Christina Tudor-Sideri

@dreamsofbeing

[in the manuscript]

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Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· 20d

at night, “a certain dramatics of love”

I love you more than all that has been thought and can be thought. I give my soul to you.

Henriette Vogel to Heinrich von Kleist

Epigraph to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Shattered Love

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· 21d

Munch in the early hours

I am giving her the light summer evening soft beauty—over her I pour
the splendor of the vanishing sun
—over her hair—over her face
over her white dress—shimmering gold—
I am placing her against the booming blue of the sea—with the shore’s
bending snake-like lines—
In this manner she is leaving him
—who still comprehends nothing

but as in dreams feels
her drawing away
—He is standing amidst
blood red flowers—in the deep blue clouds of evening—
He does not understand exactly what is going on—

But even when she has disappeared over the sea
he feels how a few
fine threads of her hair
are still fast in his
heart—it bleeds—and burns like an everlasting open sore

The private journals of Edvard Munch: we are flames which pour out of the earth. translator J. Gill Holland

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· 21d

“Whatever this crowded world had no room for, I made a place for within myself,” writes Elias Canetti in Notes from Hampstead, in the translation of John Hargraves. Perhaps that is indeed the lesson to take from him. To always make a place within oneself. And to tell stories.

My obstinate rejection of time is now taking its revenge on me. Its passing never existed for me. I never felt it as a river that could dry up. It was all around me, inexhaustible, a sea. I drifted about in all directions; it seemed natural to go on this way. My time would never run out. Everything I undertook was for eternity, and eternities were at my disposal, even for the smallest projects.
I was in search of the old gods, wanted to reconcile them within myself. My intellectual ambitions were fulfilled in the study of many peoples: this was how I atoned for the arrogance of my own forebears. I did not look to history for guidance. The smallest things, because they were on the verge of disappearing, meant more than the biggest. I could not accept ignoring a single life. What-ver this crowded world had no room for, I made a place for within myself. And so now I feel as broad as the world: I feel I touch it everywhere. Year by year the arrogance of

those who live for themselves alone seems more and more alien to me. Today I know how little I am myself, how much of me is in the universal breath of the spirit.
But having attained this goal, I recognize my own futility. I have scorned time, and now it is running out on me.
The things one depends on in the course of a life are grotesque, and it is hard to see how one can guard against them without models.
Telling stories to anyone who will hear them s stories, who doesn't know you, who doesn't expect literature. Life as a wandering storyteller would be nice. Someone says the word, and you tell the story. You never stop, day or night, you go blind, you lose the use of your limbs. But your mouth still serves its function, and you speak whatever is in your head. You have no possessions, only an infi-nite, ever-growing number of stories.
Nicest of all would be if you could live on words alone and did not even need to eat.

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· 22d

“When does something become a relic?”

Aphrodite bust statue with silver pendant around her neck

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· 23d

the tender interval

“Time… what is it?”

Still frame from Eternity and a Day

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· Jul 15

To love Paul Celan...

Sometimes I imagine how it would be if I could be young and beautiful for you-with this youthful beauty, strength, immediacy, assurance (which I believe I never had). But then I am also grateful that it is not like that.
I am almost sure that we had to travel all the long and difficult roads in order to be able to see ourselves the way we now do— can do-will do? There is something almost reassuring in this—my wrinkles under the eyes and all that. I cannot say any more to you now other than that you are very much there-everywhere-in the night when I can't sleep— at dawnearly when hardly anything is awakeduring the day with all the life surrounding me of which you know so little.
Ilana

The Correspondence of PAUL CELAN & ILANA SHMUELI
Translated by Susan H. Gillespie

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· Jul 14

“the nights are unending” Angst, Hélène Cixous; tr. Sophie Lewis

Today facing life, close to living, to dying, as if before the entrance, the exit, the transition, and now I am not living, I'm not dead, all the paths lead you astray, the nights are unending, they're extending, poor tender, well-intentioned thing, you look around yourself at those who don't know, with the most extreme wisdom and most extreme naivety.
With a strange joy in your sorrow. And in the joy the strange bliss of feeling you're entirely against death.
Death loves me. And this love, this sweet appalling love in my heart, this is life itself.

