* (restored)
s—-

‘Alex “Hurricane” Higgins was snooker’s anti-hero, seeking neither acceptance nor respectability. A fast, flamboyant shotmaker in his prime, whose acute non-verbal intelligence instantly read the implications of any configuration of the balls, he constantly undermined his extraordinary talent with self-destructive excess. Higgins died on July 24th, aged 61, after a long battle with throat cancer.

‘His 16-15 semi-final win over Jimmy White in the 1972 World Snooker Championships provided the most often reprised item from the BBC’s snooker footage. Trailing 0-59 in the penultimate frame, Higgins produced, like a gunfighter down to his last bullet, a clearance of 69 to level the match and added the decider comfortably. This was the death or glory situation in which he revelled. His compulsive urge to live on life’s dangerous edge, stronger than any mere desire to win, was like an addiction to the thrill of gambling. Always at his most dangerous and most fascinating in a situation of peak emotional intensity, he accessed a similar seam of inspiration in the final when, from 15-15, he ran through a trio of frames to beat Ray Reardon 18-15.

‘Beginning when he won the Northern Ireland Amateur Championships at 18, tales of Higgins’ dashing centuries, bust-ups, punch-ups, drinking, gambling and women spread through the snooker world. His challenge matches against the late John Spencer, then the reigning world champion, packed venue after venue as he acquired an army of supporters who were to give him their unqualified support throughout his career. Even at that early stage many questioned how long he could last with such an uninhibited lifestyle. He drank heavily; only a boxer could have collected more black eyes than he did; he was thrown out of clubs; a tour of India lasted only a day before he was sent back to England in disgrace on the first available plane.

‘Umpteen fines for miscellaneous disciplinary offences were shrugged off until Higgins prevaricated over giving a urine sample for a drug test at the 1986 UK Championship. When the tournament director tried to hurry him, Higgins headbutted him. Higgins was at the centre of the ensuing scrum that spilled out into a corridor and resulted in his being fined £200 for assault and £50 for criminal damage to a door by Preston magistrates. A disciplinary tribunal chaired by Mr Justice, now Judge, Lightman fined him £12,000 and suspended him from five tournaments. On his return, he was again in the news after a row with his girlfriend, Siobhan Kidd, a psychology graduate he had met while she was working as a waitress. When she locked him inside her flat, he attempted to crawl round her building on a ledge only to plunge 25 feet to the pavement, breaking bones in his foot.

‘Siobhan was the love of his life but she departed finally with a fractured cheekbone for her trouble. Out of his mind with rejection, he threatened, backstage at the World Team Cup, to have his team‑mate Dennis Taylor shot the next time he visited Northern Ireland, reducing him to tears with vicious verbal abuse of his late mother. Disciplinary action was pending from this when, after losing in the first round of the 1990 World Championship at the Crucible, he punched the WPBSA’s duty press officer on his way to the obligatory press conference. This was nothing personal, simply an expression of his consuming rage against any form of authority. He was suspended for a year and docked so many points that his ranking fell to 120.

‘His last match on the circuit was in August 1997 in a qualifying event in Plymouth. He lost 5-1, became truculent, was escorted from the venue by police and was found at 4am sprawled on the ground outside a nightclub, the victim, so he claimed, of an unprovoked assault with an iron bar. Quickly discharging himself from hospital, he made his way to the Manchester home of a girlfriend, Holly Hayse, who stabbed him with a kitchen knife when an altercation broke out. Higgins declined to give evidence against her.

‘Sporadic attempts to compete on the fringes of the professional circuit were cruelly unsuccessful as he lived out his declining years in a small flat in sheltered accommodation. In his prime, he could play brilliantly in an imitable way even, at times, well enough to give himself the illusion of the omnipotence he craved to keep at bay the vulnerability he feared. When snooker could no longer serve as the glue to hold his life together he made no concessions, no pleas for sympathy.’ — The Observer

 

Alex Higgins Official Website

savealexhiggins.com

Alex Higgins: A Complete One-Off @ Snookerscene

The Alex Higgins Collection

Alex Higgins History & Stats @ Global Snooker

The extraordinary life of Alex Higgins

 

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Plays

From 1979 World Champs match against Terry Griffiths.

