“On Sundays Kafka goes for walks by himself, without any objective, without thinking. He says, ‘Every day I wish myself off the earth. There is nothing wrong with me except myself.’”
it’s delightfully easy to picture everything kafka is writing about in his travel diaries. images of rivers, streets, train stations, inns, cathedrals…it can become possible to put yourself there
it’s another quiet, lonely saturday. the world is going on without me. i’m inside, trying to stay warm while writing and playing satie. earlier, i thought to myself, after some realisations in during the week, i did not in any way move on after my ex shot herself. i accepted it, but i did not heal anything. i drowned the pain by flooding my self with heroin, with little concern as to whether i would die (i came so close, until i was found)
i fell in love after that and last year was a beautiful time, for once, but i am noticing patterns - patterns that have persisted for a long time. i’m wondering what the best way to fix things might be. i’ve decided that it’s time to turn over new stones and plant new seedlings and do things differently, to tell stories in different ways, to change the possibilities and endings.. but such a strong part of me is worried that if something bad happened again, i’d end up back at the start. i can’t tell if this is a weakness or it can be blamed on borderline personality. maybe it is just sensitivity
giving up is not something i want, but it is like there are forces blowing me around, causing me to get caught in the wrong currents. next time something bad happens, i don’t want death to seem like the only answer
faust and various books of rilke have once again been taken off my shelves to read through. i find few books to have much i can personally use in the way i need - one can’t always be reading pessoa or cioran
“pictures of the lost world presents a series of static, or gently swaying images which are sometimes bucolic landscapes but more often industrial ones (sludgy harbours, power lines, abandoned railway stations or deserted factories). the interplay between the two sets of imagery is not simple. wyborny photographs his modern ruins at their most ravishing – at dawn or sunset, partially reflected in the water or glimpsed through the trees. shots recur throughout, optically printed into brilliant colours or else, given the washed out quality of fifth generation xeroxes. as there are few people shown, one’s impression is of a planet that is populated mainly by cows, barges and hydraulic drills”
i want to form connections to people but it never seems to work. there is only the person i love and people who merely exist in books. i think it’s enough, so why do i still feel very lonely? my heart yearns for more but it’s all so elusive
‘Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.
Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.
The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.’
to accompany the most delicate rustling of the soul with an intentional tension;
to be lucid in all intimate dissolutions;
to oversee one’s musical fascination;
to be methodically sad;
to read the Bible with political interest, and the poets in order to verify one’
s
own power of resistance;
to use nostalgia for thoughts or acts; to kidnap them for the soul;
to create an exterior center for oneself; a country, a scenery; to tie one’s
thoughts to space; to maintain one’s hatred artificially, it doesn’t matter against whom
—a
nation, a city, a person, a memory; to love the force that comes after each dream: to be brutal with
everything that is pure or sublime;
to learn a tactics of the soul; to conquer the spiritual states; to not learn anything from people; only nature is in control of its own
doubts;
to annul one’s fear of motion, while running; every time we stand still,
things remain silent and nothingness calls us;
to make a system out of delusions.
