Cioran Unleashed
January 11 1960
Bar None
January 11 1960 — Cioran’s entry for January 11 1960 covered a lot of stuff I ran across writing, about who one is writing for, and what one is doing about it, especially in terms of his having a stubbornness to go after what the writing engages with for him, bar none.
Do I agree with everything he says there? I agree with the issues he is running into. My writing fought for its own space in a way that crossed into a kind of vegetable violence, hammer and shell hell, scared the shit out of me. And it refused to back down at every turn. Making me into stubborn scrappy invaginater of experimentation, exploitation and tantrum —
Negation and Prestige
Especially where become enamored with encumbrances of the negative —
Negation has such prestige in my eyes that, cutting myself off from the rest of things, it has made of me a narrow-minded, stubborn, infirm being.
1.11.60 CIORAN
Cioron’s discussion of No and the Negative, filled my heart with justice. Having been caught out there too… Until drawing and “negative space.” As well as how math deals with negatives.
It’s because No has entered my blood, after having perverted my mind.
1.11.60 CIORAN
So I could begin to see it less as a void addressing no not and never, and more as part of structure, in the mind of its own space.
Early on, no matter how I hated the writing, when going back and reading, and seeing how twisted it was and engaged it was with battles in itself, as a hodge podge of collective torrents, and puritanical derivatives — even so, the more stubborn it became.
Naked and the True
Disbelieved in idea of searching for method. As if I was searching and searching after its original sin, as any life could feel in its being — equivalent with its origin, as an entanglement with death and eternity as limits to fate and faith.
I have noticed that I can only get along completely well with a man that has reached the height of defeat, and has lost all foundation, and along with that, all certainties of his success. It is because, in those moments, he has stripped away all lies, and is naked and true, returned to his essence by blows of fate.
1.11.60 CIORAN
What becomes of being heavily affected by puritanical dilemmas. And believing the risk was in being authentic however later felt derivative.
Now I tend to try and see as passage through the needle in a way.
As lonely as an unemployed God.
1.11.60 CIORAN
Wondrously punctuating entry, longest one in his journals so far in little over three years that I have already translated — writing to himself, valuing honesty in his work above all else, both religiously and tyrannically.
Ah! how I would like to limit myself to a sensation, to a world before the concept, to the infinitesimal variations of a felt impression that would have to render in a thousand astonishing and inconsequential words! To write directly from the senses, to become an interpreter of the body and uncoordinated soul!
1.11.60 CIORAN
In some ways I think every poet goes through that, if they write long enough.
Systems and the Abstract
Seriousness and a system:
Without a background of desolation that colors all my thought and controls all my attitudes, lending them an appearance of seriousness and even a system, I would have had what it takes to make a perfect dilettante.
1.11.60 CIORAN
Abstract styles.
There is something cloying and painful in use of the abstract style: all of these empty words juxtaposed to translate the unreal, what we call thought.
1.11.60 CIORAN
Over which I laughed. Because everything he puts down — he also engages with, making his thoughts about it — all that more incisive.
I worried about being overtaken by systems, that any system would overtake my reason for being there. Not realizing how much I was stealing in order to create my own, until SM.
That said, did not have any bother with running into abstracts styles, because of Math, and Sylvia Plath. Both achieving avenues to concretion despite it.
Seductions of Poison and Complaint
He is never far from complaint.
Anybody who embraces their fame, who isn’t humiliated or incensed by it is contemptible.
1.11.60 CIORAN
After his being censorious as all get out, then goes onto say:
Don’t waste your time criticizing others, censoring their works; do your own, devote all your hours to it. The rest is rubbish or infamy. Be in solidarity with what is true in you and even “eternal.”
1.11.60 CIORAN
Embraces his willingness to expose and entertain himself, with whatever its tender tyranny, as long is it addresses the eternal dead on. Commands himself, to refuse to let admiration get in his way.
By judging one’s contemporaries without pity, one risks being right and appearing in eyes of posterity incisive and clear-sighted. But of the same time, we renounce the adventurous side of admiration, to the heartfelt errors that it presupposes. Yes, admiration is an adventure, all the more beautiful because its nearly always wrong. It is frightening, although reasonable, to have no illusions about anyone.
And yet, pulls a Vincent, and does the opposite.
My admiration, however impassioned it may be, always retains a touch of poison.
1.11.60 CIORAN
Admiration when it arises, often finds its poison. Much as love does. Admiration is a fertile part of my Love Bunny in a way I refuse to defame.
Because of how it I find in it, the glorious shit that Cioran is talking about! And that it preexists him, as part of my fiction. Thus it becomes, something of a renewal in discussion with a new “host.”
Letting the voices exchange across eras, that all eras have their discoveries addressing time in a web of eternal astonishment.
All fiction is salutary, and, no more than any other, I can’t do without it. (The further I go, the more I am lead to multiply my admissions of defeat.)
1.11.60 CIORAN
Searingly genuine.