Some exhibition shots from 1975.

Century break by The Hurricane! from 1985 UK match against Jimmy White.

Angry Alex Higgins

Unusual shot by Alex Hurricane Higgins to beat Steve Davis 1987

1989 Snooker Irish Masters, Alex Higgins – Stephen Hendry, epic Final!

ALEX HIGGINS – FLASH SHOTS

Alex Higgins BBC Documentary – The People’s Champion

Alex Higgins’ Final Battle

 

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Jimmy White: ‘I’d have died if I’d beaten Higgins and won the world title in 1982’
Donald McRae

When we remember Alex Higgins, his fellow snooker genius and reprobate who died in 2010, Jimmy White suggests that losing their epic semi-final at the worlds might have saved him.

“I would’ve died if I’d beaten Higgins and won the world championship in 1982 because I’d just found cocaine and I liked to drink,” he says. “I always liked cocaine – whether drunk or sober. It was no one’s fault but my own. I’d just become famous, because we only had four channels in them days and, instead of queuing round the block to get into a West End nightclub, I was getting the treatment. I had such fun, even though I can’t remember much.”

Years of cocaine use led to the dark spiral of crack. “I’d knock about with Kirk Stevens [the former snooker pro from Canada] and he’d be on crack. One day I tried it. It’s the most addictive thing ever. Kirk had no idea how to get cocaine. But I’d come from the street, so I knew 20 dealers. For me to get cocaine was easy. So I became hooked on crack for a few months. It’s like being an alcoholic. The first hit is the best – like your first drink. When you’re smoking crack it’s pure but you never hold on to that first hit either.”

How did he kick crack? “I couldn’t get any money out one night. I had drained one account completely. I got the heebie-jeebies. I had a day trying to think and then I knew. I had to stop.”

Higgins, in contrast, could not save himself. “I first played Alex in an exhibition when I was 13,” White remembers. “He came to a working men’s club in Balham, which my dad ran, and tried to chat my sister up. So my brother wanted to knock him out. It was the most horrendous first meeting with your hero ever. I should’ve known.

“But the only time I fell out with Higgins was when I had a mansion in Surrey. Swimming pool, snooker room. Higgins came over and we went drinking. My friend drove us in a Mini Metro. We were drinking all day and I decided to drive after another two gallons of wine – for which I apologise. I crashed into a wall. The windscreen flipped out and Higgins, who never wore a seatbelt, flew out.”

White shakes his head. “Higgins stands up and he’s shouting: ‘I’ve got nine lives, baby!’ I’m feeling sober now and I drive to my house … the windscreen wipers are attacking us. I drive into the garage and the engine falls out. If we’d been driving we could have been seriously hurt. But Higgins is flying, saying, ‘This is great!’

“After I get my friend to pick up the windscreen, because it’s got my name on the tax disc, I feel safe. But I’m not ready for Higgins. He takes me to the snooker table and says: ‘Let’s play for money, baby.’ He wouldn’t stop. I threw him out. He knew the neighbour and I didn’t get on so he went next door and said I’d attacked him. That was Higgins.”

What happened when they next saw each other? “He said: ‘Hello, babes. How are ya?’ He had ways where you’d be fuming with him and then he’d say something and you’d forget about it.”

In the grip of throat cancer, Higgins barely ate in the last months. “It was horrific,” White says. “As much as me and his sisters done things for him it was no good. They did far more than me, obviously, but he fell out with them. So he wasn’t found for 10 days. He died of malnutrition. It was horrendous.”

White and the sisters had raised money to buy a new set of teeth for Higgins’s ravaged mouth. “We raised three chunks of money for him,” White says. “But you give money to a gambler it’s like giving heroin to a junkie. The money just made him eager to gamble more. I think Guinness kept him alive – the iron in it – because he wasn’t eating much. He was his own worst enemy.”

