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Christina Tudor-Sideri

@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social

[in the manuscript]

1153 Posts1690 Follower1265 Folgt
Andrew Wittkop@awestfell.bsky.social · 2w ago

Especially loved these lines leading up to the one Christina quoted: “The smallest things, because they were on the verge of disappearing, meant more than the biggest. I could not accept ignoring a single life.“

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 2w ago

“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
Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 2w ago

“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 ofthose 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.bsky.social · 2w ago

four in the morning with Rilke and his translators— "shall we continue to feel this glorious pain or shall we make ourselves numb?" "what if we bore this splendour within us?" "what if we meshed these wakeful hours and together bore them unrequitedly?" "how would it be?"

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 3w ago

Someone should write of how fulfillment is, paradoxically, a form of finality; of how, for instance, the circle of time closes tightly around lovers, sealing them into a self-contained eternal now; of how absence shapes a void that prevents the present from folding in on itself.

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 3w ago

“Too many things present themselves to me at once as I write to you… There is in my head a storm of thoughts by which I am ceaselessly dazzled and enervated, years of dreams, projects, and anguish that long to be compressed into a phrase, into a single word.” —Gérard de Nerval

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 3w ago

At night, with An Absence of Sea now three months into the world, I think of Nancy’s Shattered Love: “It might well be appropriate that a discourse on love be at the same time a communication of love.” Perhaps even—or especially, as another Jean-Luc says—the apophatic discourse.

Christina Tudor-Sideri@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 3w ago

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, anexhortation 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