feeling broken,

and that this
is a good thing.

what i have seen
i have not seen

I don't look at a man and think: man.
Nor, for that matter, 
Do I think him ox or pig.
He is I. And as meaningless. 

Shinkichi Takahashi
tr. Lucien Stryk

The poem is lonely. Lonely and en route. Its author remains added to it.

Paul Celan
tr. Pierre Joris

To prattle on,
complaining about the woes
of one's situation
is to betray the heart
that cast the world aside.

to ni kaku ni / ukimi o nao no / nageku koso /
suteshi ni tagau / kokoro narikere

Tonna

each leaf
whether of tree
or speech
is but a withered sun


(NB. kotoba, the japanese kanji for "word," translates literally as "leaves of speech")

the difficulty lies in overcoming intention

Working from life would mean surrendering to the object.

Pierre Bonnard

In the state of delusion, both right and wrong are wrong.

Jūjūshin'in Shinkei

You don’t paint the way someone, by observing his life, thinks you have to paint, you paint the way you have to, in order to give. That’s life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving. The question about knowing will naturally be wrong. When you’ve finished giving, the look surprises you as much as anyone else.

Franz Kline

If I speak of having a subject to paint, I mean there is a forgotten place of beings and things, which I need to remember. I want to see this place. 
      I paint what I want to see.

Philip Guston

poetry: the eternal unborn

The humane are sure to be courageous; the courageous are not necessarily humane.

Confucius

my spirit is nearing affliction's
peak and i don't know how
to christen the suffering

Pura López-Colomé

the body hurtling
through the tunnel
its stillness

To see now only
The light, the simulation of that disturbing
Thing that would have to be disposed of

Henri Deluy

one only needs to know where to look,
or perhaps how to look,
or maybe it's a case of not looking at all
but simply seeing.
yet it might not be even that,
rather just accepting.

Man
Tests the earth
Before assuming his place


Then begins
His obscure course between silence
And Babel
Toward the enigma of things.

Andrée Chedid

Chaos is the basis for the individual.

Markus Lüpertz

Why be human if being human
is so difficult? Become the lamp
by the roadside that quietly sheds
its light on man.
Be as it is, for as it is
he will always have a human face.
Be good to him, this man,
and impartial like a lamp
that quietly illuminates the faces
of drunkards, vagabonds and students
along the solitary road.

Be a lamp
if you can't be human,
for being human is difficult.
A human has just two hands
but he should help thousands.
So be a lamp by the roadside
shining on a thousand happy faces,
shining for the lonely, the aimless.
Be a lamp with a single light,
man in a magic square
signaling with a green arm.
Be a lamp, a lamp,
a lamp.

Srecko Kosovel

even the light
bows to the pebbles
and their silence

I had no life, had to find whether one was possible. If so, whether it was worth keeping.

Shinkichi Takahashi

Clarity, too, has it mirages.

Yves Bonnefoy
tr. Richard Pevear

various kinds
of wonders
have lost their wonder
wonderland is headed
for its own destruction

Tada Chimako
tr. Jeffrey Angles

I again learned to speak and I wept
when a word escaped me.

Ingeborg Bachmann
tr. Peter Filkins

Between a word and a thing
you only encounter yourself,
lying between each as if next to someone ill,
never able to get to either.

Ingeborg Bachmann
tr. Peter Filkins

At the risk of appearing self-contradictory, I do not believe art is understood through intellectual operations, but rather that we intercept the outline of a certain manner of treating (being in) the world.

Mel Bochner

art is perhaps the most glorious of failures

DISGUST IS THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO MOST SITUATIONS

Jenny Holzer

The there of things, the auroral there, is not inert. It shifts constantly, imperceptibly.
(Le là des choses, là auroral, n’est pas inerte. Remue sans cesse, imperceptiblement.)

Roger Munier

L'aube

We can know with a reassuring certainty what is beautiful or ugly, right or wrong, good or bad, why it is so and how far it is so [...] And yet! Notwithstanding this, men have been turning about for thousands of years in the same circle of follies, errors and abuse, neither their own experiences nor those of others have made them any more sensible.

from Dark Mirrors

by Arno Schmidt

not about
—from

perhaps the real issue for humanity is the impossibility to not care

Your sense of unity, only perceptible to you, is a sheen on the surface, not a deeper layer of reality.

David Weisman

that in addition to those familiar dark shadows
there are those luminous as well

If man is once again to come into the vicinity of Being, he must first learn to exist in namelessness. He must recognize equally the seduction of the public and the powerlessness of the private. Before he speaks, he must allow himself again to be spoken to by Being and risk the danger that in being spoken to he will have little or rarely anything to say.

Martin Heidegger

Art is the persistence of illusion in a disillusioned world. 

Theodor Lipps

The social body is occupied merely with safeguarding itself and could not care less about a life that has been damaged.

Jean Améry

Regard every man first and foremost as a being who exists only as a consequence of his culpability and whose life is an expiation of the crime of being born.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Man is hungry for beauty. There is a void.

Oscar Wilde

Somewhere, free of joy, there is nothing.

