December 3, 2008 by notesfromaroom
He had thought that his tall uncles in their dark clothes were princes of an elite brotherhood. He had thought the synagogue was their house of purification. He had thought their businesses were realms of feudal benevolence. But he had grown to understand that that none of them even pretended to those things. They were proud of their financial and communal success. They liked to be first, to be respected, to sit close to the altar, to be called up to lift the scrolls. They weren’t pledged to any other idea. They did not believe their blood was consecrated. Where had he got the notion that they did?
When he saw the rabbi and cantor move in their white robes, the light on the brocaded letter of their prayer shawls, when he stood among his uncles and bowed with them and joined his voice to theirs in the responses; when he followed in the prayer book the catalogue of magnificence —
No, his uncles were not grave enough. They were strict, not grave. They did not seem to realise how fragile the ceremony was. They participated in it blindly, as if it would last forever. They did not seem to realize how important they were, not self-important, but important to the incantation, the altar, the ritual. They were ignorant of the craft of devotion. They were merely devoted. They never thought how close the ceremony was to chaos. Their nobility was insecure because it rested on inheritance and not moment-to-moment creation based on annihilation.
In the most solemn or joyous part of the ritual Breavman knew the whole procedure could revert in a second to desolation. The cantor, the rabbi, the chosen laymen stood before the open Ark, cradling the Torah scrolls, which looked like stiff-necked royal children, and returned them one by one to their golden stall. The beautiful melody soared, which proclaimed that the Law was a tree of life and a path of peace. Couldn’t they see how it had to be nourished? And all these men who bowed, who performed the customary motions, they were unaware that other men had written the sacred tune, other men had developed the seemingly eternal gestures out of clumsy confusion. They took for granted what was dying in their hands.
But why should he care? He wasn’t Isaiah, and the people claimed nothing. He didn’t even like the people or the god of their cult. He had no rights in the matter.
– Leonard Cohen
Tags: The Favourite Game
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December 3, 2008 by notesfromaroom
Was it possible to reconcile the warring shapes of longing inside her? To bring them all into a greater whole… it was one of those ideas that open up a new horizon, like when you suddenly see the sea after turning a bend in an unfamiliar coastal town. The great men and women of the spirit, the teachers and saints in distant reaches surely knew evil as intimately as they knew the good and the sacred. They’d gone to hell for their wholeness, been tortured by disgusting devils in the desert like St Antony, and knew evil better than the worst criminal. So it was at least humanly possible, even if not for her.
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December 3, 2008 by notesfromaroom
He held the half-caste firmly in the saddle and walked on. His feet were bleeding, but they would soon harden. An odd stillness dropped over the forest, and welled up in the mist from the ground. The night had been noisy, but now all was quiet. It was like an armistice with the guns silent on either side: you could imagine the whole world listening to what they had never heard before — peace.
A voice said ‘You are the priest, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ It was as if they had climbed out of their opposing trenches and met to fraternize among the wires in No Man’s Land. He remembered stories of the European War — how during the last years men had sometime met on an impulse between the lines.
‘Yes’, he said again, and the mule plodded on. Sometimes, instructing children in the old days, he had been asked by some black lozenge-eyed Indian child, ‘What is God like?’ and he would answer facilely with references to the father and the mother, or perhaps more ambitiously he would include brother and sister and try to give some idea of all loves and relationships combined in an immense and yet personal passion… But at the centre of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery — that we were made in God’s image. God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge. Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before the bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex. He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated dirty ingenuities which God’s image had thought out, and God’s image shook now, up and down on the mule’s back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip, and God’s image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut among the rats. He said, ‘Do you feel better now? Not so cold, eh? Or so hot?’ and pressed his hand with a kind of driven tenderness upon the shoulders of God’s image.
The man didn’t answer, as the mule’s backbone slid him first to one side, then the other.
– Graham Greene
Tags: Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
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December 3, 2008 by notesfromaroom
Much later I isolated the problem that inspired the novel Venus in Furs. I became aware first of the mysterious affinity between cruelty and lust, and then of the natural enmity between the sexes which is temporarily overcome by love, only to reappear subsequently with elemental force, turning one of the partners into a hammer and the other into an anvil.
– Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Tags: Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs
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December 3, 2008 by notesfromaroom
I was sitting in a bar on Western Ave. It was around midnight and I was in my usual confused state. I mean, you know, nothing works right: the women, the jobs, the no-jobs, the weather, the dogs. Finally you just sit in a kind of stricken state and wait like you’re on the bus stop bench waiting for death.
– Bukowski
Tags: Bukowski
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December 1, 2008 by notesfromaroom
She decided to do the right thing, did the wrong thing and retreated. She stopped listening until she turned deaf. She stopped talking until she turned mute. It was true that silence was often the best answer, like Christ’s answer to Pilate. But not this kind of silence, in which you pass through your own life like a ghost.
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November 30, 2008 by notesfromaroom
You, the Lord, yourself are our Father, ‘Our Redeemer’ is your ancient name. Why, Lord, leave us to stray from your ways and harden our hearts against fearing you? Return, for the sake of your servants, the tribes of your inheritance. Oh, that you would tear the heavens open and come down! At your Presence the mountains would melt. No ear has heard, no eye has seen any god but you act like this for those who trust him. You guide those who act with integrity and keep your ways in mind. You were angry when we were sinners; we had long been rebels against you. We were all like men unclean, all that integrity of ours like filthy clothing. We have all withered like leaves and our sins blew us away like the wind. No one invoked your name or roused himself to catch hold of you. For you hid your face from us and gave us up to the power of our sins. And yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we the clay, you the potter, we are all the work of your hand.
– Isaiah, 63:16b-17; 64:2-7
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November 29, 2008 by notesfromaroom
My room is scattered with empty cans. Fragments of conduit. Each one is a segment of a pipeline that I am building, to tap and channel the subterranean currents beneath the pavements. I take my part from the current; part is expelled as breath, thought, writing, sex — clouds of alcohol breath and smoke — the remainder pours back into the subterranean rivers, through porcelain, then earthenware, finally into brick-lined catacombs. The city is an economy of liquids. Talk drips, describes liquidation of capital, flows of traffic and people, of capital crystallised into buildings tapping other credit streams. The cornucopia is filled, not with fruit, but the decayed ferment of it.
Liquid reflects; this is how we recognise ourselves in it, gazing back at us. The recognition acknowledges that we can see ourselves where we are not, but this is not what is recognised. It shows us that there is a place within us, too, where we are not.
– robin_bile
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November 29, 2008 by notesfromaroom
In a sense, fear is the daughter of God, redeemed on Good Friday night. She’s not beautiful, she’s mocked, cursed and disowned by all. But don’t get it wrong, she watches over all mortal agony, she intercedes for mankind. For there’s a rule and an exception. Culture is the rule, and art is the exception. Everybody speaks the rule: the cigarette, the computer, the t-shirt, TV, tourism, war. Nobody speaks the exception. It isn’t spoken. It’s written: Flaubert, Dostoevsky. It’s composed: Gershwin, Mozart. It’s painted: Cezanne, Vermeer. It’s filmed: Antonioni, Vigo. Or it’s lived, and then it’s the art of living: Srebenica, Mostar, Sarajevo. The rule is to want the death of the exception. So the rule for Cultural Europe is to organise the death of the art of living, which still flourishes. When it’s time to close the book, I’ll have no regrets. I’ve seen so many people live so badly and so many die so well.
– Godard
Tags: Cinema, Godard, Je vous salue Sarajevo
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November 29, 2008 by notesfromaroom
– such as you’ve heard before, spoken before, dreamt of: a [ ] of voices, the rush of tone, things fall by the wayside, an afterthought precedes, a form of dyslexia, it happens more often at the extremes of the day, upon waking, or now, later, it’s too late, perhaps, to form a coherent line, tangles, then, one of many, like the waves, the hesitation, there, drawing back before the pulse, then, the tug of it, flow, the way things even out. Similar books are added to the pile of those unread, unbearable silence, silences, borne in common, contradictions, joyous, terrible, the thread spools, ravels a line, one ravels lines together or ravels them apart; if not splitting, then, certainly slipping, a loose thread pools into the curve of one’s hand, & the texture of it & the color of it, reminding you of something else again, entirely, and you drift off on a digression, for a moment, because you are happy, then reeling off like an idiot or a fool, whatever the right word is: earnest and without apology, I would like to take a stand.
– Red Thread(s)
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