[b]Maurice Blanchot
My being subsists only from a supreme point of view which is precisely incompatible with my point of view. The perspective in which I fade away for my eyes restores me as a complete image for the unreal eye to which I deny all images. A complete image with reference to a world devoid of image which imagines me in the absence of any imaginable figure. The being of a nonbeing of which I am the infinitely small negation which it instigates as its profound harmony. In the night shall I become the universe?[/b]
Not all that different from my own being. Or, perhaps, it couldn’t be further away from it.
But this is the rule, and there is no way to free oneself of it: as soon as the thought has arisen, it must be followed to the very end.
Which we more or less make up as we go along.
Weak thoughts, weak desires: he felt their force.
And now we’re feeling them.
As reason returned to me, memory came with it, and I saw that even on the worst days, when I thought I was utterly and completely miserable, I was nevertheless, and nearly all the time, extremely happy.
That ever happen to you? No, I didn’t think do.
A word may give me its meaning, but first it suppresses it. For me to be able to say, ‘This woman’ I must somehow take her flesh and blood reality away from her, cause her to be absent, annihilate her. The word gives me the being, but it gives it to me deprived of being. The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being - the very fact that it does not exist.
Note to others: Is this what I’m saying too?
The central point of the work of art is the work as origin, the point which cannot be reached, yet the only one which is worth reaching.
Let’s start with the Mona Lisa.