The Exquisites: A Conversation with Yahia Lababidi by Alex Stein

Yahia Lababidi is an aphorist, poet, and essayist whose work has appeared in such publications as World Literature Today, Cimarron Review, Rain Taxi, and Philosophy Now. He is the author of a new poetry collection, Fever Dreams, an essay collection, Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Belly Dancing, and a collection of aphorisms, Signposts to Elsewhere, selected as a 2008 Book of the Year by The Independent (UK). Lababidi’s work has appeared in several anthologies, including the bestselling Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing and Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists. He was chosen as a juror for the 2012 Neustadt Prize for International Literature.


Alex Stein calls poetry “the alphabet zoo.”
“We convene on the grounds of the alphabet zoo, and see what there is to see,” he says.
“They are all poets,” Alex continues. “Nietzsche, too. And Kafka. If the term is to have any meaning at all.
“The true poets, the deep poets, destiny’s poets, in prose or verse, madness, eloquence, or silence, are connected to one another by a mutuality of intention.
“This intention goes by many names, but, fundamentally, it is a rage for transformation.”
And then he sighs and quotes Baudelaire. “Anywhere! Just so long as it is out of this world.”

Part One: “If My Devils Are to Leave Me”

I.

Yahia Lababidi: I’d had to set the frail ones aside for a while. They were haunting my mind. All the invalids. Those gilled creatures thrown upon the earth, gasping for a breath from their home atmosphere. I couldn’t bear to pity any more suffering. Each one forever on the verge of nervous collapse. I’d combed their letters. I’d inhabited their journals. I’d read between their lines. I didn’t want to return to those frailties. I was afraid of what echoing responses they might draw from me.

I imagined them, sometimes, those too-sensitive instruments of reception, vibrating to the wild thunder of some approaching stampede, which is also like the palpitations of an impending panic attack.

Nietzsche. Rilke. Vilhelm Ekelund. As I consider them, now, they appear together almost as one exquisite body. If I had to come up with a single name for this triad, it might be The Exquisites.

Or I might call them The Goners, because all of them are completely gone.

They are The Exquisites by temperament, but they are The Goners because the going for them is all in this world they have to which to cling.

Nietzsche writes, “Existence and the world appear justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.”


II.

Lababidi: Style was important to Nietzsche.

In an aphorism titled, “One thing is needful,” Nietzsche writes, “To give style to one’s character. A great and rare art. He exercises it who surveys all that his nature presents in strength and weakness and then molds it into an artistic plan, until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.”

In another one, he writes, “Improving our style means improving our ideas. Nothing less.”

An earlier sculptor of the self, Plotinus put it this way: “Draw into yourself and look and if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful. He cuts away here, he smooths there. He makes this line lighter, that one purer. Cut away all the excess. Straighten all that is crooked. Bring light to all that is overcast. Labor to make all one glow or beauty and never cease chiseling your statue. . . .”

“The style is the man himself,” writes George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon.

For Nietzsche, as for Rilke and Ekelund, to write was to cast a spell.

It begins as attention and builds into trance.

It is not so much writing, sometimes, as it is a recovering of the territories lost in what Christianity calls “the fall.”

That garden, given us as birthright, from which some say we were exiled, and others that we simply wandered away.


III.

Lababidi: Returning to Nietzsche on this occasion, I am reminded how much he is not what he seems to be. And how much it is he who is to blame for this confusion.

I’ve been preparing myself for our talk by reading a collection of writings called Conversations with Nietzsche, a few leaves of memory from some few who had spent time with him, spoken with the man himself. If you can believe such a thing possible.

That history lives with us a while, and breathes, before it passes into its own ghost.

Lou Andreas-Salomé, the woman whom Nietzsche referred to as his “twin soul,” was twenty-one when they met. He was thirty-seven.

Nietzsche was smitten like he never had been before and never would be again.

Salomé is particularly constituted to hear Nietzsche, and what she recognizes immediately upon engaging him is his “religious” temperament.

One experienced from him, she writes, the sense “that he will step forth as the proclaimer of a new religion, and then it will be such a one as recruits heroes to be its disciples.”

Early on in their conversations, Nietzsche confides to Salomé that he considers himself a “tertium quid,” which means “a disembodied third person or entity.”

It composes, Nietzsche told her. “I am neither mind nor body. . . .”

There is never a good time to remind anyone that so-and-so eventually went mad.

Nietzsche spent the last ten years of his life mad.

His last extended act of sanity was his autobiography, Ecce Homo (“Behold the Man”).

In that autobiography there is a poem which we may call “The Gondola Song.”

People forget this, but Nietzsche penned more than a few poems during his tenure as furious world guardian and crisis-hour moralizer.

“And my soul,” the poem reads, “a stringed instrument, / Sang, touched by invisible hands.”

It is this song that bursts from Nietzsche’s lips when he has gone mad and is being escorted on a night train to the clinic.