The funeral was delayed to allow White to return from Thailand. “When I got the call saying he had died, I was numb. It was evil.” White helped carry Higgins’ coffin and “4,000 people lined the streets. It was unbelievable – but so sad.”

Higgins’s last world championship title came in 1982 when, in that unforgettable semi-final, White was 15-14 ahead. White was 51-0 up in the next frame, which would have won him the match, when he gave Higgins, who had been drinking heavily, a chance. Taking on shots that needed outrageous courage and daring, Higgins cleared the table with a break of 69. “That was his best. There were three or four shots in there which – under the pressure – will never be repeated. The drunker he got, the calmer he got.”

White looks away, lost in the memory. “I was in awe of him. I was watching my hero playing. That clearance is the best ever made.”

—–

 

*

p.s. Hey. There’s a new, long, very thoughtful essay on Diarmuid Hester’s Wrong, my writing, and Permanent Green Light called ‘On Dennis Cooper and Becoming-Nothing’ just up on Los Angeles Review of Books if anyone’s interested. Here. ** David Ehrenstein, Especially Blanchot by far for me. ** Misanthrope, I always try to see people I meet as blank slates and disavow as many preconceptions based on looks or gender or race or age or the identity politic as possible and let them (with my instincts in tow) fill in whoever they are. It’s very rare that I’ve gotten bamboozled. I’m kind of disassociated from how I look. I don’t now what to do with how I look other than to maintain it in a basic way. Tomorrow we’re getting a murderous 104 degrees F day here, the first truly awful day of the summer, and I’m ‘praying’ it’s a 24 hour novelty act. Me, I say err on the side of being overly precautious re: the pandemic, and more power to places that enforce strict rules, especially over there in the US where the chaotic ‘guidance’ has been a complete fucking mess. So I guess just deal with it, is my advice. ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff. ‘The Last Man’ is sublime, I think. What he does/pulls off there is unbelievable if you’re interested in what he does. Hope you like it. Yes, I listened to the Julian Calendar EP. Excellent! Especially the first two tracks for me. Congrats! Everyone, Jeff Jackson’s fine musical unit Julen Calendar … and here I turn the wordage over to Jeff … ‘finally released some new music. First of four EPs. Post-punk, sinister groove, dark lullaby. Really happy with how it turned out. You can download/stream it here.’ Highly recommend that you stream it. Glad the screenplay is going well. Me? Finished some new GIF wall works that actually open in a gallery show tonight. Doing some editing/dramaturging with Gisele on her new piece. We won’t have an official answer on the TV project until early September, but, barring an enormously unexpected turn, I think it’s dead as the veritable doornail. Gisele is looking into turning it into a feature film, but we will see. Fund-raising/strategising on the new film. There’s a possibility of bringing a great particular co-producer that would make the fundraising much easier and ease the issues of shooting the film in English and in the US, so we’re waiting anxiously to see if that pans out. My first attempt to turn the TV script into fiction was a bust, but, actually, in the past week I have a new idea of how to possibly revamp that in a way that could maybe work really well. So I’ll be trying that out over the next week or so. I think there’s a way that it can work really well, but I have the find the right approach. Great to see you, bud. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Well, ‘Death Sentence’; is my l=favorite, but ‘The Last Man’ is incredible. It’s a harder book to find, but Jeff Jackson says he found a downloadable pdf, so that might work. Oh, I see, about he storage, etc. Yeah, that makes sense because, yeah, really, who has any idea what your world or mine will be like in even a few months. Makes sense. Cool you got ‘Wrong(ed)’. ** Sypha, Hi. I, of course, don’t know the HBO show because I don’t watch TV. Weirdly, I’ve never read ‘Watchmen’. I remember sort of enjoying the film. Or at least thinking that Jackie Earle Haley and his character were great in it. ** Max B, Hi, Max! Oh, cool that Screen Slate reran that. I really love Benning. He’s definitely one of my filmmaker gods. His films are not easy to see. He used to have a kind of secret Vimeo account where most of his films could be watched for free, but either he’s taken it down or it has become even more secretive. My favorite is ’11 x 14′, but it’s super hard to see. ‘One Way Boogie Woogie’, another favorite, seems to be on youtube very unexpectedly, at least at the moment. Honestly, I love everything he’s made. So you can kind of just try what you find. Good to see you. You good, surviving, etc.? ** Damien Ark, Hi. Oh, that