on a flying visit home from the peruvian rainforest

In New York I went to the entryway, only two blocks from my apartment. where John Lennon was shot. In Central Park a crowd had gathered spontaneously for a silent vigil that kept growing and growing. The degree to which people were feeling genuine shock and dismay made an impression on me, even if the demonstration was plagued by all the inanities that also form part of his era: joints were passed around, posters of gurus were held up in the crowd, and vague demands for peace were voiced - for what peace, where? A young woman wearing a paleo-hippie outfit held up a banner reading, "All he said is give peace a chance."

Werner Herzog, December 1980, from Conquest of the Useless

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quotation from a plastic bag from libreria del teatro el galpon, av 18 de julio 1618-20

Uno no se llega a ser quien es por lo que escribo sino por lo que lee.

Jorge Luis Borges

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what he said in caracas

What then is writing of quality? Well, what it has always been: knowing to stick one’s head into the dark, knowing to jump into the void, knowing that literature is basically a dangerous occupation. To run along the edge of the precipice: on one side the bottomless abyss and on the other the faces one loves, the smiling faces one loves, and books, and friends, and food. And to accept that fact, though sometimes it may weigh on us more than the flagstone that covers the remains of every dead writer. Literature, as an Andalusian folk song might say, is dangerous.

bolano

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2 quotations courtesy of enrique vila-matas

To those who ask me the reason for my travels, I tend to respond: I am well aware of what I am fleeing from, but not what I am searching for. In any case it's better to exchange a bad state for an uncertain one.

Montaigne

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The soul while travelling is constantly being exercised as it observes new and unknown things; and I know of no better school for the formation of life than consistently bringing before it the diversity of so many other lives.

Montaigne

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on finishing the guermantes way, the 3rd volume of A La Recherche

Confieso, The Guermantes Way didn’t affect me in the same way as the first two volumes, the Greek and the Australian. This volume, the Uruguayan, never quite connected with the Proust who captured passion so clinically in the earlier books. The hundred page long descriptions of a snobbish dinner party or a Paris salon felt sobre-extended, testing the mettle of the ordinary reader whose taste for this world is fragile at best. All those surgical powers of description put to the purpose of describing a world whose vacuity the narrator is constantly noting. It seems a waste of the great man’s talents, a frivolity in the wake of his established genius. And yet, the reader hangs in there, battling his way through, moments and details ever ready to leap out and rupture the banality of the Guermantes’ world. M de Charlus lurks, promising to reappear, and Swann grants a cameo, as does Albertine, all bestowing the gravitas which we know is there somewhere, waiting to re-emerge. I don’t know where I’ll read the next volume, Sodom and Gomorrah. I suppose there’s no guarantee that it shall even happen. However, after three years and three volumes, in three countries, I shall live with the knowledge that should one be lucky enough to avoid the porcine flu or the depths of despair or the black box or the sharks in the pool, there’s another three volumes of Marcel’s epic, waiting to beguile or frustrate.

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inside out

What people see on the outside has so little to do with what takes place on the inside that sometimes it feels incredible there should have been any connection between the two at all.

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on friendship

It might be said of a writer that it is not his or her job to like his or her friends.

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But then there are as many ways of ‘not liking’ your friends as there are of skinning a cat; which is also to say that there are as many ways of ‘not liking’ your friends as there are ways of liking them.

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dream diary xmas 08, ipswich

The events of the dream(s), the details, are of less importance than the fact of the dream. However, for the benefit of context I shall attempt to describe them.

I met up with H in South Africa. We spent a lot of time in a car. The clutch was slipping. Sometimes H drove but most of the time I did. We were in some kind of valley. At one point I had to clamber up a slippery muddy slope; at another we were trapped in a lift in an old building into which a black cat had crawled. At another we became separated, and I walked through a village where a girl approached me, begging me to sleep with her and pay her, her whole family in tow. I gave the girl 20 pounds, which was all the money I had in my wallet, and an old 70 real note which no-one recognised as currency.

[My nephew is playing a Boo game with me]


Later H and I rediscovered each other and kept driving. There is much that I’ve left out. But the real thing that has struck me about the dream is the way it both reminded and revealed to me a sense of intimacy with H. Intimacy which has nothing to do with sex (although the consummation may be found there), but the knowledge of one for the other, and the other for one, of spending time in each other’s pockets. An intimacy which engenders a way of speaking, knowing, sharing. Its been so long now since H and I knew one another, both as lovers and as friends, that I have all but forgotten it. I would almost have been ready to accept her commandment that we no longer know one another, and that to claim otherwise would be to claim a false knowledge. The dream restored the intimacy, which can, I suspect, never be quite annihilated. The intelligence, humour and love which accompanies it. I can’t remember the last time I dreamt about H. Maybe I’m only just ready for it.

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salisbury

Modern theatres have the architectural feel of airports: points of departure (in theory).

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Looking at photos of past productions reveals a flock of actors and writers whose day came, went, and is now little more than a scarcely glanced-at photo.

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Exceptions for my generation are: Rossiter, David Hemmings, Ronald Harwood, as an actor. All now dead.

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Theatres in other countries with photos of actors whose moment of glory has gone.

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My own friend himself captivating of a night, emphasising the value of the ephemeral in the face of eternity.

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angels walk backwards

Do you not believe that you can know everything there is to know about someone from what is depicted on their face the very first time you meet them? And everything that comes thereafter is merely an unfolding of that moment?

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images which will will never grow older (only fade away)

What tends to be forgotten in the act of creating cinema is that above and beyond all its other functions it is primarily an act of immortalization. 

(For a while at least; firstly as long as our generational minds can conceive immortality; secondly for as long as human minds shall conceive immortality. Lastly for as long as the true immortals shall conceive immortality. Thereafter immortality itself enters something of a conceptual void.)

through a glass darkly

Sometimes it's possible to recapture everything you need to know about a dream, in terms of how it made you feel, without being able to remember even so much as a single detail of what occurred within it.

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head over heels

When you fall in love with someone, try to make sure you also fall in love with some part of the person they think they are, in addition to the person you think they are (which you cannot help but do).

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winchester

It's a beautiful day and the sun brings warmth to the eleventh floor. The door is open and the Westway traffic resonates with an urban twang. Although it's still January, the day has a first hint of Spring to it. 

Whenever Spring peeks through the clouds, I find myself thinking of Winchester. Although I was never enamored of it, for reasons which are lengthy and fundamentally English, I find myself missing it. Winchester, the Winchester which I knew, was not the countryside, it was some corner of an old English provincial town, a kind of hinterland. My parents' house, at times my own, was on the edge of town. During the Winter, whole months would go by with low cloud, drizzle and damp. But, as the season turned, signalled by the appearance of daffodils on the banks of the Itchen, the mind would fast forward. To days when the walk up the hill would be balmy, to be undertaken towards dusk, the grass longer and docile under the final rays of the day. Or an evening in the garden of the Queen, pulling a jacket or sweater against the onset of chill as the Summer night faded. Or just the smell of the meadows as you ambled the seemingly over-familiar path down to St Cross, verdant, reassuring, nature's nurture pulling its underhand tricks.

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