kagablog

The Gypsies rightly contend that one is never obliged to speak the truth except in one’s own language; in the enemy’s language the lie must reign.

panegyric 1

Our personalities should be inscrutable, even to ourselves. That’s why we should always dream, making sure that we’re included in our dreams so that we won’t be able to have opinions about ourselves.

And we should especially protect our personality against being invaded by others. All outside interest in us is a flagrant disrespect. What saves the banal greeting ‘How are you?’ from being an inexcusable vulgarity is the fact that it’s usually completely empty and insincere.

fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet

462

I’ve never seen suicide as a solution, because my hatred of life is due to my love of life. It took me a long time to be convinced of this unfortunate mistake in how I live with myself. Convinced of it, I felt frustrated, which is what I always feel when I convince myself of something, since for me each new conviction means another lost illusion.

I killed my will by analysing it. If only I could return to my childhood before analysis, even if it would have to be before I had a will!

…

Far-away palaces, pensive parks, narrow paths in the distance, the dead charm of stone benches where no one sits anymore - perished splendours, vanished charm, lost glitter, O my forgotten yearning, if I could only recover the grief with which I dreamed you!

456

…

It often happens that I don’t know myself, which is typical in those who know themselves. I look at myself in the various disguises that make me alive. Of all that changes, I possess whatever remains the same; of all that is accomplished, whatever amounts to nothing.

…

I’ve become so entirely the fiction of myself that any natural feeling I may have is immediately transformed as soon as it’s born, into an imaginary feeling. Memories turn into dreams, dreams into my forgetting what I dreamed, and knowing myself into not thinking of myself.

I’ve so stripped myself of my own being that existence consists of dressing up. I’m only myself when disguised. And all around me expiring, unknown sunsets gild the landscapes I’ll never see.

427

My dreams: In my dreams I create friends, with whom I then keep company. They’re imperfect in a different way.

Remain pure, not in order to be noble or strong but to be yourself. To give your love is to lose love.

Abdicate from life so as not to abdicate from yourself.

Women are a good source of dreams. Don’t ever touch them.

Learn to dissociate the ideas of voluptuousness and pleasure. Learn to delight in everything, not for what it is, but for the ideas and dreams it kindles. (Because nothing is what it is, but dreams are always dreams.) To accomplish this you mustn’t touch anything. As soon as you touch it, your dream will die; the touched object will occupy your capacity for feeling.

Seeing and hearing are the only noble things in life. The other senses are plebeian and carnal. The only aristocracy is never to touch. Avoid getting close - that’s true nobility.

“The part of me that exulted in performing seemed to make the part that was a poet shrivel up in disgust and become very difficult to find again. I saw it as a tiny sprouting shrub hidden somewhere at the centre, extremely critical of the other parts of me it had for companions. None of these must be allowed to develop too far or they might stifle it altogether. One had to be constantly on the watch, I wasn’t quite sure what against. Self-indulgence was an enemy, so were over-precision and dry mathematical exactness I thought. These stopped the mind floating when it might have floated somewhere unguessed at. I even tried not to learn the name of streets or useful buses, tried to keep everything in what I hoped was a fertile haze - reduced my brain to a sort of scrambled egg.

PJ Kavanaugh, The Perfect Stranger

401-402

…

If I were a musician, I would compose my own funeral march, and with such good reason!

…

I’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.

330

Since perhaps not everything is false, may nothing cure us, my love, of the almost ecstatic pleasure of lying.

Ultimate subtlety! Supreme perversion! The absurd lie has all the charm of the perverse with the even greater, ultimate charm of being innocent. The deliberately inncoent perversion - who can go beyond this supreme subtlety? The perversion that doesn’t even aspire to give us pleasure and that lacks the fury to cause us pain, falling to the ground between pleasure and pain, useless and absurd like a shoddy toy with which an adult tries to amuse himself!

Don’t you know, Exquisite One, the pleasure of buying things you don’t need? Don’t you know the delight of roads which, when we’re distracted, we take by mistake? What human act has a colour as lovely as a spurious one …. which lies to its own nature and contradicts its own intention?

How sublime to waste a life that could have been useful, never to execute a work of art that was certain to be beautiful, to abandon midway a sure road to victory!

Ah, my love, the glory of works which have been lost for ever, of treatises which today are mere titles, of libraries which burned down, of statures which were demolished!

How blessed with Absurdity are the artists who set fire to a beautiful work! Or the artists who could have made a beautiful work but deliberately made it ordinary! Or the great poets of Silence who, knowing they were capable of writing an absolutely perfect work, preferred to crown it with the decision never to write it. (For an imperfect work, it makes no difference.)

How much more beautiful the Mona Lisa would be if we couldn’t see it! And if someone were to rob it just to burn it, what an artist he would be, even greater than the one who painted it!

Why is art beautiful? Because it’s useless. Why is life ugly? Because it’s all aims, objectives, intentions. All of its roads are for going from one point to another. If only we could have a road connecting a place no one ever leaves from to a place where no one goes! If only someone would devote his life to building a road from the middle of one field to the middle of another - a road that would be useful if extended at each end, but that would sublimely remain as only the middle stretch of a road!

The beauty of ruins? That they’re no longer good for anything.

The sweetness of the past? Our memory of it, since to remember it is to make it present, and it isn’t present nor can ever be - absurdity my love, absurdity.