makes sense that you’re in guro, no surprise. I’ve been tempted do a commission with a few of the especially amazing artists for a project. Might still. I’m glad you had a feeling-filled birthday for Jon. Yes, indeed, I do love Sparks. Oh, whoa, congrats big time for your piece being on Hobart! That’s so awesome! I’ll, of course, go read it asap. Everyone, Excellent writer and fine fellow Damien Ark has his first novel coming out later this year, and there’s a preview excerpt from it just up on the Hobart site called OPANA, DYING, IN BALTIMORE: AN EXCERPT FROM FUCKED UP. Obviously, I’m seriously suggesting that you who are reading this go check it out. Right here. ** JoeM, All is right or re-right with the online world. Oh, that’s not too bad, your schedule. I mean … I don’t know if congrats are appropriate under the circumstances, but not bad. I feel way too outside of things to know what’s good or bad or right or wrong, but I do really hope that Scotland breaks off from the biggie UK. And not only because you’d still ostensibly be in the EU with us over. But that is an opinion influencer. ** Ian, Hi. Ha ha, not as often as you would think. It’s more like people would often say, ‘I bet you get called Dennis the Menace’ a lot more than anyone actually calling me that. I’m glad the guro nagged at you. It nags at me, obvs. I guess so-so is better than not-so? Hoping for steady if not speedy improvement. And I hope you can set up your writing such that you can dive in. How are setting it up? Is it something describable? (I’m a bit of a process junkie). Thanks, I’m good, or will be once the heat wave that arrives tomorrow dies a hopefully quick, painless death. Take care. ** Bernard Welt, No, you’re the only one, B. It’s touching. ** Steve Erickson, Eek. Trust/hope all is right throat-wise by this morning. Everyone, Mr. Erickson weighs in on the raging ‘cancel culture’ debate via think-piece called ‘Who’s Waging & Winning the Cancel Culture War?’ if you want to know. Here. Oh, really? My Facebook feed was stuffed with people mostly ripping Shane Carruth a new one yesterday or the day before, I can’t remember. ** Nik, Hi, Nik. Oh, awesome! It’s so insanely great, right? What an especially mind blow of a thing from the great mindblower. Enjoy the idyllic and natural. That sounds really nice. Things are still very good here. No huge change, still very reopened and chill, although the possibility of a downswing forever looms. But, no, things are really just fine here relative to most everywhere else from what I can tell. Really good to see you! Catch me on your stuff whenever you feel it please. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi. I’ll go hear your gig add, thank you. I think I’m sort of an oblivious to my home surroundings type other than very minimal cleaning. I’ve still never even put up a piece of art though intending to do so for years. But I’m an oblivious dresser too. Whatever covers the body and doesn’t give me an allergic reaction is my modus operandi. Other than ‘late next year’, I know zip about my novel’s release date. I’m assuming it’ll start getting nailed down maybe late this year. Bon day. ** Right. I thought I’d throw you blog readers a wild card today and restore this very old post about ‘Hurricane’ Higgins. Back in the mid-80s when I lived in Amsterdam, I had about a year where I was obsessed with watching snooker on TV, and Higgins was the fascinating snooker star for me. So at some point years ago I remembered that and decided to do a thing about him. And here it is. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Le Dernier homme is a trial of the limits of dissolution of both the character and language,the ability to dwell in the present is a feature of not only the last man but also the story about him. As a narrative, Le Dernier homme is not very eventful. Striking with a low dramatic voltage, lack of chronological order and only scattered pieces of information, this re´cit about the relationships between three nameless characters residing in a non-specified house presents lengthy, carefully constructed passages where nothing happens. With the characters never doing anything except spending extended stretches of time together, they are simply there with each other, in the atmosphere of time and action coming to a standstill. As Hans-Jost Frey observes, on the level of communicating meaning Le Dernier homme does not say anything and does not try to. Instead, its stylistic devices are employed in such a way that they allow it to say nothing; or, as Frey fittingly puts it, “to say what cannot be said without losing it as unsayable by saying it”. It is by trying to say nothing that the language and style of this narrative manage to exert an unprecedented pressure on the partitions between the characters – something Nathalie Sarraute announced as a goal for contemporary fiction several years earlier.

