19 12 2024 morning

There is only one really experimental writer: Kafka. His experiment, telling the truth, could only be carried out once.

Thank you: this disgusts me until I remind myself that it refers not to any particular thing but to a general principle of thanking. That we are grateful above all for the possibility of being grateful –

I love you: this disgusts me until I remind myself that it refers not to any general principle of love but rather to its particular genesis –

World-historicised version:

Buddhism: oh yes, I can love all my fellow beings, just as long as that’s all they are.

Christianity: you only love them insofar as they destroy your understanding of what they are.

Love as an excuse to generalise, versus love as an excuse to particularise.

Which is more disgusting? The secret question of Kierkegaard’s entire oeuvre…

Dog, house, ass. That at a certain point in history, someone said these words for the first time – this is miraculous to the point of being literally unbelievable.

But that, at a certain point in history, people started to exist – this is beyond tedious.

(This is how I would convert: first, I would go beyond belief, and then I would go back to it, walk back over the distance. I cannot go forward to it directly.)

In the beginning was the Word. Nothing shocking there, but in the beginning was a word –

G. Whenever I meet someone this humourless, I start picturing them butchering me in my sleep. If I had been born unable to laugh, unable to see the so-called funny side of things – who would I not have killed?

20 12 2024 morning

Impossible to decide whether women are more beautiful than nature. You have to think about it case-by-case:

1. Joanne, half-nude, one foot over the cliff edge, slowly toeing the air. Versus the moon.

2. Faye Dunaway being sultry in Bonnie and Clyde. Versus Altai Tavan Bogd National Park.

3. Maraini’s Ama divers. Versus the water into which they dive.

Thus my method. I’d have to join a monastery to do it properly, to have the requisite time and focus. I’d explain to the abbot that, due to circumstances outside of my control, this is basically the only spiritual task still viable for me –

After several years I’d emerge from my chamber, eyes brighter and cleaner than ever, and terminate my vow of analytic silence: well, boys, in the end, nature has it. It was the long rocky bays which did it. And I’d get the map out, explain. This one in particular. Wide, wet, the sun like a half-peeled orange. Sound like God doing laundry. You just walk off. You just fall into it.

‘Wouldn’t you like to read Kafka in the original?’ No, I prefer to read him clothed.

A list of things the internet was designed to annihilate (in exactly this sequence):

1. memory

2. perception

3. love

4. beauty

5. family

6. God (at least, to keep him buried)

7. the body

8. the polis

9. nature

10. experience

11. understanding

12. Kant

13. Hegel

14. psychoanalysis

15. marxism

16. thought

17. music

18. friendship

19. tenderness

20. sex
    

Fine – it’s normal to lose things.1 The peculiarity of the internet is that it synchronises, and thereby camouflages, our losses.

Technology: science with claws. Which perfectly fit the eyes, which sleep on top of them.

Mark Zuckerberg’s face: all I can see is my own face being eaten alive.

The other is always an existentialist; the self, never.

Love has a certainty density, a certain sensitivity, reveals things in a certain way, gives you a certain picture of the thing; hate likewise has a certain density, reveals things in a certain way. As with two different balls which rebound differently off a certain wall.

Nietzsche, writing to his sister on December 20, 1885: ‘If I had better health and enough money, I would have emigrated to Japan just to be more peaceful.’

Japan as the designated phallus for the retroactive impregnation of European metaphysics. Look, I don’t make the rules –

A new translation of Crime and Punishment. Everything as in the original but the climactic murder is replaced by ‘I’m going to stay in a co-living space in Chiangmai’ –

21 12 2024 afternoon

Cioran prided himself on not becoming a father, considered this his only ethical achievement. But what did he do instead? Found every other possible means to inflict himself on the world –

Such that eventually one longs for him to leave Paris, to go back where he came from. Oh Emil, impregnate the whole of Sibiu for all I care, just as long as you don’t produce any more pithy remarks –

Dreamt an invisible hand had threaded a long vertical seam of x’s skin onto hers. The hand dipping and rising (because that’s how you knit) –

I woke from it with a vision of God’s finger, dipping in and out of cold water, afraid to touch it too long, lest it give him ideas… Was that how he invented the spine?

A society in which dramatic public feats are required before ‘access to the pronouns I, you and we’ is given. Prior to this, you aren’t even allowed to know what these words mean.