I imagine his escort, a friend who was sent to retrieve him, a sensitive person who believes he is doing a good deed, a service to one troubled beyond bearing by the sight of a world so unashamed of the baseness of its enterprise, a world so shocking with self-deceit, a world so violent.

There is never a good time to mention that Nietzsche may have gone mad from pity.

I imagine the other passengers. There must have been some. Middle class. Tired. Deep within the play of their own private lives. At the sound of his sudden exaltation, inclining slightly toward him.

“And my soul, a stringed instrument, / Sang, touched by invisible hands.”

In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche had written, “The most fortunate author is one who is able to say as an old man that all he had of life-giving, invigorating, uplifting, enlightening thoughts and feelings still lives on in his writings, and that he himself is only the gray ash, while the fire has been rescued and carried forth everywhere.”

Is this what had occurred? Is this what the other passengers were witnessing?

And what of the escort? That friend who accompanied him to the end of his genius and through the door of madness?


IV.

Lababidi: Nietzsche came up with at least two conceptions almost over-full with crazy wisdom.

First, his idea of the Overman. “Man is something that shall be overcome,” writes Nietzsche. “Man is a rope tied between beast and Overman. A rope over an abyss. . . . What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”

And his idea called the Eternal Recurrence.

The concept of Eternal Recurrence is a rather astounding idea for an individual to simply encounter. Even an individual of Nietzsche’s capacities.

Nietzsche, we can agree, was not a rationalist. Fine, nor is life, nor any other thing, rational. We accept this about Nietzsche, with the genius. But even accepting this, the conception of Eternal Recurrence is still almost too irrational. One would have to be a little crazy in the not-necessarily-romantic sense, one would have to have looked pretty deeply into the abyss, just to think of it, wouldn’t one?

And, yet, it is a conception that affirms life in the most profound sense.

Given his context, and knowing his biography and knowing that he had rejected Christianity, and that he had rejected God and the promises of an immortal hereafter, the Eternal Recurrence is Nietzsche’s way of sanctifying every day.

It is the big idea that asked of his every action, every day, are you prepared to do this over and over again for eternity?

“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you, ‘This life as you now live it, as you have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more, and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.’ . . . Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!’”

We know Nietzsche’s answer to be the latter. His answer is amor fati. Love of his fate. His answer is yes! Eternally. Yes! With all the loneliness and the suffering. It was worth it. He is prepared to affirm it. All of it. To celebrate the adventure of the life of the spirit.

Of amor fati, he once wrote, “A formula for greatness in the human being: That one wants nothing to be different. Not merely to bear what is necessary. Still less to conceal it. But to love it.”


Part Two: “I’m Afraid My Angels Will Take Flight As Well.”

V.

Lababidi: The solitude seems to be the key to everything. For Nietzsche, for Rilke, for Ekelund. Solitude enough that they can hear the echo of their longing returning as a concentrated drop, direct from heaven. They want to catch it before it lands, before anything human mixes with it.

These drops, rescued one at a time, are what make for their, frankly, incandescent prose and poetry.

The drops are where the writing comes from and the proof of what they have lived, because each drop glistens with that afterbirth.

Rilke calls poems “experiences.”

One direct heartbeat from the body of creation.


VI.

Lababidi: One more glance over Nietzsche’s historic situation before moving on to Rilke.

I do see in Nietzsche the lineage of the ancient Greeks. And I think he would have seen himself, to a large extent, this way, as an anachronistic ancient Greek. It’s almost a joke that he was not born into that time. He responded so deeply, on so many levels, to the sensibility. There is a paradoxical aphorism that he wrote: “Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously, at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearances, to believe in forms, tones, words and the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial out of profundity.”


VII.

Lababidi: On to Rilke, now, but carrying with us, perhaps, this Greek inheritance.

On Socrates’ ladder, the inheritance begins with sexual love, and progresses to the aesthetic appreciation of form in all bodies, and then to the love of beautiful souls, and finally to a contemplation of the ideal form.

In “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (Stephen Mitchell’s translation), Rilke writes:

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

“Boo!” wouldn’t have surprised me more, the first time I read the ending, than did “You must change your life.”

Here is Rilke, beginning in admiration and ending in awe. Here is Rilke, a rapt witness in the territory of the sublime. “That beauty which . . . / Hath terror in it” of which Milton wrote.

Quite a notion, that a human being could realize such a poem.

Though if such a poem were already in one, it would be equally surprising if it could be contained.


VIII.

Lababidi: Rilke was another sculptor of the self, always chiseling at his statue, so it makes sense that he fell under the influence of the sculptor Auguste Rodin. This is the ethic that Rodin imparted to Rilke: There is only work.

Rodin also gave Rilke a way to see newly. And his engagement with Rodin coincided with his “thing” poems. Poems in which the “thing” is definite.