‘With its tired characters and exhausted language, everything in Le Dernier homme is “just there”, plainly and without attributes. The most manifest linguistic and stylistic elements that contribute to the impression of unadorned presence and the absence of reported events are, on the one hand, an excessive use of certain words (especially adverbs presque and peut-eˆ tre; verbs mettre a` nu, blanchir and effacer, and nouns le vide, le silence, l’immobilite´, la le´ge`rete´ and la faiblesse), and, on the other, a very unconventional syntax. Imitating the narrator’s inability to place himself firmly in his rapport to the last man, Blanchot’s sentences often oscillate among “je”, “il” and “nous” in a single long sentence. This tendency, which makes sentences develop only by diverging from the course that was grammatically determined by their beginnings, allows for the adding of often disparate segments to the endlessly ramifying compositions. The following passage, in which the narrator describes the way the last man talks, can serve asan example here:

Ce qu’il disait changeait de sens, se dirigeait non plus vers nous, mais vers lui, vers unautre que lui, un autre espace, l’intimite´ de sa faiblesse, le mur, comme je le disais a` la jeune femme, “il a touche´ le mur”, et le plus frappant e´tait alors la menace que sesparoles, si ordinaires, semblaient repre´senter pour lui, comme si elles avaient risque´ de lemettre a` nu devant le mur, ce qui se traduisait par un effacement qui blanchissait cequ’il disait au fur et a` mesure qu’il se pre´parait a` le dire.

‘Along with exemplifying the syntax of this re´cit, this sentence also explains – and performs – the speech of the last man. Here, the narrator already shows signs of speaking the same way as the last man. The last man’s speech does not only efface whatever it says; nor does it merely postpone denotation by means of constantly modifying the meaning of the sentence. It is rather that when the last man finally gets to speak, his speech, at every moment, shows his reluctance to talk about things. With his slow and heavy rhythm, what becomes more important than words is the very act of speaking. Addressing neither himself nor the narrator, and saying nothing definite, his speech only marks the fact that these two characters are together.

‘Not unlike the sparse speech of the last man, Le Dernier homme, with its static syntax and mono-semantic vocabulary, itself serves as a medium of exhausted talk. What we get in both cases is a slow and careful preparation for talking, but not the message-transmitting speech. By the time this preparation crystallises into a fully formed language, it has already started effacing itself. With nothing hard and stable remaining in the narrative, what is left is an extreme level of linguistic thinness which, as Paul de Man argues is the case with all Blanchot’s stories, is as close as one gets to an entirely “unpunctuated [form of] temporality”. This thinness is not only intricate to create – especially within the genre of narrative literature, with its tendency towards denotative language – but also difficult to undergo for a reader. Many readers undoubtedly struggle with the exhausted language of Le Dernier homme. However, even though the unusually desolate space of this narrative does not immediately make one submit to it, the reader’s uneasiness is not left unaided. From the very start, the reader is constantly reminded of a similar resistance displayed by the narrator when facing the speech of the last man. In fact, the reader experiences discomfort precisely by means of reading about the narrator’s discomfort – that is, by means of being exposed to the effect that the last man’s speech left on the narrator’s own way of telling the story.

