[-empyre-] Towards a drift in values? (part 3/3) QUESTIONS

[Simon]

On 22/04/20 2:06 pm, Maurice Benayoun wrote:
> 1/ Could we expect a constructive fight for values as a possible
> outcome of the crisis?

On 23/04/20 7:56 am, Constanza Salazar wrote:
> How do we mobilize ourselves to think about care and about making a 
> radical political act?

by joining the resistance.


> 2/ can the artists be considered as viruses of social consciousness/awareness?


I don't know.

I hope not; and, I fear so.


...

Not by refusing, and not by austerity, or out of purism, is it possible 
by reducing to find something worth affirming?

I am inspired by these words of Enrique Vila-Matas for what they leave 
said, or say and then leave, and for what they do not say, and for the 
great/No/ of Aldo Busi they recall: (but that is not the quote I want to 
add here, so here's the alternative (and I hope Enrique will forgive me 
for quoting it at such length), one which starts with the injunction...):

..."we have to imagine ourselves at the most recent Barcelona Book Day, 
a party that happens every April 23, where, as you may know, roses and 
books are given as gifts, and the whole city participates in this 
enormous event.

"On this 23, right after I arrived at my spot in the tent to sign books, 
I got to watch as a frenzied crowd tried to knock over the barriers, 
apparently just to touch the forehead of a former politician who is now 
a media titan. It was a moment of total absurdity. And things had been 
arranged so that it would be hard for anyone other than this celebrity 
to sign books.

"I closed my eyes and imagined that this best-selling author was asking 
me about the future of literature. I immediately remembered the 
“conversations with the retired mathematicians.” These were gatherings 
that Ricardo Piglia had helped with at Princeton, and he’d recently 
discussed them in an interview. Piglia said that the mathematicians were 
brilliant people, extraordinarily knowledgeable about Western 
literature, expert readers of Joyce and his /Finnegans Wake/, experts in 
Robert Musil, Michel Butor, Samuel Beckett, Witold Gombrowicz; they were 
the kind to be fascinated by Hermann Broch, Arno Schmidt, Jorge Luis 
Borges . . .

"For Piglia, there weren’t any other readers like them in the world: 
“Roberto Calasso, George Steiner, and Harold Bloom are dilettantes next 
to these tired men: one learned Japanese at the age of forty just to 
read Yasunari Kawabata. They all knew that nothing was going to happen 
to them, so they still had their whole lives ahead of them to dedicate 
to reading. Robert Hollander, the great Dante scholar, gave a course on 
/The Divine Comedy/ in which they read just one canto per semester: 
there were six or seven people seated around the roundtable, mostly 
mathematicians and theoretical physicists; they finished reading the 
/Comedy/ after five or six years of classes, and then they began to read 
it again. Thus will be the literature of the future, at least I hope.”

"When I came to and opened my eyes, I considered the contrast between 
the tired men at Princeton and the collective delirium of that savage day.

"Then I said to myself: what’s good about this inaccessible spot in the 
tent is that you don’t have to greet anyone, and nobody greets you, no 
one bothers you. And then just a little bit later, almost holding my 
breath, I thought: however, what’s bad about this remote spot in the 
tent is that you don’t have to greet anyone, and nobody greets you, no 
one bothers you.

"I was caught up in these thoughts when, to my surprise, I saw that 
someone had overcome the sizable obstacles to arrive by my side, 
extending his hand with a smile. I remained still with happiness when I 
saw that I had myself a person, which, considering everything, was a 
lot. Although, in another sense, wasn’t this moment cruel? We began to 
talk as if we were two of the tired men of Princeton. We talked about 
life, love, hate, death. It was as if we had returned back to those days 
when life was simply life, when you would chat and there weren’t emails 
or iPhones, when everybody was freer, each alone with their own 
metaphysics, and it was still possible for two people, in the middle of 
general pandemonium, to talk about the world. I want to think, I tell 
myself, that this is the literature of the future."

/- from 
https://tinhouse.com/the-literature-of-no-an-interview-with-enrique-vila-matas//

Best,

Simon

http://squarewhiteworld.com


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