chiunque sia nel glutine delle sue immaginazioni è incapace di carità e generosità, essendo tutto perso a confezionarsi le sue bolle iridescenti di fandonie e desideri. […] mai nella mente dev’esserci ristagno, tutto ci deve scorrere come da una fonte, senza assembramenti o incanti: nulla può accadere di male se col cuore della mente spingeremo in vortice la massa delle immagini.

[storia del fantasticare]

supponete sensibilità e memoria anche nel clavicembalo, e ditemi se anch’esso non si saprà, se non ripeterà da sé le arie che avrete eseguite sui suoi tasti. noi siamo strumenti dotati di sensibilità e memoria.

[elementi di fisiologia]

finché i mali dei nervi erano rimasti associati ai movimenti organici delle parti inferiori del corpo, si situavano all’interno di una certa etica del desiderio: essi rappresentavano la rivincita di un corpo grossolano; ci si ammalava per colpa di una violenza eccessiva. ormai si è malati per troppo sentire; si soffre di una solidarietà eccessiva con tutti gli esseri circostanti.

[storia della follia nell’età classica]

superato un determinato momento
della nostra esistenza
siamo già di troppo
più si resta e più è peggio
come quando si va a trovare qualcuno
e nell’unico momento giusto
non si ha la forza di alzarsi
e filar via
e così si è ossessionati
di essere ancora lì
e questa nostra presenza ci disgusta.

[il riformatore del mondo]

non mi dispiaceva affatto, anzi, provavo una sorta di gioia torbida, come quando si distrugge qualcosa che si è pazientemente costruito con le proprie mani.

[il treno]

l’idée, le principe, l’éclair, le premier moment du premier état, le saut, le bond hors de la suite… a d’autres, préparations et exécutions. jette là le filet. voici le lieu de la mer où vous trouverez. adieu.

[monsieur teste]

ha mai tentato di togliersi la vita?
da bambino avevo deciso di impiccarmi ma la corda si spezzò.

quanti anni aveva?
avevo sette, otto anni. la seconda volta fu durante una passeggiata col nonno, abitavamo a traunstein, per tutto il cammino continuai a ingoiare barbiturici, a un tratto mi sentii male e dissi che dovevo tornare a casa, eravamo lontani dalla città, circa trenta chilometri, lo lasciai continuare e ritornai da solo a casa, non so più come; restai a letto quattro giorni vomitando ininterrottamente, e nello stomaco non mi rimase niente. dovevo avere dieci anni.

e poi cosa le capitò?
mi maledirono come bambino esaltato, dissero che volevo fare scena e che avrei portato disgrazia alla famiglia.

ci sono momenti in cui pensa ancora di uccidersi?
il pensiero c’è sempre. ma non ne ho l’intenzione, almeno per adesso.

[da un’intervista]

21 giugno 1962

Lavoro tutto il giorno come un monaco
e la notte in giro, come un gattaccio
in cerca d’ amore… Farò proposta
alla Curia d’ esser fatto santo.
Rispondo infatti alla mistificazione
con la mitezza. Guardo con l’ occhio
d’ un’ immagine gli addetti al linciaggio.
Osservo me stesso massacrato col sereno
coraggio d’ uno scienziato. Sembro
provare odio, e invece scrivo
dei versi pieni di puntuale amore.
Studio la perfidia come un fenomeno
fatale, quasi non ne fossi oggetto.
Ho pietà per i giovani fascisti,
e ai vecchi, che considero forme
del più orribile male, oppongo
solo la violenza della ragione.
Passivo come un uccello che vede
tutto, volando, e si porta in cuore
nel volo in cielo la coscienza
che non perdona.

[da poesie mondane]

a chi pensa quando scrive?
questa è una domanda veramente stupida.

[da un’intervista]

virginia woolf, Words Fail Me, 29 April 1937 BBC.

trascrizione grazie a star stuff.

…Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today – that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past. The splendid word “incarnadine,” for example – who can use that without remembering “multitudinous seas”? In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words – they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation – but we cannot use them because the English language is old. You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet always mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. Indeed it is not a word until it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great poet knows that the word “incarnadine” belongs to “multitudinous seas.” To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a whole new language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the old English language as it is. How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.

And the person who could answer that question would deserve whatever crown of glory the world has to offer. Think what it would mean if you could teach, or if you could learn the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper you’d pick up, would tell the truth, or create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing on the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still – do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were un-lectured, un-criticized, untaught? Is our modern Georgian literature a patch on the Elizabethan? Well, where then are we to lay the blame? Not on our professors; not on our reviewers; not on our writers; but on words. It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most un-teachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-a-million words all in alphabetical order. But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. Look once more at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems lovelier than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, ranging hither and thither, falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid.

Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling is all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live – the mind – all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think before they use them, and to feel before they use them, but to think and feel not about them, but about something different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed. If you start a Society for Pure English, they will show their resentment by starting another for impure English – hence the unnatural violence of much modern speech; it is a protest against the puritans. They are highly democratic, too; they believe that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as good as educated words, uncultivated words as good as cultivated words, there are no ranks or titles in their society. Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.

Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity – their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being many-sided, flashing first this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity, this power to mean different things to different people, that they survive. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination…

[tutto questo trovato grazie allo splendido blog di federico novaro]

A little black thing among the snow:
Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe!
Where are thy father & mother? say?
They are both gone up to the church to pray.

Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil’d among the winters snow:
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

And because I am happy & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King,
Who make up a heaven of our misery.

[The Chimney Sweeper]

il grassetto è mio.

lei non mostra mai i suoi sentimenti?
con la gente sono sempre molto affabile.

[da un’intervista]