‘As a structurally inherent part of the re´cit, the reader resembles the narrator. Since the narrative structure of Le Dernier homme comprises the homological relation between “le dernier homme” as a book and as a character of this book (the book says what it says in the same way as the last man speaks), the reader enters into another functional homology – one between the last man and the narrator. The reader, while reading about the narrator’s difficulty to adapt to the last man’s speech, doubles the narrator’s attempt to come to terms with exhaustion and emptiness because s/he has to withstand the narrator’s language that itself already resembles the one of the last man. The reader and the narrator thus form yet another functional homology of this narrative. Although thereader cannot be forced as far as to comply with the narrator’s self-expropriation, the weariness that Le Dernier homme exerts via the reader’s enacting of the narrator’s enacting of the last man’s speech demands an exhausted reader. The reader who complies with this demand, then, carries out the very fatigue that defines the last man.’ — Daniel Just

 

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Further

Espace Maurice Blanchot
‘The Space of Literature’ @ goodreads
Contradictory Passion: Inspiration in Blanchot’s “The Space of Literature”
‘Everything and Nothing’: Blanchot in the Space of Shakespeare”
Introduction: Blanchot’s Spaces
Analysis of the Space of Literature by Maurice Blanchot
Blanchot on the analogy between writing and suicide
I’m too dead to tell you: withdrawing rooms and other breathing spaces.
BLANCHOT AND THE RESONANT SPACES OF LITERATURE, SOUND, ART AND THOUGHT
Reading The Space of Literature (iii)
Nothing doing: Maurice Blanchot and the irreal
Introduction: Against Praise of Maurice Blanchot
(Re)Writing, (Re)Reading: Maurice Blanchot and The Space of Literature
The Negative Eschatology of Maurice Blanchot
Read the entirety for free online
Download ‘The Last Man’ here

 

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Handwritten

 

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Extras

Derrida on Blanchot

Levinas on Maurice Blanchot

Maurice Blanchot.mp4

Blanchot’s Nietzschean Inspiration

Christopher Fynsk. The Relation Between Bataille and Blanchot, Speech and The Alterity.

 

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beirut 12 / 11: maurice blanchot and georges bataille
By Richard Marshall

 

Maurice Blanchot: As the German expression has it, the last judgement is the youngest day, and it is a day surpassing all days. Not that judgement is reserved for the end of time. On the contrary, justice won’t wait; it is to be done at every instant, to be realized all the time, and studied also (it is to be learned). Every just act (are there any?) makes of its day the last day or – as Kafka said – the very last: a day no longer situated in the ordinary succession of days but one that makes of the most commonplace ordinary, the extraordinary. He who has been the contemporary of the camps is forever a survivor: death will not make him die.

Georges Bataille: To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the “pleasures of the flesh” only on condition that they be insipid.

But as of then, no doubt existed for me: I did not care for what is known as “pleasures of the flesh” because they really are insipid; I cared only for what is classified as “dirty.” On the other hand, I was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, while, in some way or other, anything sublime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.

MB: Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one’s rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

GB: I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it.

MB: To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat.

GB: The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind . . . From the very first he set before the consciousness things which it could not tolerate. The road to the kingdom of childhood, governed by ingenuousness and innocence, is thus regained in the horror of atonement. The purity of love is regained in its intimate truth which, as I said, is that of death. Death and the instant of divine intoxication merge when they both oppose those intentions of Good which are based on rational calculation. And death indicates the instant which, in so far as it is instantaneous, renounces the calculated quest for survival. The instant of the new individual being depended on the death of other beings. Had they not died there would have been no room for new ones. Reproduction and death condition the immortal renewal of life; they condition the instant which is always new. That is why we can only have a tragic view of the enchantment of life, but that is also why tragedy is the symbol of enchantment.

MB: When Kafka allows a friend to understand that he writes because otherwise he would go mad, he knows that writing is madness already, his madness, a kind of vigilence, unrelated to any wakefulness save sleep’s: insomnia. Madness against madness, then. But he believes that he masters the one by abandoning himself to it; the other frightens him, and is his fear; it tears through him, wounds and exalts him. It is as if he had to undergo all the force of an uninterruptable continuity, a tension at the edge of the insupportable which he speaks of with fear and not without a feeling of glory. For glory is the disaster.