In a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé (the same Salomé who had known Nietzsche, fifteen years later would become Rilke’s lover and confidante), Rilke writes, “The thing is definite, the art thing must be more definite still, removed from all accident, wrested away from all obscurity, withdrawn from time and given over to space. It has become enduring, capable of eternity. The model seems. The art thing is.”

Thanks, at least in part, to Rodin, he is now in a more concrete place.

And it is from this place that “Archaic Torso of Apollo” comes.

This “thing” which is out there stuffed with brilliance from the inside, and gleaming with power, took him. He sent it back, and it returned to him again, this time in the form of transformation.


IX.

Lababidi: There is no backing out once you have committed to this project, this self-sculpting, to match yourself to your ideals.

Rilke writes:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

This is Mitchell’s translation of the first passage from the first of the ten beatific Duino Elegies Rilke wrote in a few-weeks’ burst of poetic power, in retreat at the Duino castle. And with these elegies, by every standard, Rilke proved himself to himself.

Even five years after the writing of these ten elegies, he was content to play mage, to compose his endless, gorgeous, crystalline letters of instruction, of elucidation, of connection. The letters were his pleasure, because he had gotten the fire out of himself. He sang his song and he is now the ash.

Not unhappy to be ash for the last five years of his life, is how one might describe it. There is a sense in Rilke of having achieved, and that achievement was not so much the deed of composition as it was the achievement of being ready, being prepared, being patient, and being willing to let this beauty and terror come through him when the time for it was upon him.

One year before Rilke passed away, he was asked to elaborate on the elegies, which had come to him as lightning comes to a lightning rod.

He begins by speaking on the coexistence of the material and the spiritual realms.

“It was within the power of the creative artist to build a bridge between two worlds, even though the task was almost too great for a man. Everywhere transience is plunging into the depths of Being. It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves, so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, invisible, inside of us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”


Part Three: Heritage

X.

Lababidi: I must now go on immediately to Ekelund.

Vilhelm Ekelund was a literary soul-gazer.

In an aphorism, he writes, “There are passages in the works of some authors that in a way lie outside the frame of their writing. Passages where you suddenly feel the man talking is not the literary worker So-and-So, but the human being high above all ‘literature.’ Clear, deep, good—but also with a wild tone, flying through the soul, like the scream of a bird above a desolate ocean bay.”


XI.

Lababidi: Rilke writes, “Space reaches from us and construes the world. / To know a tree in its true element, / throw inner-space around it, from that pure / abundance in you.”

The Exquisites all cultivated these exquisite states, in order to intensify their inwardness and access the numinous.

That’s just something I thought worth mentioning.

Ekelund writes, “How did I become a hunter for treasure? When I saw a climate (a land) in my nature, in the traditions of my blood which was my heritage. Then I began to realize that the strife of my whole existence was this: to prove my right to inherit . . . ”

Ekelund is a discovery I owe to the Swedish poet Boel Schenlaer, whom I met at an international festival. I was raving about Nietzsche and the aphorism, presumptively, as it turned out. “You must read Ekelund,” she insisted.

I understood why immediately upon opening the first book. The way you know immediately upon meeting people.

Ekelund was born in 1880 (Nietzsche was still around then) and died in 1949. He began as a poet, and a gifted, accomplished poet, so that by twenty-three years of age he was considered Sweden’s foremost poet. Then, being the radical temperament that he must have been—to keep company, as I see it, with the other Exquisites—he renounced poetry as sentimental and did not publish any more verse.

He practiced a kind of literary soul-gazing. “Books must be lived to be read,” he writes. He saw into the writers he read in ways that others don’t. He composed essays and aphorisms.

He discovered Nietzsche at twenty-seven. He turned to Nietzsche “for learning, strength and solace.”

Nietzsche taught him that it is possible to be a great poet of ideas writing in prose.

By his forties, Ekelund wrote exclusively in aphorisms.

The aphorism integrates both existential and moral commitment, and that is what Ekelund was after. No less!

Ekelund writes, “An even accumulation of divine sunshine, slow and blissful, no artist’s fever with repercussions of tumbling into darkness. My worship of the sun begins in the autumn, culminates in February.”

Ekelund writes, “The real poet is a mystic.”

Ekelund would not write for money and lived sometimes in the most heartbreaking poverty. He tied a rope around his waist for a belt and slept as a vagrant. He led a terrible life and desperate.

He didn’t have Rilke’s gift for cultivating princesses and baronesses.

He collapsed with a lung ailment and was in recovery when he wrote The Second Light.

As he was recovering, he began to hear himself breathe, and with that awareness his breath changed altogether.

He was quieted somehow.

Nietzsche had advised that no thoughts could be trusted but those that came to one while walking.

Ekelund, who would never stop thinking, took this advice for his medicine.



