‘When rhythm has become the sole and unique mode of thought’s expression, it is then only that there is poetry. In order for mind to become poetry, it must bear in itself the mystery of an innate rhythm. It is in this rhythm alone that it can live and become visible. And every work of art is but one and the same rhythm. Everything is simply rhythm.’ (Hölderlin in conversation with Sinclair, 1804.)

Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the center like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road----

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.

By Sylvia Plath

SCIENTIST: Then we can’t really describe what we have named.

TEACHER: Any description would reify it.

SCHOLAR: Nevertheless it lets itself be named, and being named it can be thought about…

TEACHER: …only if thinking is no longer re-presenting.

SCIENTIST: But then what else should it be?

TEACHER: Perhaps we now are close to being released into the nature of thinking…

SCHOLAR: …through waiting for its nature.

TEACHER: Waiting, all right; but never awaiting, for awaiting already links itself with re-presenting and what is re-presented.

SCHOLAR: Waiting, however, lets go of that; or rather I should say that waiting lets re-presenting entirely alone. It really has no object.

SCIENTIST: Yet if we wait we always wait for something.

SCHOLAR: Certainly, but as soon as we re-present to ourselves and fix upon that for which we wait, we really wait no longer.

TEACHER: In waiting we leave open what we are waiting for.

SCHOLAR: Why?

TEACHER: Because waiting releases itself into openness…

SCHOLAR: …into the expanse of distance…

TEACHER: …in whose nearness it finds the abiding in which it remains.

 

(Extract from Blanchot’s L’attente l’oubli (1963) in The Infinite Conversation) 

a dog cannot lie

…

if a lion could speak we would not be able to understand what he said…why do i say such a thing?

…

what’s going on behind my words when i say: this is a very pleasant pineapple?
take your time.

…

we imagine the meaning of what we say say as something queer, mysterious, hidden from view…but nothing is hidden! everything is open to view!

you can’t know this pain, only i can!

it makes no sense to speak of knowing something in a context where we could not possibly doubt therefore to say i know i am in pain is entirely senseless

are you saying there are no philosophical problems?

there are linguistic, mathematical, ethical, logistic and religious problems but there are no genuine philosophical problems

you are trivializing philosophy

philosophy is just a byproduct of misunderstanding language. why don’t you realize that?!

from Derek Jarman, Wittgenstein (1993)

In haste, before the morning hour dissolves, a segment from The Image of Proust by Walter Benjamin and Chris Marker’s magical photo film La Jetée.

‘When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting.’

CLOV: Why this face, day after day?
HAMM: Routine. One never knows. (Pause.) Last night I saw inside my breast. There was a big sore.
CLOV: Pah! You saw your heart.
HAMM: No, it was living. (Pause. Anguished.) Clov!
CLOVE: Yes.
HAMM: What’s happening?
CLOV: Something is taking its course.
Pause.
HAMM: Clove!
CLOVE: (impatiently). What is it?
HAMM: We’re not beginning to…to…mean something?
CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that’s a good one!
HAMM: I wonder. (Pause.) Imagine if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn’t he be liable to get ideas into his head if he observed us long enough. (Voice of rational being.) Ah, good, now I see what it is, yes, now I understand what they’re at! (Clov starts, drops the telescope and begins to scratch his belly with both hands. Normal voice.) And without going to far as that, we ourselves… (with emotion)… we ourselves…at certain moments…(Vehemently.) To think perhaps it won’t all have been for nothing!
CLOV: (anguished, scratching himself). I have a flea!
HAMM: A flea! Are there still fleas?
CLOV: On me there’s one. (Scratching.) Unless it’s a crablouse.
HAMM: (very perturbed). But humanity might start from there all over again! Catch him, for the love of God!
CLOVE: I’ll go and get the powder.
Exit Clov.
HAMM: A flea! This is awful! What a day!
Enter Clov with a sprinkling-tin.
CLOV: I’m back again, with the insecticide.
HAMM: Let him have it!
Clov loosens the top of his trousers, pulls it forward and shakes powder into the aperture. He stoops, looks, waits, starts, frenziedly shakes more powder, stoops, looks, waits.
CLOV: The bastard!
HAMM: Did you get him?
CLOV: Looks like it. (He drops the tin and adjusts his trousers.)
Unless his laying doggo.
HAMM: Laying! Lying you mean. Unless he’s lying doggo.
CLOV: Ah? One says lying? One doesn’t say laying?
HAMM: Use your head, can’t you. If he was laying we’d be bitched.
CLOV: Ah. (Pause.) What about that pee?
HAMM: I’m having it.
CLOV: Ah that’s the spirit, that’s the spirit!
Pause.