Bram  van Velde

thing not as object
but as revelation

to elevate the gaze
even when looking down

The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. Tears and not sight are the essence of the eye. 

Jacques Derrida

The foundation is not something obscure, neither is it light which becomes perceivable only when it shines upon the thing which bathes in its light, nor is it the thing itself as a “transcendent phenomenon”, but it is an immanent revelation which is a presence to itself, even though such a presence remains “invisible.”

Michel Henry

Yes . . . I like . . . I like their . . . their illogicality . . . their burning illogicality – the flame . . . the flame . . . Which consumes all our filthy logic . . .

Samuel Beckett to Charles Juliet

Just 'cause you feel it, doesn't mean it's there.

Thom Yorke

One is only ever exiled from oneself 
and personal pain is of little concern. 
After all to wail within is not 
to wail for everyone.


But if living is such
then marching enraged 
under the windows of past contempt 
will allow one to say 
"us", "all of us."

Pierre Lepori
translated by Michael Twed

that which is closest
often seems most distant

I cannot be pinned down here and now
because I live as well with the dead
as with the unborn
somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual
but still not close enough.

(inscription on Paul Klee's tomb)

It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.

Ornette Coleman

If man is once again to come into the vicinity of Being [die Nahe des Seins], he must first learn to exist in namelessness [Namenlosen]. He must recognize equally the seduction of the public and the powerlessness of the private. Before he speaks, he must allow himself again to be spoken to by Being and risk the danger that in being spoken to he will have little or rarely anything to say.

Martin Heidegger

The self and things are mutually responsive to each other; things do not move the self nor vice versa. There is only one world, one scene. 

Nishida Kitaro, An Inquiry into the Good, pg. 32

Study self-pity seriously -- it finds us out in our most puerile parts. 

Jane Heap

Under every deep, another deep opens.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everywhere we encounter things,
yet we only ever find the absolute.

Searching is everything – going beyond what you know. And the test of the search is really in the things themselves, the things you seek to understand. What is important is not what you think about them, but how they enlarge you.

Wynn Bullock

One doesn't enter Nothingness, one becomes it.

Roger Munier

the water's void
takes shape as a fish

Do not believe that the person who is trying to offer you solace lives his life effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that might occasionally comfort you. His life is filled with much hardship and sadness, and it remains far behind yours. But if it were otherwise, he could never have found these words. 

Rilke, Letters on Life, pg. 3

In time there is no present, there never has been one, and there never will be one.

Michel Henry, I Am the Truth, pg. 19

Givenness can be understood [...] as the yielding of the self to the allure and turning toward it attentively.

Daniel J. Dwyer

to let the world

each thing
its infinity

To be in this world is to be ever entering a material space of radiance.

Andrew J. Mitchell, Heidegger Among the Sculptors, pg. 1

The present, while being determined, is something whose determination should be denied. What is made, while being something that has gone by, goes to make what makes. Here we find the continuity of discontinuity, the self-limitation of nothingness. . . . The individual formation of the self is not a continuity from act to act but, rather, should be a continuity from what is made to what makes. In other words, it must be a historical continuity.

Nishida Kitaro

Somewhere, there must be a realm between, a realm akin to that ultimate realm where motion becomes rest and rest motion.

Suppose I flay about me with my arms. As I do so, I lose a certain amount of intellectual blood. Suppose I allow myself, however briefly, to think before I strike. At that moment, my blow is doomed to failure.

Somewhere, I told myself, there must be a higher principle that manages to bring the two together and reconcile them.

That principle, it occurred to me, was death.

And yet, my idea of death was too mystical; I was forgetting the plain, physical aspect of death.

Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel, pg. 92

For Bushido it is the good will in-itself which has an absolute value. And it does not matter if it is an unsatisfied will, an unrealizable ideal --the life of misfortune and sadness, "the disconsolate empire of thirst and grief," in sum, that "time lost" perpetually repeating itself. Confront transmigration without fear, valiantly. Pursue perfection while maintaining a clear consciousness as to its "deception." Live in perpetual time, in Endlosigkeit, to use Hegel's terms. Find Unendlichkeit in Endlosigkeit, infinity in endlessness, eternity in succession without end.

Kuki Shuzo

Spiritual acts do not stop as events within the mind but must seek expression in the body. Expressive movements are not external signs of spiritual phenomena but are states of their development and completion. The spiritual act and the expressive movement are one act internally. Thus, our language is not a sign of thought but is an expressive movement of thought. Thought perfects itself through language. However, our world is not merely one that has been expressed by thought and language. Our spiritual acts are infinite activities, and each possesses its own world of expression. As the act of pure visual perception develops into language, it naturally moves our body and develops into a kind of expressive movement. This is the creative act of the artist. From this standpoint the world of concepts suddenly dissolves, and the prospect of a world of infinite visual perception opens up.

Nishida Kitaro
as quoted in A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics, pg. 291

We don’t need to cling to the self to enjoy life. Life is naturally rich and abundant.

Dzigar Kongtrul, Light Comes Through, pg. 11

Does "life" exist? I see only a desperate, unbridled will to survive.

Roger Munier, Le Su et L'Insu, pg. 48