Alex Stein’s other “Conversations with Yahia Lababidi” have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI Online, The Gulf Coast Review, The Pinch, and The Literary Review. Stein’s recent book is Made-Up Interviews With Imaginary Artists (Ugly Duckling Presse). (10/2011)


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The Prayer of Attention:
A Conversation with Yahia Lababidi
by Alex Stein

Yahia Lababidi is the author of Signposts to Elsewhere (Jane Street Press), selected as a 2008 Book of the Year by The Independent (UK). He has two books forthcoming: The Great Contrarians: A Study of Nietzsche and Wilde (Thee Hellbox Press) and a collection of literary and cultural essays, Trial by Ink (Common Ground Publishing). A selection of his aphorisms appeared in AGNI Online in 2009.


Yahia believes the condition of the artist is exalted.
“Even if the artist lives in disregard?” I ask.
“Yes,” Yahia insists.
“Even if he is scorned and impoverished?” I ask.
“Still, yes,” says Yahia.
“What does that mean, then—exalted?” I ask.
“It means,” says Yahia, “called to service.”
“Oh,” I say, a sinking feeling coming over me, “you mean that soldiery of light, that brigade, born to march into the
Valley of the Shadow?”
“Yes,” replies Yahia, “precisely!”

There is a moment in the life of Rimbaud when he comes to realize that he is a poet, but that it is not his fault. He writes: “It is wrong to say, ‘I think.’ One has to say, ‘I am thought.’ I is another. Too bad for the wood that finds itself a violin.” For me, that tells all. I haven’t studied the lives of the mystics as closely as I have the lives of the artists but I do see the correspondences. The life of the artist may not be apparently monastic, or holy, but there is the same sense of sacrifice, of vocation, of having been entrusted with something greater and dearer than one’s own happiness. Imagine! To hold something more dear than one’s own happiness. That cannot be a voluntary thing. We want, as much as we can, to be happy. Isn’t this true? Yet there are these strange, luminous creatures who recognize that there is something to which they must submit, in order to be fully realized. It is the wood finding itself a violin.

Kafka is another. Another artist as mystic. Another who recognizes this affinity. In his journal he writes, “This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.” Again, the calling. Again the gift-slash-curse privileged. The whole life structured toward developing the necessary faculties, the necessary conditions. Rimbaud must be drunk and whoring all the time, Kafka has literally to abstain and deny himself everything.

Might I be permitted one more quotation? Kierkegaard. He was another who saw his life very much as a sacrifice. “A little pinch of spice,” he writes in his journal. “Here, a man must be sacrificed. He is needed to impart a particular taste to the rest.” He is just a concentrated flavor, that is to say. He doesn’t take it personally. In another place, he writes something to the effect that, a writer is lost when he confounds himself with what he has produced and ceases to think of himself as merely an instrument. All of these lives, all of these sometimes protracted convulsions of living, contain something of a renunciation, a continual giving up, or self-limiting, at their core.

I have sought out such artists, combed their thoughts for these instances, because, from very early on, they helped me to make sense of my own sometimes reluctant yearnings. In their lives and words I heard the echoes of my own submission. Through them, I received confirmation and solace.

I was eighteen years old when I began to guess that I too might be a writer. The change stunned me. I had known myself one way and that knowing was silenced. I had been loud and cheap, interested in the noise of the world and in adding to that noise, and now I withdrew and began asking myself if there was a specific purpose to my being and if that purpose had to do with writing. I didn’t want to have anything to do with anyone until I could figure out what was happening. Eventually I understood that I was never going to figure out what was happening. Some things, some people, some ways of living just fell away.

I was attending college in D.C. I went through several roommates, almost without noticing them. I was absorbed with books, those dead friends who were telling me: “Come, let’s go this direction, let’s try this pathway . . .” The books were almost always accidental. I don’t know how to say where they came from, except to quote from Rumi: “What you are seeking is also seeking you.” One led to another. A series of spirits come to try and draw my own spirit out.

Kafka was the first. I remember reading “A Hunger Artist.” In total immersion, my long frame crouched, like a shadow or a gargoyle, against the wall of my dorm room. I didn’t know then that Kafka had revised this as he was dying and that it was a parable for his spiritually dissatisfied life, but it struck me, at eighteen, as the most profound encounter I had yet had with myself. You know the story, of course. No one is interested any longer in the hunger artist. Professional fasting has lost its cachet with the public. The hunger artist is wasting away, forgotten, in the dirty straw of a carnival cage. Weakened almost to the point of death by his fanatical pursuit, he is at last removed by the overseer, and his place taken by a vital, bright-eyed panther. “I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” the hunger artist tells the overseer. “We do admire it,” the overseer replies. “But you shouldn’t admire it,” the hunger artist continues perversely, “because I have to fast, I can’t help it. It is just that I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, I would have stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” That was the thought that undid me. That this spiritual food that one was craving simply could not be found. And that nothing else would do. Better to starve, then, says the hunger artist. Better to starve and to make of that starvation one’s nourishment.