GB: Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror.

MB: And there is no question that we are preoccupied by dying. But why? It is because when we die, we leave behind not only the world but also death. That is the paradox of the last hour. Death works with us in the world; it is a power that humanizes nature, that raises existence to being, and it is within each one of us as our most human quality; it is death only in the world – man only knows death because he is man, and he is only man because he is death in the process of becoming. But to die is to shatter the world; it is the loss of person, the annihilation of the being; and so it is also the loss of death, the loss of what in it and for me made it death. As long as I live, I am a mortal man, but when I die, by ceasing to be man I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death, but the impossibility of dying.

GB: There is always some limit which the individual accepts. He identifies this limit with himself. Horror seizes him at the thought that this limit may cease to be. But we are wrong to take this limit and the individual’s acceptance of it seriously. The limit is only there to be overreached. Fear and horror are not the real and final reaction; on the contrary, they are a temptation to overstep the bounds.

MB: The disaster… is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.

GB: I remember that one day, when we were in a car tooling along at top speed,we crashed into a cyclist, an apparently very young and very pretty girl. Her head was almost totally ripped off by the wheels. For a long time, we were parked a few yards beyond without getting out, fully absorbed in the sight of the corpse. The horror and despair at so much bloody flesh, nauseating in part, and in part very beautiful, was fairly equivalent to our usual impression upon seeing one another.

MB: “A child is being killed.” This silent passive, this dead eternity to which a temporal form of life must be given in order that we might separate ourselves from it by a murder–this companion, but of no one, whom we seek to particularise as an absence, that we might live upon his banishment, desire with the desire he has not, and speak through and against the world he does not utter–nothing (neither knowledge nor un-knowledge) can designate him, even if the simplest of sentences seems, in four or five words, to divulge him (a child is being killed.)

GB: Realism gives me the impression of a mistake. Violence alone escapes the feeling of poverty of those realistic experiences. Only death and desire have the force that oppresses, that takes one’s breath away. Only the extremism of desire and death enable one to attain the truth.

MB: Whoever digs at verse must renounce all idols; he has to break with everything. He cannot have truth for his horizon, or the future as his element, for he has no right to hope. He has, on the contrary, to despair. Whoever delves into verse dies; he encounters his death as an abyss. We can never put enough distance between ourselves and what we love. To think that God is, is still to think of him as present; this is a thought according to our measure, destined only to console us. It is much more fitting to think that God is not, just as we must love him purely enough that we could be indifferent to the fact that he should not be. It is for this reason that the atheist is closer to God than the believer.

GB: Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commence from that point on. …out of despair I decided to follow this horror through. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a ‘hypermorality.’ Literature is communication. Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.

MB: I cannot forgive — forgiveness comes from others — but I cannot be forgiven either, if forgiveness is what calls the “I” into question and demands that I give myself, that I subject myself to the lack of subjectivity. And if forgiveness comes from others, it only comes; there is never any certitude that it can arrive, because in it there is nothing of the (sacramental) power to determine. It can only delay in the element of indecision. In The Trial, one might think that the death scene constitutes the pardon, the end of the interminable; but there is no end, since Kafka specifies that shame survives, which is to say, the infinite itself, a mockery of life as life’s beyond.

GB: Eroticism is the brink of the abyss. I’m leaning out over deranged horror (at this point my eyes roll back in my head). The abyss is the foundation of the possible. We’re brought to the edge of the same abyss by uncontrolled laughter or ecstasy. From this comes a “questioning” of everything possible. This is the stage of rupture, of letting go of things, of looking forward to death.

MB: 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. The authentic answer is always the question’s vitality. It can close in around the question, but it does so in order to preserve the question by keeping it open. The disaster… is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.

GB: To put it more precisely, since language is by definition the expression of civilised man, violence is silent. Civilisation and language grew as though violence was something outside. But silence cannot do away with things that language cannot state. Violence is as stubbornly there just as much as death, and if language cheats to conceal universal annihilation, the placid work of time, language alone suffers, language is the poorer, not time and not violence.

