Vertigo

The problem with most writing is that it tries to do so much and what it tries to do is so predictable and in the same mode. I want a literature that is not trying to say anything, not the intention constantly hounding at every word. How to write for the barely visible? How to make it not seem significant, at least not in the normal ways? Approaching BOREDOM that is the goal. Even achieving boredom, which is a task--boredom that is not the result of boring writing--boredom which is carefully manufactured boredom in the reader which is a kind of constant attentiveness--a state of unease where the reader is potentially responsible for everything.

Deliberately slowing down the pace, not deliberately beautiful, as if an accident. Signifiers not bundled together like a thesis--a sort of rambling that defies easy 'purpose', allowing the person speaking to be the only common element, that voice and his concerns which is larger than the piece of writing, that goes on afterward and was going on before, that the writing becomes a sort of artifact of his thinking & materializing perspective without DEFINING him, without concluding anything without easyness of "saying".

It is not that it lacked significance, it's that the words did not create that significance. The words were like a rag, already soaked in whatever mysterious significance it needed--so that the words themselves didn't have to try to convey anything. The attention is focused back to the basic attention of the sentence, its parts taken simply which becomes a feat astounding by itself. To read every sentence as if it were the only sentence in the English language. To make a reader read it that way. How?

It is clear that his work was as unfinished as it was original. And odd. It was work of high seriousness without pretension. That is, it engaged with many of the great themes of the literature and art of the past: war, peace, life, death, art itself, memory, absence, omission. But almost as prominent was—for a writer with such high regard for the history of individuals—the almost total absence of such concerns as love, sex, family, children; or of such ordinary (and powerful) emotions as jealousy, hatred, love (again) or greed.

"The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling." (p. 212)