Liza
Do you feel it, too?
From the inside
In fragments
Voce
Andante con moto
Recovering the pain
Teaching
Performances
Texts
Contact
In fragments
Written via di levare, by removing matter
Sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed
Choking
To gain weight in all frankness,
it needs be, it cannot fail to be
Deliver
Chest to chest
Over and against spiritual bereavement
How to live together
Does loyalty dialectically need betrayal?
Holding forth
The surplus within
In the silence you don't know
Refusing to forfeit faith
What is there to do except to go into stillness and wait
As yet unconsoled
On firmer ground, more lastingly than before
A drama punctuated with precious decisions
Portugal. The sea.
The unbrokenness of motivation to reach something
Some powerful emotional factor at work
I give myself over to the darkness
Answering a fundamental need for energy
The misrecognition threatening love
Allow yourself to be haunted
People unfold
Words that aren’t worth a damn
Writing, from out of you
Где страданий нет, жизни нет
An existentially overwhelming voice
. . .there is no pressure, except that of one's own integrity. Steiner
Love comes softly
The painful crossover from being in love to being with love, to loving
Purify your intention for something new in the physical world
Affliction discloses
Walking at sea, the struggle and effervescence of waves
You have to go through weight to get to lightness
Poetry has real and immediate consequences in prose
Your feelings are not immortal enough
The caution of human gesture
Rilke. And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry of a darkened sobbing
Hеужели это к настоящему только прелюдия?
What breaks up, or holds, under the weight of years
Pain is not idle inside
I taste life in the feeling that separates me from it
Всё зависит от голоса
Out of the vena amoris
. . .as though tangency admitted degrees
In vita reali, what is known right away
Becoming aware of a scream
Disenibriation
Approaching the unconditional
The last breath,
the lasting breath,
duende of the breath
We are, most of us, removed from the intimacy of our own breath, removed from the perilous urgency of touch
Rigorism of living, the toll is largely invisible
Any moment that I am not in it
And this struggle gets deeper, and quieter, and more painful
A deep religious need
Living every hour in relation to eternity
Slow opening of the dark
touching life, without interference
Desire, and search, and patience, and the length of time
Finding the thing
Intensity so subtle as to go unnoticed inside us and by most of us
This bare physical encounter with life
As if ardor alone could imprison a thing without substance, and cause it to endure
Done in by my own words
To fall deeply in love,
a special patience
It is a question of breath
Effort (inner)
Everything matters terribly
Mandelstam…шепот на губах
Being ended slowly inside (lethal pianissimo)
Betraying the ember within
To be touched as someone vital
The closer we get to one another, the more in dark we are from one another,
going blind in the approach
Holdovers of magic, mysterious quivering within
As deeply religious as I ever became
The deepest fulfillment through the deepest grounding
Pre-, over-occupied,
bothered by the "why"
Slowly forging a hesitant connection
Breathing, self-touching
I tire myself looking
My eyes are looking so hard they're bleeding
Life is twisted up in tangles inside of me
Hourly aching
weight of the subtlest movement
Truth labouring in the voice
Inward advance,
pain thoroughgoing
Carrying the longing for love heavy in the body
Holding life in, as much of it
Undaunted, until it stands revealed
Slow, never clarified gestures
Hurting outside myself
It’s not “I miss you,” it’s “you are missing from me”
The burden of carrying the real
It sustains its enigmatic hold
. . .quietly arresting
The task of writing something equal to the experience
“One always fails in speaking of what one loves”
The actual meeting
That only parts of us are touching parts of others
Discovering in the dark
Elevation through trembling
Lengthwise, longing
I feel what you mean to me
Until my fingers ache with reaching
(that reaching essentially contains aching)
Struggling along the whole length of the wall
Жизнь - это вдруг
Where are you?
Why aren’t you here right now?
What a tragedy to remain in the “prelude”
Prodigious emotional effort
Pursuing this to its extreme point
Inconvenience yourself for me
Create an opening in time
Is the depth of the struggle equivalent to the immensity of the reward?
What dares linger
(Difficulty of) resting in yourself
I am. . .the duration of this feeling
Is it true that only diminuendo and refined minor may touch the heart?
[Gide] and since it always requires love in order to understand. . .
Waiting,
on the condition that expectation has a meaning,
basically, reaching out
for meaning
Giving
myself over
Opening the whole arm
In passionate attention
A lifelong effort bent over this instant
Trying to gain you,
My effort,
Unreturning
I thought the way to avoid despair is to be a need, not an end
To live in the 'domain of having' is poverty
It calls to be given, ‘it gives’
Is there pain deeper
Than when what is given has to be withdrawn?
