final days: In the 1990s, an emaciated, elderly man with sharp eyes and wavy hair is found sitting on the side of the street somewhere in Paris's Latin Quarter. He is lost. He can recall neither the way back home nor even his address. He is taken home. Eventually he stops eating. After an accidental fall, he is brought to a hospital. He drifts in and out of lucidity, rarely recognizing those closest to him. He stops speaking entirely. After slipping into a coma, Emil Cioran dies, on June 20, 1995. * Also from A/A , in an essay (Admiration) on Joseph de Maistre (1753 - 1821), a snippet re the Fall: . . . Like all great ideas, that of the Fall accounts for everything and for noth...

     Perhaps we should publish only our first drafts, before we ourselves know what we are trying to say. *      Only unfinished -- because unfinishable -- works prompt us to speculate about the essence of art. *      What cannot be translated into mystical language does not deserve to be experienced. *      L. wants to know if I have a suicide line, but I hide my hands, and rather than show them to him, I shall always wear gloves in his presence. *      A book should open old wounds, even inflict new ones. A book should be a danger .   

Speaking of plants and animals... Jealous of their unconsciousness, basis of their salvation, we would be as they are, and furious at being unable to become so, we meditate their ruin, we strive to interest them in our misfortunes in order to revenge ourselves upon them. It is the animals we resent most of all: what would we not give to strip them of their silence, to convert them to language, to inflict upon them the abjection of speech! The charm of a life without reflexion, of existence as such being forbidden to us, we cannot bear that others should delight in it.

It may be at hand, the day when, no longer able to endure that mass of fear we have accumulated, we shall collapse beneath the burden with which it overwhelms us. This time the fire from heaven will be our fire, and to escape it we shall rush to the depths of the earth, far from a world we ourselves have spoiled and disfigured. And we shall sojourn beneath the dead and envy their repose and their beatitude, those carefree skulls forever on vacation, those calmed and modest skeletons, freed at last from the impertinences of the blood and the claims of the flesh.

A reading period in which I'm jumping from book to book. Lots of starts, few finishes. Just the way it is: work and restless sleep. Sometimes the way we come to a writer is as interesting as the writer him/herself. Or at least both are interesting. So it is with Cioran. Found him in a circuitous way. Settled first on Drawn and Quartered . * Despite everything, man pulverized his last prejudice, and his last belief; when he finally  brings himself to do so, dazzled and destroyed by his own audacity, he will find himself naked facing the abyss that follows upon the disappearance of all dogmas, and of all taboos.

Emil Michel Cioran ( Romanian pronunciation:  [eˈmil t͡ʃoˈran]  ( listen ) ; 8 April 1911 – 20 June 1995) was a Romanian philosopher and essayist , who published works in both Romanian and French . Cioran was born in Rășinari, Sibiu County, which was part of Austria-Hungary at the time. His first French book, A Short History of Decay , was awarded the prestigious Rivarol Prize in 1950. It was the only book for which he accepted an award given to him, claiming that it would have been insolent of him to refuse it. The Latin Quarter of Paris was his permanent residence and he lived much of his life in isolation with his partner Simone Boué. [From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Cioran ]