Reflections: Nausea

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God help me, I'm an American.
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Quote du Jour: At the Brink

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To live at the edge of death and of the stars is a vibration too tense for our veins to endure. There isn't even the child of a star and a woman as a compassionate intermediary. The heart must present itself alone before nothingness, and alone it must beat loud in the darkness.
XXXX~ Clarice Lispector, Soulstorm, "Silence" (tr. Alexis Levitin)

If you can write like that, you don't need to go to church.
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Readings: The Inside-Out

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Below are three brief excerpts from three books that I’ve been reading in the past few days. Each of these excerpts struck me as interesting, even instructive. They may, or may not, be thematically related. Think about them and see what you decide:

But my mind is asleep, I can tell.
If it could stay wide-awake from this moment on, we would soon arrive at the truth, which may even now surround us with its weeping angels.*
xxxxx~ Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, “The Impossible” (tr. Paul Schmidt)


The form of the horse exemplifies what is best in the human being. I have a horse within me who rarely reveals himself. But when I see another horse, then mine expresses himself. His form speaks.
xxxxx~ Clarice Lispector, Soulstorm, “Dry Point of Horses”


One must destroy that intermediate, uneasy part of the soul…in order to expose the vegetative part directly to the fiery inspiration that comes from beyond the heavens. Strip oneself of everything above vegetative life. Bare vegetative life and turn it violently toward the heavenly light. Destroy everything in the soul not attached to the light. Expose naked to the heavenly light the part of the soul that is practically inert matter. The perfection offered to us in the direct union of the divine spirit with inert matter. Inert matter seen as thinking is a perfect image of perfection.
xxxxx~ Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks

Weeping angels, equine form, mud thinking: in each case, attention is being paid by the subject to transcendent interior states—or to the desire to achieve same—states that normally we ignore, distracted as we are by ego trips and daydreams. Purified, such attention is true prayer, in and of itself.
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*--Mais je m’aperçois que mon esprit dort.
S’il était bien éveillé toujours à partir de ce moment, nous serions bientôt à la vérité, qui peut-être nous entoure avec ses anges pleurant!
~ Arthur Rimbaud, Une Saison en Enfer, “L’Impossible”
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from Rodak's Writings

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Clichés de la Boue

Le travail

Buck naked in our billboard rags, we squat in the gleaming rubble of cathedrals and malls, toiling to construct malls and cathedrals using shards of detritus and lopsided pots of library paste.

L’environnement

The natives stare, they pinch our women, for we are strangers here. They take strong drink and teach our little sons things of which we must not speak. Others speak for us. We call them prophets. We call them dead men walking. We bank on our deafness and continue to delve, for the labor is many and the time is few.

La hauteur

Even as we slave we convert the sweet rain into dark salty urine. With alchemical pride we transmute the tender bled flesh of throat-cut kids into elegant feces, which we shape with our hands into sun-dried briquettes. As the sky goes opaque, we light anxious fires.

Les divertissements

Banging and rattling our rude tambourines, we dance for a spell, then we hunker down moistened, enthralled by such narrative tableaux—such crackling distractions from the toxic frost of the angry stars—as we imagine we see woven throughout that leaping light.

L’amour

We huddle and stink, giving off gasses like a low-water swamp. We moan at the horror of our own looming shadows, as the strobe-like eyes of circling pariahs pierce the illusory stockade of shimmering flame. We roll and we crawl, we snatch and we clutch, tumescent with throbbing, redundant, desire.

L’effroi

We passively shiver in our dissipating heat as though need alone would ward off the stalking jaws of growling darkness.

L’espoir

And we pray for the sun to return.
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Quote du Jour: Empty Nest Blues

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XXXXXXXXXIt got lonely too early this morning
XXXXXXXXXLonely was laying like dirt
XXXXXXXXXIt got lonely too early this morning
XXXXXXXXXBefore I was ready to hurt
XXXXXXXXXXXxxxxxxxxxxxxx~ Merle Haggard
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Rants: Rest in Pieces, Uncle Sam

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That whiff of carrion that you catch on the breeze is the corpse of Uncle Sam rotting in the sun, neither side of his family being willing to take responsibility for providing him with a decent burial.

This country is fucked. It's giving off the same vibes given off by a dysfunctional family; the kind of vibes once described by Hannah Arendt as "the banality of evil": ordinary folk, trapped in bad behavior that they view as "normal."

In the case of America today, however, the term "the banality of failure" (although this "failure" is driven by the same engines as "evil") might be more to the point.At the banal heart of this evil-failure is greed: greed for power, shored up by wealth. Ho-hum. 'Twas ever thus.

Right-wingers want unlimited power, wealth, and enforced security for the individual. Left-wingers want power and wealth for the state, with universally guaranteed—and sufficient—measures of each provided to all individuals by that state. For Americans—although, mysteriously, not for Europeans—this would seem to be an irreconcilable conflict; a conflict which, being banal, is by definition not even interesting.

Watching the reportage yesterday of widespread glee on the political right over President Obama's failure to secure the Olympic Games for his home town of Chicago, and for America, was something like watching the wife in a failed marriage express glee that her unemployed husband has failed to get the job for which he was interviewed, even though it hurts the family as a whole: his individual defeat is the trump. It is nothing but pointless, and--yes, banal--vindictiveness.

Hatred is self-defeating. Stick a fork in America, she is done.
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Readings: Pair o' Phrases

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Je pense, donc je suis. ~ Descartes

Je me crois en enfer, donc j'y suis. ~ Rimbaud
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