Walter Benjamin once said that a child’s first experience of the world is not his realization that “adults are stronger but rather that he cannot make magic.”
If only art could accomplish the magic act of its own disappearance! But it continues to make believe it is disappearing when it is already gone.
(Jean Baudrillard uncited from Gablik 34)
To be is to be something, to be something is to be expressed, and to be expressed is to be exchanged, one thing for another, with the one intelligible and illuminating medium of exchange, the voice. Heaven and earth may never have been created. That may be left as it was. But this remains. Whether or not they were once evoked by speech in the beginning, in the end and always they are evoked by nothing else.
There’s an age-old feud, as you know, between being and seeming. Being seems to me something more certain. Seeming more suitable to disappearing. And I feel apt to disappear.
…the secret name is not so much the cipher of the thing’s subservience to the magus’s speech as, rather, the monogram that sanctions its liberation from language.
The secret name is the gesture that restores the creature to the unexpressed. In the final instance, magic is not a knowledge of names but a gesture, a breaking free from the name.
Children take a particular pleasure in hiding, not because they will be found in the end, but by the very act of hiding, of being concealed in a laundry basket or a cabinet, of curling up in the corner of an attic to the point of almost disappearing.
People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image. No doubt they sense this mystery, but they wish to get rid of it. They are afraid. They want something secure to hang on to so they can save themselves from the void. By asking ‘what does this mean?’ they express a wish that everything be understandable. But if one does not reject the mystery, one has quite a different response. One asks other things.
(René Magritte in Gablik 11)
The death of interpretation is the belief that there are signs of something, that is to say, some hidden essence waiting for us at the end of our interpretive journeys; the life of interpretation, on the contrary, is to believe that there are only interpretations.
(Foucault)
Both [Maldoror and the Poésies] are permeated by the awareness that the written word functions not as a neutral transmitter of pre-existing ideas, facts, perceptions or feelings but as an agent of ambiguity and uncertainty.
(Mathews 235: on Lautréamont)
…the rôle of life is to insert some indetermination into matter.
When I attribute inspirational value to works of literature, I mean that these works make people think there is more to this life than they ever imagined.
…happiness coincides entirely with our knowing ourselves to be capable of magic, with the gesture we use to banish that childhood sadness once and for all.
O let my silence be your song!
What should the poor person whisper to you
Who is separated from life’s gardens?
Let you be nameless in me—Who are dreamlessly built up in me,
Like a bell without tone,
Like my pain’s sweet bride
And the drunken poppy of my sleepings.
“And this has been standing here for centuries. The premier work of man perhaps in the whole Western world, and it’s without a signature: Chartres. A celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man. All that’s left, most artists seem to feel these days, is man. Naked, poor, forked radish. There aren’t any celebrations. Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know, it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand, choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust, to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish.
Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash. The triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life. We’re going to die. ‘Be of good heart,’ cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced — but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.”
{ } VK Arkiv 