I thought of this transformation that I was undergoing, this shedding of old skin, as too private to explain to anyone. When I had to be around people who knew me as I had been, I hid. I put on the best mask I could find. I didn’t know exactly what was happening. It looked like a kind of crisis, but it wasn’t. Or, rather, it was, but it was a fruitful crisis. The only way I could explain it to myself, even, was in the composition of dialogues, monologues, parables and, finally—this was the form that gave me the most relief, that offered the deepest bloodletting—aphorisms. In the aphorism, I didn’t have to say “I,” I could just let the thing speak itself, so I didn’t feel compromised or embarrassed or vulnerable. A shy truth that could also be a general truth. I wrote, “The thoughts we choose to act upon define us to others. The ones we do not, define us to ourselves.” They had enough of an air of mystery and ambiguity that I could bring them out and not feel exposed. I wrote, “Impulses we attempt to strangle only develop stronger muscles.” It was with these aphorisms that I understood—accepted!—that I was in it up to the neck. I showed my aphorisms to more people than I should have. Some responded with arched eyebrows, some with indifference or incomprehension, but those who were close enough to me, my dear friends, lovers, or family, understood that I was confessing in code.

In the culture I come from, a saying is a magical thing. For my grandparents, a saying was something they were happy to hear, and if I happened to have written it, that was good too. I grew up with grandmothers, both maternal and paternal, who spoke almost exclusively, at times, in sayings. A string of proverbs. Sing-songy, witty-wise remarks. When I found myself writing such things, it made sense for me to share them. You share a saying. You quote a saying. They come in handy when you are tongue-tied. My grandmother’s sayings were mostly commentaries on the divide between men and women. How men are dogs. How the man will be lying on one woman’s breast and already considering the next woman. How love will prove your undoing, but without love what taste does life have?  How, rather the shadow of a man than the shadow of four walls. Not sayings that necessarily spoke to me as a child, but the idea of speaking in sayings, and of generalizing from particulars, stuck with me.

As I think of it now, it was Wilde who first turned me toward the territory that would inform my aphorisms. I was sixteen when I read The Picture of Dorian Gray. I stole the book from a classroom in my school because I liked the cover. It showed a ghoulish, vital, aged face in a gaudy picture frame. Standing next to it, locked into its gaze, it seemed, was a sophisticated, exquisite dandy, bearing scarf  and cane, looking, as they say, pretty as a picture, and as unreal as a picture, too. I was interested in traditional horror stories at that time. I read . . . well, I read Stephen King. And Dorian Gray was my point of transition. From physical horror to spiritual horror, I suppose. I took the book home and read it through in one night. Then I read everything of Wilde’s that I could get my hands on. I was writing already, but I wasn’t yet writing truly. You know Kafka’s line about literature being an axe for the frozen sea within us? The frozen sea within me was still very much frozen and I didn’t mind that it was frozen. I liked it frozen. I skated happily on it.

What impressed me in Wilde was his ability to play with serious subjects. To make light of them. I thought I could pick up that quality for myself. Tossing off, with seeming gaiety, a thought that was at base painful and dark. Born of real suffering and insight. Every part of Dorian Gray spoke to me. I highlighted almost the entire book. I underlined more passages than I left unmarked. I scribbled in the margins furiously. He said he was summing up the entirety of existence in a phrase. Anyway, he was summing up in a phrase the entirety of my existence. It was my first exposure to the philosophical concept of detachment. To become the spectator of one’s life is to become detached from the suffering of life, he suggested. That hit me. I didn’t know why, or how deeply, until a couple of years later, when I started working on my own detachment. It is this detachment, in its variety of permutations, that I admired in the lives of the artists whom I would eventually take for my models. This supreme indifference, even in the hardest of times, to one’s own welfare. So long as one could pull off the alchemist’s trick of turning it into art, it no longer mattered how tortured the romance, how isolated the life, or how penniless the pocket. On the contrary, the more one gave up, the more authority was vested in the creation. The beauty lay in the tension between what one had surrendered in pursuit of the achievement and what had been achieved.

And then there was Nietzsche. I came upon his work in a college English class. There was no reason for him to be on that syllabus, but there he was. Those were the days when I would read and think without sleeping, sometimes for two or three days in a row, so that I could hold on to whatever intensity I was experiencing and magnify it. If I was reading and thinking and not sleeping, I’d enter a state that was like  rocks being struck together. Sparks would rise: ideas and aphorisms. I treated all of my reading at that time as if I were being granted audience with the writer, and in order to honor that audience I had to come prepared. I had to be as attentive as possible, in order that I could sound the depths of that writer. In that way, too, I was learning to sound my own depths.

