More The World Goes On; 11-24-2019

  [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written.Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 4/21/2025]

I am sitting in the prison's law library this Saturday morning, wanting to write up these notes on Laszlo Krasznahorkai's The World Goes On (New Directions Books, 2017; John Batki, translator). Maybe give a rest this morning from the interlibrary loan books - I started W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz last night (I am now wondering about that novel's influence on this book). I put off John Dewey until this evening.

... Duplicity I call it, but I could say it was total anarchy, because even as I was trying with all my might to say no to possessions, at the same time I also said yes to them. Let's take, for example, the street, where you see I had noticed a peculiar fact, namely that people went around, not with their eyes straight ahead in a normal manner, but sidling aberrantly, all of them, without exception, twisted, with sidelong glances at shop windows; that is, while I recognized and recused myself from the fact that I was living among blatantly unable to resist hypnotic attraction of acquiring possessions, at the same time I found myself from time to time unable to resist casting the occasional glance at these shop windows. And at times, fighting off nausea, I even entered some store or another to purchase, say, a new hat to cover my head. I can only characterize my situation as the most abysmal anarchy, riven at I was by possessive pronounces and nausea, actual possessions and actual disgust, the mendacious, or at the very least unclean, foundations of my life, while I hadn't the slightest notion of what was tearing me apart, what was confounding me so thoroughly when I had to apply the first person singular to the world.

"Universal Theseus", pp. 80 - 81

Yes! Putting the world into sentences. Freud and Nietzsche both wrote something about possessions. The Freud is back in my room - my cell - and have to add whatever I can find in Freud to the end of this note. The Nietzsche was returned to its owner earlier this week. Do you not recognize your own behavior in the passage quoted? I can, in a clumsy, incoherent way. Records - I can think of a story which will owe much to TJ and Daniel Stern in Diner.

And how Laszlo conjures out of words a sense of the feeling that nothing makes sense in this world:

... it is plainly ineradically embedded within us to feel that everywhere at all times facts exist in all in their ungrapability and uncapturability, what's more, trillions and trillions of facts exist released in the stillness of time, because amidst the ceaseless lightning bolts of doubt, the feeling is indeed indestructible... that therefore ther emust be direct experience, or more precisely: that is all there is occasion for - to stand ther in springtime, whre there is spring, and observe buds and everything greening, to stand and stand there when springtime is come, to stnad and observe this, almost the most clamitous immediacy, abandoned to our own devices, nursing a dismal suspicion that someday after all we ought to see how it is possible that simultaneouslywith all these existences, all these trillions upon trillions of facts, nothing whatsoever exists at all.

"One Hundred People All Told", pp. 91 - 92

I have not had the words or the fearlessness of syntax to write like this, but most of my life has been a fight against meaningless. Love, work, sex, friendships were not quite successful defenses. Religion and philosophy have been more successful - when applied - and religion only here after my arrival here at my prison. Writing has been the best solution for me - it incorporates everything else. Would I were younger and had more time to write like Laszlo K.

Oh, yeah, "One Hundred People All Told" I read as a Buddhist tale.

... and we have forgotten what the world's most origianl philosopher had thought through and proclaimed 450 and 380, or between 563 and 403, B.C., in the environs of the Isipathana Deer Park and Kushinagar, it took only a hundred people, so that we of tghe early twnty-first century no longer have the foggiest notion that the fact simultaneously creates and destroys itself. that words and ideas cannot say anything about the world...

pp. 89 - 90

 "Not on the Heraclitean Path" I really want to quote at length - it's two paragraphs and two sentences. This is the opening paragraph:

Memory is the art of forgetting.

p. 95

I never thought of this. Me, who was always vain about his recall and who now forgets and recalls with randomness - or what I hope is randomness. 

The other paragraph and second sentence takes most of the remaining page, and I suspect copying all of it will bust space and time and copyright restraints. I will quote this because I also never saw memory in this way.

... revealing that there had never been a connection to connection, and this connection had never been desired, since regardless of the horror or beauty that the memory evokes, the rememberer always works starting from the essence of the image about to be evoked, an essence that has no reality, and not even starting from a mistake, for he fails to recall reality not by making a mistake, but because he handles what is complex in the loosest and most arbitrary manner, by infinitely simplifying the infinitely complex to arrive at some thing relative to which he has a certain distance....

p. 95

Is this fiction? Is it a philosophical sketch? Does a category matter other than excellent writing about the human condition? I'm skipping on the Freud quote.

sch 

 

[ László Krasznahorkai: where to start with his literature (New East Digital Archive)

László Krasznahorkai is probably the best-known contemporary Hungarian author. His work has received the International Booker Prize in 2015, the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019, and the America Award for a lifetime contribution to international writing in 2014, among many others. Known for his breathless, demanding prose, and his itinerant life, Krasznahorkai’s career spans over three decades and three continents.

Susan Sontag called him “the Hungarian master of apocalypse”, but this might not be how he would describe himself. “We are not prepared for reality,” he said in an interview, when he was asked about his fictional universe that often seems to be a tilted, broken version of the world we share. He insisted that much remains unseen or invisible, and what we call realism in literature is little more than a convention of confined, narrow optics and thematic restrictions. Reality, for him, is more overpowering and inescapable, resistant to sober attempts that would hope to exclude the destitute as dystopian, or the driven as crazy. He insists that his characters are real, and vehemently denies that this would be meant in a figurative way. 

sch 4/21]