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· Jul 13

Angst, Hélène Cixous; tr. Sophie Lewis

What is calling you, poor body, what lifts you, and drags you, what attracts you so late, in those nights, so far into the lands where you are never again truly at home, amid the crowd of lively creatures who recognise you and whom you no longer know, no longer see, you are summoned, you answer sum-monses, you meet people dressed and coloured in presence, in reality costumes; they don't attack you, don't reject you, don't welcome you, don't see you, you aren't there, you should go and pursue your profession, your shadow cannot assert itself, you'll be awaited, it seems, there are buildings, full of halls of science of people of scholarship of seriousness of reading machines and deleting machines, you ought

to be bleeding freely from this, there are chairs and meanings, chumps to chop, tongues to iron, there are bureaucracies, circuses full of believers full of sound and sawdust, in silver prize costumes, there are lecture halls full of heads, of prosecution of rules of laws of rights of predictions of licences of exams of blindness of corridors of signs of doors through which to enter and leave without scream-ing, without collapsing thunderstruck, without bleeding without stopping without appearing to crumble away, to widen, without even wobbling, of queues of beings with which you have no relationship at all. Or rather with which you are in an incomprehensible relationship; of incomprehension.
You go no further.

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· Jul 12

Rosmarie Waldrop / Edmond Jabès

We write in order to deny (nier) the nothing (rien) that is God.
Again, to write means "to wait for words that wake our thoughts as they write us."

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· Jul 12

Four years, four pages. A novel born out of the question: What if one could experience one’s death? Or rather, How does one live with this impossibility? The first of the impossibilities. Disembodied remains one of the most intense writing moments of my life. To the forgotten.

I DIED ON THE TWELFTH of September, at the height of happiness. Clothed in the shadow of the chestnut tree outside the house, my body preserved the posture of a living woman hours after my last breath. Whereas at first I struggled with snakes under my tongue, around my ankles and my wrists, snakes clotting the blood under the skin of my lips and rearranging my limbs to fit the encasement of this new reality, I now watch lavender clouds pass by. A book slides gently from my ashen hand and as it falls on the grass lets out a sound much like how I have always imagined collapsing into the soul of another in the absence of touch might sound. A tender breeze instructs the memory of my fingers on how to manipulate time: as if its seconds were the puppets and my fingers the puppeteers.
My eyes count birds in flight as necrotic wounds on the diseased flesh of the skies. From this mouth full of dissent, my confession weaves unseen threads between the earthly space that my remains inhabit still and the myth-laden fragmentation of other more ethereal worlds-there is a magical calling in this ordinary language, a wailing correspondence with all structures of human consciousness, an

exhortation of that which I have come to know as the soul.
Against the background of rotting flesh, existence carries out its sacred rituals unscathed by lingering funereal har-monies. Aware of the impossibility of touch, I resume my count with the dull and inaccessible gaze of someone whose history I wish to forget. The ghost of thought falls captive to the absence of a voice, and as the rain pours down to wash me, a thick darkness invades my mind, penetrating its every corner—a darkness that uproots and relocates shards of memory as if it were repositioning the hours on the clock in the image of a time that only goes backward. A new uneasiness arises. The color of water has settled on the inside of my eyelids. Imagine floating in the middle of a sea. There is nothing but sea all around you, the blue sky itself is a mere extension of this sea. Imagine seeing this sea for the first time, imagine not being able to think of it as a relatively small sea, not being able to divide it into fragments and portions with the blades of the mind-not even empirically. You wish to touch and unravel the waves but you are not able to see them as anything other than parts of this sea, as crashing slivers of this little sea, and yet, it does not mean that what travels through your mind is pure intuition, the a priori intuition of the sea, but in fact a highly a posteriori experience. Imagine Aoating in the middle of this sea. You say it is false that one can think of space as infinite: you are not able to think of infinity, you can only fathom the possibility that to a given

space, you can add another and another; you can only conceive the possibility of being able to expand its boundaries.
Here, where thought floats in the middle of the sea under my eyelids, I find myself unable to argue that space is a priori intuition, not based on its infiniteness, for I myself cannot think of infinite space nor can I envision infinite worlds in which the darkness that falls over my lifeless body does so for any other reason than to erase all connections with the past, and I think of how at the heart of the idea of eternal return lies one of the most rudimentary forms of human thought: analogy. The most common expression of this idea is the cyclic return: one world describing a cycle of events disappears and another is born describing the same cycle—I believe it was Goethe who ascribed to this thought the shape of the spiral. Things repeat themselves but they describe an ascent, therefore although one encounters sameness, it will always be on different planes. Nietzsche's eternal return is based on the scientific myth of atoms, not a repetition of the world but rather a repetition in its most concrete sense: every gesture, every event, every raindrop, every fall. And there are of course others who have depicted eternal return as something contemporaneous with the mythical age. Under the shadow of the chestnut tree, all returns become patterns that germinate from the pure intuition of the concrete, a law of the regeneration of existence in the name of a life I long to both forget and leave written on my flesh. Here,

