John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

The following is as close as I can recall to the conversation I had at the Spanish Consulate in Manhattan the other day when I went to make sure that there was no paperwork I needed to complete.

“Hi. I’m an Irish citizen and I’ve been planning on moving to Spain. The Irish Consulate told me I should come here to see if there was any paperwork I need to complete.”

“Why do you want to come to Spain?”

“Why do I want to come to Spain?”

“Do you have a lot of money and want to just go and not work?”

“No, I was planning on working eventually.”

“You can’t work. You need a sponsor for that.”

“But I’m a EU citizen.”

“Huh?”

“I’m a European Union citizen.”

“Ooooooh. European… Here’s what you have to do. Go buy your tickets, get on the plane and go.”

“That’s all?”

“When you get there go to the Ayuntamiento - the City Hall - and register with them.”

“Ok, so I just go register?”

“Yeah. And when you go, you have to prove you’ve been living out of the European Union for at least year. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Then you won’t have to pay any importation taxes. You can bring all of your stuff, your car, whatever and not pay anything.”

“Ok, great. Thank you.”

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are —
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.¹

And to think I used to think Tennyson a mediocre poet.

1. Alfred Lord Tennyson : Ulysses : Lines↩

This is officially the quote of the week.

“Why so hard?” the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. “After all, are we not close kin?”

Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask you: are you not after all my brothers?

Why so soft, so pliant and yielding? Why is there so much denial, self-denial, in your hearts? So little destiny in your eyes?

And if you do not want to be destinies and inexorable ones, how can you one day triumph with me?

And if your hardness does not wish to flash and cut through, how can you one day create with me?

For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress your hand on millennia as on wax.

Blessedness to write on the will of millennia as on bronze — harder than bronze, nobler than bronze. Only the noblest is altogether hard.

This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: become hard!¹

Not, of course, that I entirely agree with the sentiment. The direction it points seems right to me, though. The essential problem being that what is called hardness is often only an excess of anger in a man, which is to say — an excessive sensitivity to life.

1. Friedrich Nietzsche : Thus Spoke Zarathustra : The Hammer Speaks↩

There’s really no mood that Bane doesn’t have a song for.

So for the first four months it was bad and certainly better for you that I didn’t carry a gun or know where you lay your head at night. It was not her as everyone had thought, but you — how easily you were able to turn away from all that we were. Those things that you said, admit it: your words they came as cheap as your breath and with even less meaning. You selfish fuck, the next time that you tell me that you love me please look me in the eye so that I can see the twitch. And I will fight to keep my balance, pray to hold my temper. Ten years of history traded away for a nickel and the world’s most crooked grin. You would not know “nobility” if it jumped right up and punched you in the face. And this rock won’t turn to a butterfly no matter how hard I squeeze. But I will face it while you look the other way. Face it, always facing it. I believe that it’s the only way. So many moments wasted on you and this rage, waiting for the dust to settle or these tears to dry or the axe to fall. Something has got to give.¹

1. Bane : It All Comes Down To This : Fuck What You Heard↩

I especially like the following part:

Lord it takes a silly girl
To lie about the dreams that she has had
And man it takes a lonely one to wish
That she had never dreamt at all.¹

1. Dashboard Confessional : A Mark, A Mission, A Brand : Ghost Of A Good Thing↩

If there is one thing I take pride in, it is that every year I come further and further to live by the principles in the Hagakure that seemed so wise to me when I was younger. Whether I should take pride or shame in the fact that this progressive development is unintentional is still unclear to me.

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. By doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses one still gets wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you will get the same soaking. This understanding extends to all things.¹

1. Hagakure↩

One has radically misunderstood human nature if one does not realize that the mistakes one makes will be repeated more frequently than anything else — tragically much more frequently than the actions leading to success.

Dieu me pardonnera. C’est son métier.¹

If those are not the greatest last words of all time, I can’t think of any better.

1. Heinrich Heine : Final Words↩

This song continues to affect me every time I hear it as powerfully as the first time.

The innocence she feels everybody else contains,
It’s lost, it’s gone, but I guess that doesn’t matter anyway.
Breaching, rip apart the inner fibers of her soul.
And you can sit there with that stupid smile on your face
And try and convince me that you care.¹

1. Boy Sets Fire : After The Eulogy : Unspoken Request↩

I think this sample of Berger’s writing shows exactly what is valuable in it. The italics are my own.

How much this photograph says about politics! About how politics, at their origin, are irrepressible. These five men, with their loves, their children, their songs and their Anatolian memory, are the dupes of nobody. They were often badly led, carelessly organized, often the first victims of the charismatic self-indulgence of their leaders, but none of this has surprised them. Of this present world which they know so well, they did not expect better.

They know there has never been a winter in Anatolia without snow, a summer without animals dying from drought, a workers’ movement without repression. Utopias exist only in carpets. But they know too that what they have been subjected to in their lives is intolerable. And the naming of the intolerable is itself the hope.¹

1. John Berger : Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos↩