However apparently insignificant the event, whether it be the ring of
tobacco ash surrounding the table, the direction from which the wild
geese first appeared, or a series of seemingly meaningless human
movements, he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off it and must note it
all down, since only by doing so could he hope not to vanish one day and
fall a silent captive to the infernal arrangement whereby the world
decomposes but is at the same time constantly in the process of
self-construction.
László Krasznahorkai,
Satantango
László Krasznahorkai is sixty-one today and today is the newest Egoslavian Holy Day. I haven't written about my reading slump in weeks if not months because I'm not in one, and
Krasznahorkai is one important reason. In the past eighteen months I've read
Melancholy of Resistance and
War and War - I recommend the latter before the former though I recommend both - and I just finished
Satantango. If I like you and you say please I'll mail you one of the above, your choice. I don't do reviews and long-form here because I didn't like writing reviews and long-form when I was required to, the fuck if I'm going to do it here: in sparing me I am sparing you. Please check out the links I provided for reviews and long-forms and an interview. I will say I recognize in Krasznahorkai's infinitely ominous and claustrophobic world the world I am only now beginning to realize I live in.
ON ANTI-BIOGRAPHY
Will Alexander
For me, biography is a lantern, burning in the midst of parenthetical
opaqueness. In a sense, it is a ruse, a phantasmic meandering, brighter
or dimmer, according to the ecletic happenstance of terror.
Me,
I’ve been sired in anomaly, in an imagery of brewing grenadine riddles, a
parallel poesis spawned from curious seismographic molten. I say
curious, because the original stalking arc has disappeared into the
wilderness of an a priori blizzard, which gives birth to a level, like a
portal of fire conjoined with the lightning field of mystery. I call it
the poetic guardian dove, the hieratic alien wing.
It is the
non-local field, the non-particle acid, flowing into my cognitive iodine
rays, into the vicious fires of my tarantella marshes. So I dance with
vibration, with the solar arc spinning backward around the miraculous
force of a double green horizon. Simultaneously, I escape the
territorial, while remaining within the burning loops of my own
momentary seizures, guarded by ferns, legs plowing land, the face and
the mind guided by stars.
So, I am a martyr of drills, of spates
of specific lingual flooding, casting at times, a mist or a mirage,
like a caravan of yaks, transporting tungsten and water. Conversely, to
give a graph of dates, to single out a bevy of personal social lesions,
would invert me, would turn me around a diurnal bundle of glass,
staggered, with a less than fiery temperature, partially nulling my
sensitivity to falling phonemic peppers, to the inclination towards
victory which burns in the dawn above heaven. For me, this is the green
locale, the pleroma of eternal solar essence, glinting, full of fabulous
maelstrom diamonds, an empowered hegira of drift, of claustrophobic
rainbow spectrums which empty themselves, and return to themselves, like
having an image go out and return to itself, so that its power
transmutes by the very energy of its looping; and I think of myself, the
poet sending signals into mystery, and having them return to me with
oneiric wings and spirals, so much so, that I forget my prosaic locale
with its stultifying anchors, with its familial dotage and image
reports, with its dates inscribed in trapezoidal feces. I am only
concerned with simultaneity and height, with rays of monomial kindling,
guiding the neo-cortex through ravens, into the ecstasy of x-rays and
blackness.