eternal return holds the double meaning of concluding one world synthetically while also opening perspectives for another, with the emphasis on being-even when one is embraced by darkness-but as soon as other frameworks are created and history is refreshed, it will follow the path of new forms, of a body floating in the middle of the sea, of a woman becoming memory. All we see of her is a hand.
I fall to my knees in the rain and find myself loathing its wetness. I loathe the dirt that infiltrates my stockings and mends my skin; the dirt that makes me undress of its memory. On the ground, under the burden of water that falls both here and there at the same time and with the same infectious rage, striving to provide myself not with an answer but with a reading of what collapsed me, I think of the reality of consciousness and how, in itself, consciousness is felt, not known, for it is the organ that knows but cannot know itself, same as the eye sees but cannot see it-self. It is felt, not in the ordinary sense of the word -and not with the senses themselves. Without being able to define it, without being able to provide you now with an organic sequence, I know that consciousness is in itself, and I cannot help but wonder why I chose this moment, why is this particular memory traveling through my body and not any other—perhaps when rain falls, it does so with the memory of other rains rooted deep in the structure of its drops. Nevertheless—I allow it to become my present. I was not expecting rain this late in winter, not for days

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· Jul 8

The Book of Promethea, Hélène Cixous; tr. Betsy Wing

She who did not want—
To renounce her peace; the happiness of finally having become the desert, the contentment of a dune in the sun; the triumph of renunciation; did not want to renounce renounc-ing; at the moment in which she had just made solitude her fiancée; to renounce the endless, barely rippled, bright, dry happiness of not being unhappy. All she did not want to do, with good reason, with every reason and no madness at all, everything she had learned from having soared and having crashed, from being broken and getting back up and soaring again.

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· Jul 7

Four o’clock. Darkest night. —India Song (1975)

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· Jul 6

Again and again. Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès. Rosmarie Waldrop.

Again and again, Edmond Jabès repeats: The writer is nobody.
The writer is a shadow. A writer knows only that he writes. A writer commits suicide at the threshold of the book. More than that: the writer is written.
"You are the one who writes and is written."

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· Jul 6

Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance (1983) and doing nothing at all for a few hours—

So the ghost is enclosed in a crypt, which is our body

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· Jul 3

Epigraph to Paul Leppin’s The Doors of Life

I give this book to those women who seek dead years in the lamp at night. Who stare into their days, transfixed, as into a light. Who know Resignation from the romances and Sorrow from the ballads. Who are ever Strangers among men.

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· Jul 2

Back into the room you go again. She is there, sleeping, abandoned in her own darkness, her magnificence.
You realize she's so made that it's as if at any moment, at her own whim, her body could cease to live, could just thin out around her and disappear from sight, and that it's in this threat that she sleeps, exposes herself to your view. That it's in the risk she runs, with the sea so close and empty and black still, that she sleeps.

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· Jul 2

the state of things

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· Jun 30

At midnight, Yves Bonnefoy, blue smoke, and the memory of water. It rains and rains and rains.

$Our Hands in the Water We stir the water. Our hands seek each other, Sometimes they touch, broken forms. Deeper down, a current: some of the invisible, Other trees, other lights, other dreams. And see, there are even other colours. Refraction transfigures the red. Was it a summer day, no, this is the storm That will 'change the sky, until evening. We thrust our hands into language, They took some words we didn't know What to do with, being only our desires. We grew old. This water, our hope. Others will know how to look deeper For a new sky, a new earth. translation Berverly Bie Brahic$

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· Jun 28

again and again

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· Jun 26

Last days of sea. Julian Wolfreys’ Souvenirs D’amour echoes in my head as I gather words for the manuscript.

Dear —

In the beginning was the prefix. And this is where we find ourselves, caught-between: in love, in love, in love: being-in-love.

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· Jun 25

between one silence and another

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing· Jun 24

A return to one of my first encounters with Marguerite Duras. “All that had to be done was to restore her to the rest of the world, the optimists and the others, just as you would throw a fish back into the sea.”