/lit/ - Literature

Several emotional incidents today and this evening.

Today I reread Roz Chast's graphic novel. It made me laugh and cry.

Then, later, I read a few of Kafka's stories again for the first time in a while. They were so beautiful, one excerpt in particular, that I can't help but feel devastated about my prospects of continuing to pretend there's something more to be said. I feel like I've brushed against the summit, against the absolute limit of something. I don't know what to do. I've been writing 1000 words a day for the last week, and looking back on that work, or on any of my work, in light of what I read... they're absolutely incomparable, hardly even the same genus--further apart than a wolf and a chihuahua. I feel the horrible feeling of being thrown back down into the infinitesimal minor leagues of nothingness. I'd thought I was at zero, at least. At least you can build on zero! But I'm not even at zero!

I'm at some point between zero and negative infinity, and I'm still so far from the former that I'm not sure if I'll ever get there. To say nothing of reaching one, or two. And you have to understand, that through all this, the work of Kafka's that I read was somehow dwelling at an absolute magnitude, that is to say, it was somehow positive infinity.

***

Normally I'm not so spiteful and narcissistic as I'm sure I seem here. This was a special case. As usual, it takes me lines and lines (which are still nothing by his standards, aren't even enough words to make up an opening paragraph in his works) to even begin to swim around the honest concept that has been burning as bright as the sun in the center of my vision the whole time.

I saw a post on Facebook by a beautiful girl that I'd known. It was a beautiful painting that she'd done. When I'd last seen it, several years ago, the figure reminded me of Blake's paintings. Now that I know a handful of other things about art, or have seen a few more works of art, I think it looks more like the bodies limned by Michelangelo. I can't say what I mean without sounding stupid: They seem more true to life than reality.

Well that made me think of how lucky I was to have known two beautiful girls, personally, who were capable of creating beautiful things.

And that other one I have to pass over in silence, or at least treat more obliquely than anything else. Let it be enough to quote the poet who said that "he who can say how he burns has little fire."

And I certainly burn. In various ways, I burn. That is the navel of the whole thing, the sinkhole at the center of the ocean, the point that can't be avoided just as surely as it can't be explored.

To see her rocket to heaven, which is where she belongs, while I spend my languid, empty days here on earth, unclean, unhappy, out of step, ahistorical, backwards, debased, degenerate, dumb, maudlin, bad--and to have failed to reach zero, on top of all that! That was the final degradation, why I came here, why I can't be consoled, and why I still burn.