“The cantaloupes were disappointing.” from The Great Fire of London, Jacques Roubaud.
(Seascapes, Gerhard Richter)
A moment of under-synchronic experience: my birthday week in London will be 6 days too late for any showing of After Patience: Sebald and later still for the Gerhard Richter exhibition at the Tate—and a talk on Gaspar Dughet’s Ideal Landscape at the Wallace Collection. Womp, womp, womp.
What I will be doing: going to the German Romantic prints and drawings exhibition at the British Museum.
Collecting. (Postcards, reproductions, books, business cards, receipts, photographs.)
Finally reading books (Melville, Ballard, Walser on my list- suggestions welcome!)
Drinking a shit ton of coffee.
(Also: Intensely wanting to live in London, despite the fact that I would not enjoy living there at all since I’d be broke all the time (more than usual).)
“The act of reading ruins and fractured objects needs some deliberately twisted linguistic devices that figuratively resemble the ruined space itself.” Vladislav Todorov, Red Square, Black Square (pg 3)
“The forest would be luxuriant, voluptuous, heavy, oh the forest. - - Simon was working once more at a large commercial firm”
from The Tanners, by Robert Walser.
"There is happiness— such as could arouse envy in us — only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could given themselves to us. In other words, the idea of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the idea of redemption. The same applies to the idea of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption. Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear, isn’t there an echo of now silent ones? Don’t the women we court have sisters they no longer recognize? If so, then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim."
Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’
You appear to me to be melancholia
Depicted by a good master painter,
[…]
Oh how dearly I should love to have news
Of someone who is in the other world,
[…]
text from Decameron, Boccacio
images from Melancholia, von Trier
Grand Larousses, by Guy Laramee
“Having recently overthrown the American Empire in the 23rd century, the Chinese Empire set out to chronicle the history of the Great Panics during the 21st and 22nd centuries.
This Herculean undertaking resulted in a historiographical masterwork entitled, The Great Wall. Comprising 100 volumes, this encyclopaedia derives its name from The Great Wall of America, a monumental project to build an impregnable wall around the United States of America so as to protect this land from barbarian invasions. 150 years in the making, this wall ultimately isolated Americans from the rest of the world while sapping the country’s remaining cultural and natural resources. It also undermined the American people’s confidence in systematized hedonism, thus hastening the fall of the American Empire. As we now know this paved the way for China to invade American territory.”
Still from Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.
Friedrich Nietzsche writes:
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of “world history”—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.
One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened.
(Source: beetleinabox)