 

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Book

Maurice Blanchot The Last Man (1957)
/ubu editions

‘We can dream about the last writer, with whom would disappear, without anyone noticing it, the little mystery of writing. A dense, dream-like exploration of the extreme limits of this mystery, written some ten years prior to the Death of the Author, (though unpublished in English until thirty years later) Maurice Blanchot’s The Last Man (Le Dernier Homme, 1957) could be considered a narrative follow-up to The Space of Literature (L’Espace littéraire, 1955) or a fictional companion to the critical essays composing The Book to Come (Le Livre à venir, 1959). One can imagine an infinite conversation between these works: drifting wearily across abyssal alterities—the echo, in advance, of what has not been said and will never be said. But this sumptuous récit alone demands the reader’s full attention—marvelously, Blanchot writes what cannot be written without losing it as un-writable by writing it (Hans-Yost Frey, YFS, 1998). Narrating at the threshold of this impossible writing, The Last Man weaves a blurring of several prosopopetic characters towards a radical revision of the subject and the text. The prose itself never crystallizes into an unambiguous statement—Blanchot’s trangressive philosophy peculiar in the tantalizingly pleasurable suspension of the never-fulfilled promise of understanding. Reading happens in this continual absence of comprehension: instead, dense knots of delightfully paradoxical propositions and stupefying catachreses drive the reader on in the unconditional acceptance of the text that pierces, like a look that is too direct, the indeterminate prose, and makes all relations, and especially our relationship to time, absolutely precarious.’ — /ubu editions

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Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, No, never. When I was young, I learned handwriting analysis, and I used to study people that way or read people’s handwriting when asked, with strangely often correct readings, but no face stuff, and I don’t enjoy looking at my own face casually, so I definitely don’t analyse it. I probably did when I was on acid ages back ‘cos that’s something one tends to want to do while fried. You? Oops, hope your pains are a quickie. Aging does have unpleasant surprises in store for one’s body, but you’re not very old (yet). Again, thanking the Lord above or whoever for our non-summer over here, although we’re supposed to finally get one murderous day this Friday. ** David Ehrenstein, Good old F’OH. ** JoeM, October seems theoretically possibly doable and … well, maybe not safe but kind of maybe safe-ish? Who knows. We could be locked back inside over here by then. Pretty good safety system they’re working with, it sounds. All bases covered pretty much. I had my first temperature check the other day, bizarrely in order to be able to enter Hard Cafe Cafe of all places. It seems you’ve sorted the secret of being named as you wish. ** _Black_Acrylic, Might even have had some knowledge of it maybe, who knows? Well, I suppose someone knows. Oh, man, that does sound like a real dilemma: the possible move. I’m way, way outside the situation and know little, but it does make me a little sad thinking of you not in Dundee. I kind of think of you and the DCA being wedded at the hip. But you like your parents, so there’s that. And location moves can be excellent beginnings, as I well know. But, yeah, that’s tough one. You wouldn’t have to move until year’s end in any case, right? ** Steve Erickson, Obviously I trust you will ace your test, but ultra-best luck just in case you need it. I don’t know of Kurt Walker’s ‘s01e03’, but I’ll find it since it’s so easily found. Thanks. Curious about the Seimetz. Such a fucking drag that it has the Shane Carruth shit smeared all over it. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. Thank you, and, hm, probably not on the app? Fuck knows though. Ha ha. Never saw ‘Antiviral’. I think I saw it offered on one of the ‘illegal’ sites though, and, if so, zoom. ** Okay. It’s been a good, oh, 7 or 8 months since I turned the blog over to my personal literary god Maurice Blanchot, so it seemed high time. ‘The Last Man’ is my second favorite of his novels, and it a fucking sublime and amazing novel if you ask me, which of course you didn’t, but, if you were me, which you’re not, I would definitely read today’s spotlit novel if you haven’t. See you tomorrow.