I read Thus Spake Zarathustra first. I read it like a sleepwalker. I breathed it in. A shocked inhalation, almost unconscious. When I read it again, maybe a decade later, more intentionally, in the desert outside of Cairo, it was like a long slow exhalation that let me finally examine what I had received. I went to the desert periodically. Pilgrimages to empty and refill myself. On the occasion of my re-reading of Nietzsche, I was in an apartment near the Red Sea, among mountains. One could stay in an apartment. One could stay in a hut. Or one could simply bring one’s sleeping bag and lay out upon the sands. I read Zarathustra straight through. Every time I go to the desert it is with the intention and in the belief that I am going to encounter that part of myself that is not entirely accessible in other circumstances. In the desert, there is nothing to hide behind, nowhere and no one to turn to. It is where all those crazy hermits and mystics—my people!—had their visions. It’s an extreme environment and I suppose I felt that if I flirted with that extremity, but in a committed, honorable way, a breakthrough might be granted me. If you were somehow avoiding yourself and you went to the desert,  somehow you would meet. The rumblings of eternity were there, if you could just be still enough, quiet enough, and indifferent enough to your self, to your many selves, to your many silly selves. So taking Nietzsche to the desert was a gesture toward meeting both him and the him-that-was-also-me.

There, reading the lonely words of Nietzsche, I came to realize the necessity of that loneliness. Loneliness as prerequisite for the sublime sensations or epiphanies I sought. You could be alone around people, alone in your living room, but if you reached toward this elemental loneliness—alone with the sand, the rock, the water, the stars, and the sea—you could experience a deeper innocence and purity of perception and as a result become a better witness to the life inside you and around you. Nietzsche talks about “the price.” And I understood that, there in the desert. The harsh loneliness of his life had given him the richness of himself. There is a desert quality to Nietzsche’s writing, I think. It doesn’t care much for you. It may, perhaps, want you there, but it doesn’t need you there. It doesn’t seek to appease the reader. It is not eager to please. It wants only to declare its harsh, bold truths, and if you can stand it, then stay.

Heidegger said something about longing that seems to me to sum up what I am trying to express here about loneliness. After all, it is not the loneliness that matters. The loneliness is a side effect, a symptom of the longing. There was a longing in me that I didn’t realize, that I couldn’t understand—not until I read Heidegger. He said, “Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.” Yes! I could almost brush it with my fingertips! But it was not right there. I was trafficking with metaphysics, with mere hope, when in fact it was very far away. It was not mine. When it came within reach, which happened only very occasionally, everything was perfect and nothing else mattered or could matter. But it was not mine, this great, calming beauty. So of course I would lose it. Of course I would stumble. The agony of the nearness of the distant. That was it. That was the great thing I was groping toward, the great thing that the aphorisms, on occasion, brought me upon.

One more thing before we finish. Every time I thought of this conversation that we were about to have, this one that we are now having, an image would recur in my mind. I kept trying to clarify to myself this idea of the artist as mystic, the artist and the mystic, and their disparate ways of summoning the spirit, and I kept coming back to the idea of attention. Attention is the artist’s mode of prayer. Picasso speaks, for example, of taking off his shoes before entering his studio. Like Moslems do when they enter their mosques. That was his way of sanctifying his art. The artist prays through attention.  I think of those times when I fly in my dreams. I think there must be some connection between how I fly in my dreams and this state I sometimes come to in writing when I feel that I am aloft, ecstatic. In my dreams, it is blinking that brings me to the ground. When I blink, I begin to fall. When I have fallen, I don’t know how to get back into the air. But if there is a formula, I think it must have to do with attention. Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, someone has said. So long as one’s eyes are wide open, there is that chance, again, that one will soar.

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Excerpt from The Artist as Mystic, by Alex Stein and Yahia Lababidi


There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.  —Kafka, Notebooks



Alex Stein: What do you think is “the world” of which Kafka writes? What do you make of what seems to be the slightly eroticized imagery with which it concludes? Could one call this aphorism pure sublimation? Simply the dream of an impotent? Where does one draw the line in looking to literary figures for answers or sustenance?


Yahia Lababidi: Before anything else, “the world” of which Kafka writes in this aphorism is a present moment that he, as a creative artist, happens to be alive to and, with that present moment, alive, as well, to its present possibilities. I think, also, that “the world” of which Kafka writes in this aphorism is the ‘there-world’ into which he enters to write, as the yogis enter theirs to breathe. Do you know this story? Kafka has just written the most threadbare sentence possible, ‘He looked out the window,’ and having written such a sentence wrote immediately upon its heels, ‘I know that it is already perfect.’ Now, isn’t that striking? That this nest of neuroses, this terribly insecure man, could write—could know!—‘it is already perfect.’ From where did this uncharacteristic confidence come? This sounded note of surety?

During his encounters with ‘the world,’ Kafka is no longer quite himself and his hand is being steadied. Just recently, a poet friend shared some Buddhist teachings, and one of the fables I think comes very close to what I am trying to express. The sun is always out there, he said, but we walk around with clouds above us, with their cloud shadows upon us. If we can slip out from beneath those clouds or if we can stretch up our arms and muck those clouds about a bit, the sun will shine upon us. The sacred world wants to shine upon us.

