Our mistakes are our leaps in the night. Error is not a lie: it is approximation. Signs that we are on track.
Hélène Cixous, from Stigmata.
January 16th, 2012
(The author or) The artist is the gardener of the thorn bush in spite of himself. He has been placed and then raised in a thorn bush, and even as, like Kafka’s character, he asks the Guardian of the Park to quickly bring help, he is already thinking about what he will write with one of these sharpened gorses, if he survives the awful accident. Sometimes he does not survive.
Hélène Cixous, from Stigmata.
July 11th, 2011
Kafka’s dreams are angels without wings. Movements of the soul. Acts of goodness. Runnings. Infinitives. Verbs without subjects.
Here’s another one:
“Who is it? Who walks under the trees of the quay? Who is quite lost? Who is past saving? Over whose grave does the grass grow? Dreams have arrived, upstream they came. They came, they climb up the wall of the quay on a ladder. One stops makes conversation with them, they know a number of things, but what they don’t know is where they come from. It is quite warm this autumn evening. They turn toward the river and raise their arms. Why do you raise your arms instead of clasping us in them?”
Helene Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, translated by Susan Sellers and Sarah Cornell.
June 28th, 2011
I hope you will forgive me if I use the word “truth.” The moment I say “truth” I expect people to ask: “What is truth?” “Does truth exist?” Let us imagine that it exists. The word exists, therefore the feeling exists.
Helene Cixous, from Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, translated by Sarah Cornell & Susan Sellers.
The word exists, therefore the feeling exists.
You will tell me everyone dies, but not everyone dies of writing.
Helene Cixous, from Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, translated by Sarah Cornell & Susan Sellers.
June 20th, 2011
I say ‘ascent’ downward because we ordinarily believe the descent is easy. The writers I love are descenders, explorers of the lowest and the deepest. Descending is deceptive. Carried out by those I love the descent is sometimes intolerable, the descenders descend with difficulty; sometimes they stop descending, like Kafka:
“You say I should go down further still, but I am already very deep down, and yet, if it must be so, I will stay here. What a place! It is probably the deepest place there is. But I will stay here, only do not force me to climb down any deeper.”
Helene Cixous, from Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. In which she proves that down-climbing is the hardest part. And that Kafka was, indubitably, a climber. (via kafkawasaclimber)
This, from my other blog.
June 19th, 2011
Writing is not arriving; most of the time it’s ‘not arriving’. One must go on foot, with the body. One has to go away, leave the self. How far must one not arrive in order to write, how far must one wander and wear out and have pleasure? One must walk as far as the night. One’s own night. Walking through the self toward the dark.
Helene Cixous, from Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, translated by Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers.
June 17th, 2011
Writing, in its noblest function, is the attempt to unerase, to unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us.
Helene Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing
We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is. Without that, we know nothing about the mortality and immortality we carry … [It] is an act of grace.
Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Helene Cixous. Oh, this book! Expect to hear much more from it …