I am at the beginning of years of unsuturing myself from you
Death-longing
riddling the body
carried up against myself
in dry starvation
"In which corner of the adverse body must I read my truth?" [Barthes]
Rare
that it encloses you deaf
giving fever to the quiet pulse
a magic indifferent to duration,
yet even rarer
that it chooses you, when you it
*
Is weight a given?
An aspiration downward, into the living heart of pain
Deep, internal pain
Subtle. . .pain
Feeling it, all the way through
You live it through
on the terms that it lives
through you
*
The point at which the real makes it into reality (the fermata)
*
Caught up in things last. . .
deep inside, refusing to part
endlessly, I sustain
the true survival we bear in us
. . .at stake is the difficulty of a feeling which "I am, physically, not free to forget," as every moment of love that's ever existed in me still does
Pain
When pain holds a body, when pain takes hold, there is an almost musical result. Staccato, percussive stillness. A trembling that never leaves still, but stills. Experience competes for space (in the chest, the lungs) with the living urgency of presto. It needs the geometry of the body, the physics of the speaker in a snare of the “no space to move.”
Rigor
To be deprived of the commodities of reconciliation is to be on the way to rigor. What is painful within us insists in order to save its life. It forces us to go "through." Rigor is in the pain of sobering up, of living closer to the bone. Rigere bears out a command that reiterates its own conflicted motivation: rigor mortis and rigor vitae. Rigor is in the thing within, intimating life in a way that there is no non-fraudulent “apart from” pain; there is only a for.
Longing
To engage with living, in existential honesty, is to admit its physical complication. There is a Russian word for it, тоска, a quiet burning in the depth of being. To be severely alive is to feel life's gentle insistence; soft, yet yearning, like a touch that in the right person echoes tenfold. It is to enter into a struggle for the most honest expression of this longing: the less of it you manage to say, the more of it you feel. The less you move, the more deeply are you taken in. In the lullaby of a body floating with difficulty, life calls that you proceed afflitto e penoso, in a heavy ponderous manner, with importance and with weight.
Life is a sincerity
There, at the border between form and feeling, there is no single decisive moment. Repetitious, short-lasting returns of a “slow, tentative movement” enter into a death struggle with the “becoming well, again” release. This is мучение, "torment," where in being "torn apart, within," "Life," says Levinas, "is [finally] a sincerity."[1]
Sincerity is aware of performance. Sincerity is personal, it is a personal struggle with the confinement of the form. In sincerity, the body negotiates the partial hangings-back, the hold in pause of a "still living time." This is what Freud would have called analysis terminable and interminable, but physically—a somatic anamnesis.[2] What, then, does it mean for there to be a sincere occasion (showing) in the form? Does the register of the "felt" have an enclitic relationship to the register of the "seen"? How do we know that a person is having an experience if the frankest expression of the innermost, the meaning of a real performance contains an exposure nobody will see?
[1] C.f., Levinas, Existence and Existents.
[2] teiku, negative tikkun
Struggle
(amal, amlah, amaleinu)
A development in the body against the development of the body, as such, produces struggle:
But sometimes the sorrow conceals itself even better, and the exterior allows us to suspect nothing, not the slightest. It can elude our attention for a long time, but when by chance a look, a word, a sigh, a tone in the voice, a hint in the eye, a trembling of the lips, or a blunder in the handshake treacherously betrays what has been carefully concealed—then passion is aroused, then the struggle begins. Kierkegaard
There, where the depth with which you've lived is revealed by the "mere enunciation," the proof-text of your body, we grasp the relationship of the person with existence. It is between re-covering (concealment) and uncovering (revelation) that intimacy is borne; intimacy requires privacy. What struggles to be expressed is actually an emotional intimation. It is proof that one has been in contact with life.
Where there is a body, there is a struggle, an incomplete kenosis borne of the frustration of being interfered with at this essential level. Struggle is asking, hourly, do I want continuation with the feeling?
Struggle relates to this agitated contact, allegro agitato: "All this agitation," says Kafka, "should be controlled." To bear the unbearable, you must bear it out, you must carry it forward. "I have it," that is, "I am not it"—"a distinct operation by which an existent takes over its existence." But how do you reverse a hold on the most intimate, Deus interior intimo meo, superior summo meo? Do you even know where you are being held?
Love
Is there love on the way to the love? Liebesbedingung, the condition for love. To love is to wish to be loved. To love is to give more than yourself. To love is to give what you do not have. "Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real."[1]
[1] C.f., Iris Murdoch. “L’amur is what appears in bizarre signs on the body…. It is from there that there comes the encore, the en-corps [from within the body].” [sem. XX]