The Art of Tetman Callis

“Something tells me that if all our world leaders read poetry, wrote poetry, or were involved deeply in any of the arts, we’d have a far better chance at achieving world peace.” – Wendy Videlock (quoted in Rattle 65)

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“The melancholy of the adult state arises from our dual, conflicting experience that, on the one hand, our absolute, youthful confidence in an inner voice has diminished or died, and, on the other hand, that the outside world to which we now devote ourselves in our desire to learn its ways and dominate it will […]

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“Art always says ‘And yet!’ to life.” – Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (trans. Anna Bostock)

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“In lyric poetry, only the great moment exists, the moment at which the meaningful unity of nature and soul or their meaningful divorce, the necessary and affirmed loneliness of the soul becomes eternal. At the lyrical moment the purest interiority of the soul, set apart from duration without choice, lifted above the obscurely-determined multiplicity of […]

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“The epic gives form to a totality of life that is rounded from within; the novel seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life. The given structure of the object (i.e. the search, which is only a way of expressing the subject’s recognition that neither objective life nor its relationship […]

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“The totality of life resists any attempt to find a transcendental centre within it, and refuses any of its constituent cells the right to dominate it. Only when a subject, far removed from all life and from the empirical which is necessarily posited together with life, becomes enthroned in the pure heights of essence, when […]

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“Loneliness is the very essence of tragedy, for the soul that has attained itself through its destiny can have brothers among the stars, but never an earthly companion; yet the dramatic form of expression—the dialogue—presupposes, if it is to be many-voiced, truly dialogical, dramatic, a high degree of communion among these solitaries. The language of […]

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“It is one thing when the lifeimmanence of meaning vanishes with catastrophic suddenness from a pure, uncomplicated world, and quite another when this immanence is banished from the cosmos as though by the gradual working of a spell: in the latter case the longing for its return remains alive but unsatisfied; it never turns into […]

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“Researchers ask parents if they’re happy, but that’s the wrong question; it’s like asking a cow if it can fly. Evidently there’s something we prize above happiness, and that’s a good story, especially if it stars us.” – David Kirby (quoted in Rattle 64)

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“Poetry is that ocean of fire I step into every time I’m desperate for some logic. It’s obviously hopeless. But for those moments when it seems to almost work, I keep on trying.” Maya Tevet Dayan (quoted in Rattle 66)

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“The blood clot is doing // its job, / it’s doing exactly what // it was made to do / and the only thing you // need to do / when you are dying // is to die. / Nothing else. // You don’t need to / fold the laundry // or clean / the […]

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“If I were in your bedroom, would you pick me up and say, Oh my god you’re so light I could throw you across the room? Like a toy you want to break? Because you wouldn’t be the first. Would you do it? Throw me? Does that turn you on? Do you know what it’s […]

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From the Sanskrit, there comes this: ‘Vinasa kale vibareetha pudthi’ which means, ‘When the time for your destruction is at hand you take strange decisions.’ (courtesy Abraham Sukumar at Quora)

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“Have you ever met a god? It’s like this. They just can’t help themselves. They’re very sorry, the gods, but they are going to fuck you up. Like the child-eating goddess who would very much like to but just cannot, cannot stop herself from guzzling your little daughter.” – Adam Thirlwell, “Slow Motion”

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“When we went to the district-commandant to enlist, we were a class of twenty young men, many of whom proudly shaved for the first time before going to the barracks. We had no definite plans for our future. Our thoughts of a career and occupation were as yet of too unpractical a character to furnish […]

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“Laws must look to possibilities, if the maker designs to punish few in order to their amendment, and not many to no purpose.” – “Solon,” Plutarch’s Lives (trans. A. H. Clough)

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“It can sometimes happen that, when confronted by what seems to be a wall, which one cannot get either through or round, a kind of radical reorientation is called for. Turning the whole thing over so that an approach can be made from the opposite side, as it were. If this is to succeed, it […]

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“To be excited by the prospect of a great adventure is one thing, to act is another.” – Bridget Riley, “At the End of My Pencil”

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“What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

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“The writers from the provinces are usually rescued from their dream of becoming writers, a terrible dream, difficult to abandon, when their parents die in the provinces and leave them an apartment or a small factory or, in the worst case, a widow and a few mouths to feed, and the writer from the provinces […]

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“I no longer wanted to write; in fact, I didn’t even try. It was like I knew I’d wasted time at the station and the train had passed, and now I had to walk to the fucking end of the world, to arrive there with my feet destroyed and discover that everyone else had left […]

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“This system is a fucking circle of doom. Produce more and more cheaply, and make the consumer swallow faster and faster. And the key to keeping the goddamn assembly line moving, you know what it is? That nothing that’s consumed is real; what’s real is expensive, and gets consumed slowly. That’s why the ultimate solution […]

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“I like buying new technology because it takes me quite a long time to realize it is pointless. I read the instructions, hit the keys, connect a cable here and another there, and feel as if I’m confronting a huge mystery I have to solve. And I enjoy it. Then there is no mystery, only […]

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