And I who am saying all this - why am I writing this book? Because I realize it’s imperfect. Dreamed it would be perfection; written, it becomes imperfect; that’s why I’m writing it. And above all else, because I advocate uselessness, absurdity, I write this book to lie to myself, to be unfaithful to my own theory.

And the supreme glory of all this, my love, is to think that perhaps none of it is true and that I don’t even believe it’s true.

And when lying begins to bring us pleasure, let’s give it the lie by telling the truth. And when lying causes us anxiety, let’s stop so that the suffering can’t become even perversely pleasurable.

fernando pessoa
the book of disquiet

328

Join your hands, and put them in mine, and listen, my love.

I want to tell you, with the soft and soothing voice of a confessor giving counsel, how much our yearning to attain falls short of what we do attain.

With my voice and your attention, I want us to pray together the litany of despair.

There is no artist’s work that could not have been more perfect. When read line by line, the greatest of poems has few verses that couldn’t be improved, few scenes that couldn’t have been told more vividly, and the overall result is never so good that it couldn’t have been vastly better.

Woe to the artist who notices this, who one day happens to think about it! Never again will he work with joy or sleep in peace. He’ll be a young man without youth, and grow old dissatisfied.

And why should anyone express himself? What little he may say would be better left unsaid.

If I could really convince myself that renunciation is beautiful, how doelfully happy I would always be!

For you do not love the things I say with the same ears I use to hear myself say them. Even my ears, should I speak out loud, do not hear the words I speak in the same way as my inner ear hears the words I think. If even I, when I hear myself, get confused and am not always sure what I mean, then how much more other people are bound to misunderstand me!

What elaborate misconceptions form other people’s understanding of us!

The joy of being understood by others cannot be had by those who want to be understood, for they are too complex to be understood; and simple people, who can be understood by others, never have the desire to be understood.

if one bothers to do that at all - it consumes one
and then one day you wake up and you have become one of the yobs that you always thought you were merely humouring

kaganof

philosopher mark charnas, kloof street, cape town, 5 june 2009

once potential is realized it becomes reduced, manifested into a single thing. this diminishment of itself is in fact the opposite of potential.

it is only when potential is not actualised that it has any potential.

To have opinions is to sell out to yourself.

To have no opinion is to exist.

To have every opinion is to be a poet.

woodstock philosopher mark charnas, cape town, 13 may 2009

1. there is no law
2. neither is there no law
3. therefore the law that is is not

a. there is no law
b. but this is not a law
c. therefore no law is not (a law)

the atheist howls:
“that something
that i lack
does not
exist”

it is precisely
through all
this new
mediatisation
and the democratisation
of the previously elite
(mass) media that
stupidity has
become a
virtue

if you knew how much you knew
you would know a lot more
than you know, but if you
knew how much you
didn’t know you
would know
almost
everything
there is to know.
you would be a know-it-al(most)-all

what has is becoming become?
let me suggest that the being
that was becoming is now
undone. is becoming’s
unspeakable project
to never end can
only succeed by
not being said.
that goes
without
saying.
which
is
exactly
the point.
thus is becoming
becomes. (again)

see here

-from Wikipedia -

Nihilism (from the Latin nihil, nothing) is a philosophical position that argues that existence is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. Nihilists generally assert that objective morality does not exist, and that no action is logically preferable to any other in regard to the moral value of one action over another. Nihilists that argue that there is no objective morality may claim that existence has no intrinsic higher meaning or goal. They may also claim that there is no reasonable proof or argument for the existence of a higher ruler or creator, or posit that even if higher rulers or creators exist, humanity has no moral obligation to worship them.

The term nihilism is sometimes used synonymously with anomie to denote a general mood of despair at the pointlessness of existence.[1] Movements such as Dada, Futurism,[2] and deconstructionism,[3] among others, have been identified by commentators as “nihilistic” at various times in various contexts. Often this means or is meant to imply that the beliefs of the accuser are more substantial or truthful, whereas the beliefs of the accused are nihilistic, and thereby comparatively amount to nothing (or are simply claimed to be destructively amoralistic).

Nihilism is also a characteristic that has been ascribed to time periods: for example, Jean Baudrillard and others have called postmodernity a nihilistic epoch,[4] and some Christian theologians and figures of religious authority have asserted that postmodernity[5] and many aspects of modernity[3] represent the rejection of God, and therefore are nihilistic.

Question:

Does Nihilism has its intrinsic value or quality? If it does, it is not Nihilism at all.
Here lies the self-reflexive contradiction of post-modernism.

here’s something odd:
admitting to one’s
self and the world
that one is gifted
and special only
earns derision
and a million
subtle (and
not-so-subtle)
attempts to pull
one down. when one
admits to being a useless
drunk suddenly everyone wants to help.

Last night it struck me
That the only poems
That Matter
Are the
ones
the
poet
never
wrote down
It was a comforting
thought So I stopped writing
this one

When I used to read a lot
I thought I never read
enough. Now I hardly
read at all, I think I
read too much

sintactical liminalities
the spaces between
where you’ve never
been and where
you’re not
coming
from
but
brother
that ain’t
where it’s not
at. sitting in an
italian restaurant
in the city of jeonju
south korea, wondering
why i came here to give a
lecture about reality (a subject
i don’t know very much about)

all my stories are true
except for the ones that
really happened