Thursday, November 20, 2003

 
I promise that the island life has not melted my brains; I have been reading, and in French! And in English...

J.M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (New York: Penguin Books, 1976).

“Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange. It is only by alienating the desired that language masters it. Hendrik’s bride, her sly doe-eyes, her narrow hips, are beyond the grope of words until desire consents to mutate into the curiosity of the watcher. The frenzy of desire in the medium of words yields the mania of the catalogue.” (26)

“We are no more than whim, one whim after another. Why can we not accept that our lives are vacant; as vacant as the desert we live in; and spend them counting sheep or washing cups with blithe hearts? I do not see why the story of our lives should have to be interesting.” (59)

“Perhaps what I lack is the resolution to confront not the tedium of pots and pans and the same old pillow every night but a history so tedious in the telling that it might as well be a history of silence. What I lack is the courage to stop talking, to die back into the silence I came from. The history that I make, loading this heavy gun, is only a frantic spurious babble.” (59)

“There is consolation in having a psychology—for has there ever been a creature blessed with a psychology yet without an existence?—but there is cause for unease too. Whose creature, in a tale of unconscious motives, would I be? My freedom is at risk, I am being worked into a corner by forces beyond my control, there will soon be nothing for me but to sit in a corner weeping and jerking my muscles.” (63)

“…the story of life on the road, without psycology, without adventure, without shape or form, slog slog slog in my old button-shoes, which fall to tatters but are at once replaced by the new button-shoes which hang on a string around my neck / like two black breasts, with infrequent stops for locusts and rainwater and even less frequent stops for the calls of nature and yet other stops for slumber and dream-passages, without them we die, and the ribbon of my meditations, black on white, floating like a mist five feet above the ground, stretching back to the horizon—yes, to such a life I might give myself.” (63-64) But she knows that there are real cities that she will have to pass on the road…

“It is not speech that makes man man but the speech of others.” (126)
posted by Open Mouth 1:38 AM