Sunday, January 30, 2011

Faces (23)

(23)She swallowed her words, which cluttered in her mouth and shaped her highly cheeks full and round, like a broad bridge across her face, while her black eyes had turned sweet and inwardly, light like a little star barely visible and without constellation.

Monday, January 17, 2011

The Diaries of Arnon Grunberg (11)

"Don't you grow tired by your own disquiet?"
"Sometimes," only to add at the last moment,"perhaps."
Such a settled question, Arnon thought. Only an old man, whose years have worn down his body, sees struggling and making efforts as a burden. To the vigor of a youth, being challenged feels like an elevation of the mind, to which he looks eagerly forward.

"But then you also run from deadline to deadline."
The interviewer's questions started to irritate Arnon, realizing that this man's decay was printing itself on his mind and thus polluted his lust for life. The interviewer seemed to suggest that it was all too much, that this restless inspiration needed a break, take some time off, lay in bed and do nothing for a whole day but fetish itself in lazy dinners.

"Yes, but everything that has a pattern, is easy, and I don't forget."

While Arnon heard his own voice say the last lines, hearing himself, he realized already did the gray haired, saggy face with the coarse scraping voice affect him. He reflected on the absurdity of the answer, embarrassed by the apparent habit of himself that he displayed in public. This pattern of routines was what tired him, not the exerting demands.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Les Pensées (24)

Artaud had always remained Artaud, or in other words, he never had really been Artaud.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Identity in Stasis

John was a member of the Luo tribe, according to his passport he was Kenian, though with a permanent residence in the United States, where he practiced as a Harvard trained general practitioner and he had lived the last ten years of his life in Boston. He was one of the proudest members of the Luo, and the tribe was at least as proud of him. When I met him, Obama was president for two years, while John was elaborating on his theory of self identity and advocating the importance of the tribe. He had not asked me about my tribe, he knew of course, there was no such entity in western society. I wasn't sure if he had immediately guessed my Dutch origin, but I was pretty sure that he was not aware of the tensions between the westerners, the southerners, the easterners and the Frisians, in the Netherlands. I of course am a member of the Heracleitian tribe of thought, and I do not believe in the concept of identity, or it would be in my persona as an anarchist deliberately trying to disturb all my pre-existing attachments and ideas like a Nietzschean lion. The main argument I tried to make against John's was based on Marxist principles however, where identity is the superstructure of my class origin, which is determined mostly by technology and ownership of capital, but this is a very typical belief for someone of the middle classes, and a very white and western notion, which he refuted of course.