The Fierceness, the Sadness

They lived in squares and loved in triangles.
(The Bloomsbury set).

India beat England today. What could be worse? England beating India!

Swami: A mouse's eyes are so sad. Of course, one cannot see this when they are alive -because he is always running around and is never still enough for you to get a good look. But when he dies, then look. There is an indescribable sadness there, deep shadow where there should be light.

And why is that?

Who is to say? Perhaps it is because even as he plays, even as he dances in a frenzy, forgetting himself, still he remembers that one day he too must die.

Cluniac Style:

"Swirling drapery, twisting line, as if the restless impulses of the wandering craftsmen, the goldsmiths of the Viking conquerors, still had to be expressed in stone. Bright primary colours. A Tibetan fierceness".

The Mullion at Souillac: " It is an epitome of forest fears, a kind of totem-pole of western man at the end of his wanderings"

----K. Clark, Civilisation..


"That by the 11th and 12th centuries there had emerged in western Europe within Europe a Church art a new sphere of artistic creation without religious content and imbued with values of spontaneity, individual fantasy, delight in colour and movement, and the expression of feeling that anticipate modern art."

---Schapiro.

Geoffrey Hill: wilderness revives, fierceness of the heart.

Pent up into a region of pure force
Made subject to the pressure of the stars
I saw the angels lifted like pale straws;
I could not stand before those winnowing eyes

And fell, until I found the world again
Now I lack grace to tell what I have seen;
For though the head frames words the tongue has none
And who will prove the surgeon to this stone?'

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For so it is proper to find value
In a bleak skill, as in the thing restored:
The long-lost words of choice and valediction'

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We are nihilist thoughts in the brain of God.

---Kafka.


The equivocal, oblique way of God: a detour:'Writing is the moment of the desert as the moment of separation..God no longer speaks to us...we must take words upon ourselves. We must be separated from life and communities, and must entrust ourselves to traces, must become men of vision because we have ceased hearing the voice from within the immediate proximity of the Garden..Writing is displaced on the broken line between lost and promised speech. The difference between writing and speech is sin. The Garden is speech, the Desert is writing..Speech is presence, writing is making present the absent...

A white sheet of paper is full of ways.

Sacrifice of existence by the word and consecration of it by the word...In God's name.

'The caesura, the discontinuity, does not simply furnish and fix meaning..the letter is also solitude, distance, separateness, respect, the letter of the law.'Is the choice that of a natural and an institutionalised solitude, desert or city, tree or the ship's mast?

Like the sailor who grafts a name
On that of the mast
Is the sign you are alone

'Every exit from the book is made within the book. Indeed, the end of writing keeps itself beyond writing..the world is in the book.'

---Notes from Writing and Difference, Derrida.

There's no remaking reality.
---P. Roth.