But where is it, this ‘out there’? Where is it, this sacred ‘there-world’ to which we would go? I like the word interstice. A gap or a break in something generally continuous. A paradox, like the snake that swallows its own tail until it has swallowed itself entirely. A double-joint in time, or a space that is only a bit of fabric that gives, and one can just slip on through it. The interstate.

As a young reader, I envied the invalids. And the invalids spoke of their invalid status as enviable. Gibran and Proust, come to mind. Both were bed-ridden. Being bed-ridden was their permit to dream. It was a special dispensation, really, an exemption against engagement with the tedious responsibilities of the here-world. Invalidism gave them the license, and the luxury, to go ‘there’. To go and seek the twilight hour.

Some invalids are life-long. Kafka probably romanticized himself so. Turned his affliction into a badge of honor. Proust once wrote that the neurotics have given us everything. They are the ones who have saved the world, created the world, made the world worthwhile. Invalidism eased Kafka of the burden of himself.  Eased him of the chattering fears that told him, ‘You must do better!’ That told him, “It will always be beyond your abilities, whatever you choose.”

I have been thinking, too, of fairy tales. The idea of Alice and the rabbit hole and its connection with physics. I don’t know much about physics. I’m just another artist-groupie, but I am captivated by the idea of a wormhole. A hypothetical tunnel connecting disparate points in light-space, with the attendant, hypothetical, possibility of time travel. None of this is encouraged by hard science, but neither is it entirely refuted. Disputed, more-like. This idea of a shortcut between worlds, which, for me, translates as a shortcut into creative space, where inspiration is able to move with more agility and vision to engage with more dexterity. The world down the rabbit hole. One moment you are in the here-world and the next you are in the there-world. But, how? That is the crazy part. How does one devise a way of getting there? Or at least how does one devise a way of not blocking oneself from getting there?

As a teenager I read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the first volume in C.S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia.” Before, I had read only horror genre literature. The Lewis book worked for me brilliantly on the level of pure horror, and then it went much further. As a teenager, I wasn’t aware of Narnia’s sacramental undercurrents. Or that Lewis was a ‘Christian Apologist’ (as he has been dubbed) and Aslan a sacrificial Christ figure. None of that holy apparatus was relevant to me then, but it is relevant to me  now. I return to the book both for scholarship and for Narnia. I like the idea of a closet, that eponymous ‘wardrobe’, through which the children can only sometimes gain access to Aslan, who is Narnia. I like how it shows that the wormhole experience cannot be forced. It loves to happen, perhaps, but its ways are inscrutable. One moment it is fur coats in a rickety wardrobe, but push a little harder, it becomes fir trees in a snowy forest, satyrs, fauns, and all possibilities.

I have a poem that describes something like this:

My hours are afraid of my days
mistrust placing their feet down
suspicious of finding a foothold
tick-tock they tip-toe self-consciously

My days are afraid of my years
never able to forget themselves
standing around as I try to sleep
shifting their weights, shuffling fears

In the interstices, it is timeless
unwound and happily unfound
there we slip through the sieve
between those immeasurable spaces.



That’s really where it all is. Between those immeasurable spaces. The crazy part is getting there.



The Repressed, Deviously, in Masquerade

YL: Kafka wrote many poems, but he did not call them poems. There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you. This is an aphorism constructed of mystic stations. One might call it a prose fragment or bit of wandering mage come to roost. I myself have no objection to calling it a poem. But specifically it is an aphorism constructed of mystic stations. Like stations of the cross. When I read There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen, I think of Pascal’s precept, that all our difficulties arise our inability to sit quietly in a room, alone. That if one could be still enough, if one could endure one’s own company, if one could remain present. If only one could. If only. Kafka is addressing our tendency to flinch. We flinch, for self-preservation, when we are with ourselves too long, because it quickly becomes too much. The boredom, the suffering, the restlessness. Don’t even listen, just wait, he says. Then, immediately: Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. He is a reluctant Messiah, our Franz. Distrustful of his own authority. He must immediately make qualifications, equivocate. He bids us ‘wait’. Then, backpedaling hurriedly, insists: Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. Because even the most modest expectation might scare it (the ‘there-world’) away.

We sometimes strain for feeling as though sitting outside a foxhole with our guns, waiting for a fox. The fox never leaves. It will never leave. Because it knows it is being hunted. Watched-for. Expected.

Those lines, ‘The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you…’ bring me goose bumps and, yes, tears and, yes, I do think a sublimated eroticism is partly accountable for the charge, the zap. I think of Nietzsche, especially in Zarathustra, ‘the waves are heaving breasts,’ etc. That from a man who may have seen all of one pair throughout his adult life. In a letter to Milena, Kafka will write: To try and catch in one night, by black magic, hastily, heavily breathing, helpless, obsessed, to try and obtain by black magic what every day offers to open eyes!

