Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life – its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness – conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.
Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one-and can help build a nascent one.
The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.
Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it – say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken – or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.
Concerning the death of Gertrude Stein: she came out of a deep coma to ask her companion Alice Toklas, ‘Alice, Alice, what is the answer?’ Her companion replied, ‘There is no answer.’ Gertrude Stein continued, ‘Well, then, what is the question?’ and fell back dead.
Pleasure of tragedy is vicarious suicide.
I am thinking – talking – in images. I don’t know how to write them down. Every feeling is physical.
Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one.
Did I feel all that? So much? As sounds decays into inadudibility, euphoria decays into indifference, and that is always unexpected, the way exalted feelings are weakened, undone by time.
She increases her burden of self-hatred, she behaves destructively with people she loves.
My repressed feelings leak out – slowly – in the form of resentment – a continual leakage of resentment.
My loyalty to the past – my most dangerous trait, the one that has cost me most.
To discuss the idea of silence in art is to discuss the various alternatives within this essentially unalterable situation. 4.
To look at something which is “empty” is still to be looking, still to be seeing something – if only the ghosts of one’s own expectations.
Feeling of discontinuity as a person. My various selves – how do they all come together? And anxiety at moments of transition from one “role” to another. Will I make it fifteen minutes from now? Be able to step into, inhabit the person I’m supposed to be? This is felt as an infinitely hazardous leap, no matter how often it’s successfully executed.
Apocalypse is now a long-running serial: not “Apocalypse Now” but “Apocalypse From Now On.
To say a feeling, an impression is to diminish it – expel it.
I have such strong tendencies to abandon myself to someone with whom I’m in love – to want to give up everything, to be possessed totally as well as to possess totally.
Whatever goal is set for art eventually proves restrictive, matched against the widest goals of consciousness.
Art, itself a form of mystification, endures a succession of crises of demystification; older artistic goals are assailed and, ostensibly, replaced; outworn maps of consciousness are redrawn.
Denying that art is mere expression, the later myth rather relates art to the mind’s need or capacity for self-estrangement.