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atoms danced apart and massed themselves.

image

to the left (of preceding view)
Oyamadai (Tokyo), 16 July 2014

...thing followed thing, scene obliterated scene...
Then she must put her words into order; then she must find words...

ex Virginia Woolf, Eleanor’s ruminations in chapter entitled "“Present Day,” in The Years (1937)   *
epigram from same passage.

Lots of things, and disgust with things, and disintegration of things, in a novel that brings to (this) mind Simone Weil but also Roquentin’s disgust with a rock, in Sartre’s Nausea, published only one year later, in 1938. A preoccupation with class — in a novel so full of judgements and discriminations — diminishes in this last long section, where what I would term existentialist concerns come into clearer view.

It was while listening to Maud Ellmann’s lecture about Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Virginia Woolf’s The Years — and her inclusion of Bataille’s (?) notion of the l’informe (formless) in her argument — that Simone Weil came to mind. I’ve been reading/trawling forward and backward through her notebooks for some time. And now making my way slowly through The Years, parallels with Nausea come into view as well.

These combinations must be undone, one’s own soul must be decomposed back into water and energy, and be born again from that.

Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks (Richard Rees, trans., 1970) : 73
 

16 July 2014

tags:
things; Tokyo; walls
Simone Weil; Virginia Woolf