----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
On 22/04/20 2:06 pm, Maurice Benayoun wrote:
1/ Could we expect a constructive fight for values as a possible
outcome of the crisis?
On 23/04/20 7:56 am, Constanza Salazar wrote:
How do we mobilize ourselves to think about care and about making a
radical political act?
by joining the resistance.
2/ can the artists be considered as viruses of social consciousness/awareness?
I don't know.
I hope not; and, I fear so.
...
Not by refusing, and not by austerity, or out of purism, is it possible
by reducing to find something worth affirming?
I am inspired by these words of Enrique Vila-Matas for what they leave
said, or say and then leave, and for what they do not say, and for the
great/No/ of Aldo Busi they recall: (but that is not the quote I want to
add here, so here's the alternative (and I hope Enrique will forgive me
for quoting it at such length), one which starts with the injunction...):
..."we have to imagine ourselves at the most recent Barcelona Book Day,
a party that happens every April 23, where, as you may know, roses and
books are given as gifts, and the whole city participates in this
enormous event.
"On this 23, right after I arrived at my spot in the tent to sign books,
I got to watch as a frenzied crowd tried to knock over the barriers,
apparently just to touch the forehead of a former politician who is now
a media titan. It was a moment of total absurdity. And things had been
arranged so that it would be hard for anyone other than this celebrity
to sign books.
"I closed my eyes and imagined that this best-selling author was asking
me about the future of literature. I immediately remembered the
“conversations with the retired mathematicians.” These were gatherings
that Ricardo Piglia had helped with at Princeton, and he’d recently
discussed them in an interview. Piglia said that the mathematicians were
brilliant people, extraordinarily knowledgeable about Western
literature, expert readers of Joyce and his /Finnegans Wake/, experts in
Robert Musil, Michel Butor, Samuel Beckett, Witold Gombrowicz; they were
the kind to be fascinated by Hermann Broch, Arno Schmidt, Jorge Luis
Borges . . .
"For Piglia, there weren’t any other readers like them in the world:
“Roberto Calasso, George Steiner, and Harold Bloom are dilettantes next
to these tired men: one learned Japanese at the age of forty just to
read Yasunari Kawabata. They all knew that nothing was going to happen
to them, so they still had their whole lives ahead of them to dedicate
to reading. Robert Hollander, the great Dante scholar, gave a course on
/The Divine Comedy/ in which they read just one canto per semester:
there were six or seven people seated around the roundtable, mostly
mathematicians and theoretical physicists; they finished reading the
/Comedy/ after five or six years of classes, and then they began to read
it again. Thus will be the literature of the future, at least I hope.”
"When I came to and opened my eyes, I considered the contrast between
the tired men at Princeton and the collective delirium of that savage day.
"Then I said to myself: what’s good about this inaccessible spot in the
tent is that you don’t have to greet anyone, and nobody greets you, no
one bothers you. And then just a little bit later, almost holding my
breath, I thought: however, what’s bad about this remote spot in the
tent is that you don’t have to greet anyone, and nobody greets you, no
one bothers you.
"I was caught up in these thoughts when, to my surprise, I saw that
someone had overcome the sizable obstacles to arrive by my side,
extending his hand with a smile. I remained still with happiness when I
saw that I had myself a person, which, considering everything, was a
lot. Although, in another sense, wasn’t this moment cruel? We began to
talk as if we were two of the tired men of Princeton. We talked about
life, love, hate, death. It was as if we had returned back to those days
when life was simply life, when you would chat and there weren’t emails
or iPhones, when everybody was freer, each alone with their own
metaphysics, and it was still possible for two people, in the middle of
general pandemonium, to talk about the world. I want to think, I tell
myself, that this is the literature of the future."
/- from
https://tinhouse.com/the-literature-of-no-an-interview-with-enrique-vila-matas//
Best,
Simon
http://squarewhiteworld.com
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