Viaggio In Italia

"It’s this suggested crisis of language, the breakdown that occurs when we consider all the possibilities, the lack of forward momentum, that stopped me from really becoming a writer. The books I wrote I think all suffer from the problem of incredulity, not so much that the readers could not believe them, but that I could not believe them. This is a poor position for an author to start out from. Eventually I realized that my writing was all a possible position and not THE position and this defeated me, so I stopped. For this reason I love music so much. Being in the music allows for the simultaneity of all positions, there is no linguistic demand for the either/or-ness of meaning, something that words a priori must have if reading/communicating is going to have any value. To put it short I wanted to use words musically but did not want to tie them down to their meanings. The words took this as a betrayal of their function and so the Muse left me. The song »Holocaust« is a kind of end point. It doesn’t get much grimmer in the possibility of depicting what heroin does to a body. And yet it is immensely beautiful. This is the turn that is possible in music. The highest poetry aspires to this immensely paradoxical fulfillment of contradiction that is Truth."

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