Alas, poor Milena! Imagine being the recipient of such a letter, imagine being a young woman learning about her young man, and receiving such a letter. How could it not sting? And imagine being the one who had sent such a letter. Imagine being the young man. How can such a letter ever be lived down? It is too big to regret. It is Van Gogh’s ear. It is too much to take back. It is yesterday’s moon. Sometimes a voice out from the chaos of spirits cries and one finds oneself having written. Can one say that? Or perhaps it is only poetry. The young man, in fear of the young woman, writing of sack-cloth and ash, wishing his body would be burnt away. Nothing more to it. Whatever is dammed must find another outlet. Whoever is damned must find another heaven.

The Ecstatics from my tradition, the Persian tradition, could be wildly erotic, but because they were addressing themselves to God they felt safe. For Kafka, the mystic ritual he called ‘writing’ was his safe zone. Where he could let it all out and breathe light like a spirit fish swimming between stars. Mysticism is desire, like everything else is, and the desire of mysticism is a flaming arrow launched toward union. That union of the mystic, fire reaching to fire, no less than any carnal union, is an erotic experience. An ecstasy in the specifically Greek sense of ekstasis, meaning ‘outside oneself.’

Part of what we read in Kafka is too personal. Tedious neurasthenic considerations. Documents for the doctors at the Sanitarium of Hypochondria. The repressed, finding its way, surfacing, deviously, in masquerade. And part of what we read in Kafka is a universalized, lived, sensuality. Shy experience of the self as other. Veiled encounters with the beloved. Butt-naked tusslings. And why not? To get there means ‘union’, long longed-for (or, it may be, ‘reunion,’ long hoped for) and it induces bliss. The ‘impotent’ who eroticizes the world, for me, he is the prophet. And I’m not the only one who thinks this. Lawrence Durrell, in his novel Justine, writes, “the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets [!]…all who have been deeply wounded in their sex.” The statement lacks proportion, but there is truth in it. To be wounded in that way is to dam a furious river that begins, as Rilke tells us, ‘in the sky.’ ‘Making music is another way of making babies,’ writes Nietzsche. And yes that is sublimation and yes it does color thought, but doesn’t it color thought in wonderfully feverish flesh tones and isn’t all that fleshly frailty and failing a living part of Kafka’s meaning for us—a necessary aspect of its divinity? Isn’t all that partly its sacrament? And isn’t the chaos and aren’t the death-thralls just autumn leaves in their season?

As for your last question: Where does one draw the line in turning to these literary figures for answers or sustenance, or for that matter tips on elegant living? Where does Kafka end and literature begin? Would I read Kafka’s unpublished journals? Yes. Would I read Kafka’s laundry list? Yes. Where does one draw the line? At what he agreed not to burn? I am with Max Brod. Everything Kafka wrote (or for that matter said or did) is interesting because whatever he does, he is still doing the work. And the work is just self-work, but so, too, could be said of  anything any of us do, in any capacity, fence-mending, love-making, book-binding, that it is just self-work. With Kafka we are given the opportunity to witness a self-work master-technician seeking, with elegant precision, his own hinterlands, focused in a state of such contained urgency, that it is almost a trance of clairvoyance . Kafka is us, without the lying.

Shouldn’t that change the way I read him? It should. And it does. It ups the volume on everything. Even if he only clears his throat, it rings like thunder. Because the fact of the matter is he has something thunderous in him to say, and the fact of the matter is we know that he does. That is the point. Some of this stuff, sure, it can be more navel gazing, more convolutions, but what we cannot fail to recognize in Kafka is that this is a guy who is wrestling with his angel, and that commands our attention. What he is up against, so are we up against.

In the two slender notebooks, those two blue octavo notebooks, meant for school-children, we get his private conversations. And in private conversations all of us tend to think more childishly, more innocently, more directly, about hope and suffering, good and evil. If Kafka were to have translated those private conversations into public fictions or such-like, something that could have been folded twice and shot skyward under cloak of literature, his style would have to have been necessarily more self-conscious, more ambiguous. But, because these were entirely private conversations, and because they were left so, they became perfect mirrors. Looking glasses. Beyond the fairy tale of the bardic. Verging on the estate of the vatic.

Listen, now: Aphorism #16: A cage went in search of a bird. That’s all of it. That’s all there is. No root. No soil. Bloomed in thin air. Sometimes from Kafka, we get a truth that just is. A white, as it were, flower lapel that is not worn in irony.

That cautionary reprobate Charles Baudelaire once wrote, “The greatest wile of the devil is to convince us that he does not exist.” This echoes many of Kafka’s octavo notebook aphorisms about the idea of evil. It’s almost the cleric or the choir boy in Kafka writing at such times. At another level, though, it is as if he is some august theologian, transmitting a soul-map in code.

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Alex Stein and Yahia Lababidi have embarked on an ecstatic series of conversations – with themselves, with one other and with their literary masters. This is an excerpt from their collection of calculated hallucinations: “The Artist as Mystic” (Onesuch Press). Other spirits summoned in this literary séance include: Nietzsche, Rilke and Kierkegaard.

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