Make-up: facial deterritorialisation.2

If I told him the reason I love him, it would disgust him. Therefore, I don’t tell him. Isn’t this proof enough that life is not particularly difficult?

They demand honesty only because they can’t tolerate boredom –

At a certain point, people became so annoying that ‘character’ was no longer sufficient to explain it. An external reason was required: politics.

Excuses the territory, excuses the map, excuses the map for being of the territory, excuses the territory for being represented by the map –

22 12 2024 evening

The smear of having been seen by me, in which their bodies are caked, two inches deep –

The setting is an expansive Hungarian-Moroccan bathhouse. And they’re running between the pools, trying to get it off. But it went into every crevasse, sunk in and settled down, like a bird nesting. They’re running from room to room, yelping and cursing, trying everything: cold, heat, steam, sheer matriarchal togetherness. But nothing works –

Turns out I’m dead, died a few years ago. It was my last request: nephew…. my dear nephew… do not let the smear of my seeing be cleaned from the bodies of women.

The function of the dream: to show me I can trust him, my nephew, he’s the one, he can inherit my bathhouse empire. I can trust him to sustain the sinfulness of my seeing, right down to the very water –

As with a long walk: dreams the coastal flowers, which lubricate your vision, let it slide backwards unconcerned, like the rollers they used to move the stones of the Giza Pyramid.

23 12 2024 morning

A documentary about a person from a country which has not produced a single good short story in two thousand years. The film crew follow him around as he completes his MFA. Ominous shots of fog, city lights, traffic jams, combined with ethnographic footage of his life: sitting at a desk, sitting in McDonald’s, chatting to a friend, scrolling his phone, leaning into the rain-streaked window of the public bus.

In the final scene, he reads out his short story to a small group of friends assembled in a rural coffee house.

The screen goes black; Ständchen, D 889 by Schubert plays in the background.

Times New Roman rolls down the screen:

IN 1917, FINLAND DECLARED INDEPENDENCE FROM SWEDEN, ESTABLISHING ITSELF AS A MODERN NATION-STATE.

THE NATION OF FINLAND WENT FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH; BY 2023, FINLAND HAD A GDP PER CAPITA OF 53,755.91 USD AND A POPULATION OF NEARLY SIX MILLION.

AS OF NOVEMBER 2024, NO GOOD SHORT STORY HAS BEEN WRITTEN IN OR ABOUT FINLAND.

Poems

[this is an anti-translation of Peach Blossom Blooming in the East Garden which is translated / transliterated here and copied below:

桃花開東園 táo huā kāi dōng yuán Peach blossom blooming in the East Garden;

含笑誇白日 hán xiào kuā bái rì With a smile, showing off in the bright sun.

偶蒙東風榮 ǒu méng dōng fēng róng By chance flowering in the eastern wind;

生此豔陽質 shēng cǐ yàn yáng zhì Giving rise to a radiant sunny quality.

豈無佳人色 qǐ wú jiā rén sè Could it not be as pretty as a beautiful woman?

但恐花不實 dàn kǒng huā bù shí But one fears this flower will not bear fruit.

宛轉龍火飛 wǎn zhuǎn lóng huǒ fēi As the Dragons are turning and Antares flies,

零落早相失 líng luò zǎo xiāng shī it falls to pieces and disappears.

詎知南山松 jù zhī nán shān sōng How one knows of the south mountain pine,

獨立自蕭飋 dú lì zì xiāo sè standing alone, the wind whistling in its leaves.

Admin

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Access to 81 previous posts (‘philosophical diary,’ poems, short stories, etc); to ongoing translations-variations-interpretations of Cioran’s Cahiers and de Chazal’s La vie derrière les choses; also, anti-translations of Lǐ Bái. I have a couple of short stories in the works too, one about if Žižek was a character, or rather was all the characters, in a Sally Rooney novel, the other about how there’s still time for you to become a member of the Prussian landed classes, even in 2024 (and perhaps even in 2025).

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yule log mega deal

You could also gift it to someone, this is surely a very funny idea.

Makes a massive difference to the viability of this project, too – thank you!

And thank you to everyone who ever read any of this, it’s a blessing.

I’m running a reading group for the preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. So far there has been one meeting; we are up to paragraph 7 in the Miller translation. Before the next meeting (January 7, 8pm UTC) I will send out a summary of what we discussed so far so it’s easyish to follow [we will read it live, so you don’t really need to read anything in advance]. Email Philip.traylen@gmail.com for more information.