Lisa Robertson > Quotes

“The biggest problem with melancholy is that it is more detailed than the world.”
― Lisa Robertson

“The gaze is a machine that can invent belief and can destroy what is tender. In this way it is like an animal or a season or a politics, or like the dark bosco of the park. Our scopic researches aligned us, we liked to think, with the great tradition of the natural philosophers, for whom seeing was indeed and irrevocably inexperienced, and wherein the admission of such inexperience served as an emblem or badge of belonging. What can we claim about the park, about the sorrows that are and were not our own? Nothing. We simply sign ourselves against silence.”
― Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture

“You’re also collecting an archive of the absurdity of value.”
― Lisa Robertson, Cinema of the Present

“And if you yourself are incompatible with your view of the world?”
― Lisa Robertson, Cinema of the Present

“That evening, the monuments of the city were made known by the movements of the bodies.
Each had the dignity of her movements
Each sat at rest as pure and massy gold.
Care weighs so heavily.
Cloth is by nature heavy and falls to earth.
I wanted to describe the difference in sensation.
With grace the curtains when struck with the wind showed the citizens.
I designed all these movements for painting.
The rooms felt patient, like concepts.
I disliked solitude and I also craved it.
I have given thought to making my words clear rather than ornate.”
― Lisa Robertson

“O is a story about how being born, writing, reading and loving as a female is a fall into alignment with the minor time of a nilling. It is also a story about the way resistance animates the figure of an obscenely overdetermined identification with abolishment. We cannot know if the abolishment is of the female, of the identification or of the will. Her figure keeps moving.”
― Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias

“I felt that readerly desire achieves its lastingness, its pleasurable sense of suspended duration, in a complicitous nilling, a charged refusal. That is to say that in reading, I undo a text, as I resist my own autonomy. The undoing animates passivity, all that negates and resists rather than insists. It is a slightly unpleasant thought, and it pertains to the ambivalent discomfort of pornography.   That the descriptive representation of erotic pleasure could produce discomfort is partly the unfortunate result of a reader’s embodiment of sociomoral anti-corporeal values. But the discomfort has to do with other difficulties too. If the pornographic text is specifically a work of the imaginary, we could ask where that imaginary works, what it works upon. I’d like to consider the possibility that Histoire d’O is less the signifier for genital eroticism, than it is the song of inconspicuousness, the place where will and its self-negation twist and enlace.”
― Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose

“Men deft men mental men of loving men all men
Vile men virtuous men same men from which men
Sweet and men of mercy men such making men said
Has each man that sees it
Cry as men to the men sensate
Conceptual recognition the men
And their poverty speaking to the men
Is about timeliness men is about
Previous palpability from which
The problematic politics adorable
And humble especially
Young men of sheepish privilege becoming
Sweet new style”
― Lisa Robertson

“Sometimes my sadness in reading is that I can’t stay. I fall away from the ability to receive. So that the life-long work of reading is the process of situating and elaborating within myself techniques that might guide or permit the lengthening duration and affective expansion of my receptive capacity. Within reading I desire lastingness in tandem with the falling away.   Writing proposes itself as a possible technique towards lastingness. My body becomes a desk. I lay the book on my chest; the notebook was waiting behind it, propped on the sloping lectern of the top of my thighs.”
― Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias

“Essay on Lust Identity can’t be concise. It’s knit from sequins and lust and scatters. Mostly everyone was fucking the seven arts with a willed difficulty. Then for one day there was the collective sensation that we carried our lovely voices as if in baskets, piled up in clear tones like grapes. Each voice had achieved its particular mass. From an interior space we heard the word sequin repeating in relation to leaves and the image was yellow-gold leaves moving on dark water. We had undergone an influence of death which was itself imprinted on such a moving sequin: the breath sequins, the heartbeat sequins, the organs and their slowing articulation sequins which drifting from the foreground appear to dim since they gradually go out to illuminate some event so distant we will never own the moment of its perception. But all this gives the illusion of peacefulness which is inert or at least passive when breaths burst smashing into sobbed words some urgent errand trapped in these letters as labour of light diminishing rhythm and if we fiercely decide to clear the stupid human stuff stop waiting for something to come to the father-studded earth shouldn’t this impatience release itself as a tongue so new weeping stops. In young women enamoured of their own intensities the Latin element wells up and knits from lust the pelt on the wall that’s ocelot or shadepelt or the imagination of matter. Nothing’s frugal. As for us, we want to give the city what lust has never ceased to put together. Young women or other women carrying their lovely voices as if on platters, their ten voices or nine voices in urgent errand dictating the imagination of matter. It is not our purpose to obscure the song of no-knowledge.”
― Lisa Robertson, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip

“With an obscure hesitation one steps into the day and its frame and its costume. Between the puzzlement and its summary abandonment, between the folds of waking consciousness and their subsequent limitation, is a possible city. Solitude, hotels, aging, love, hormones, alcohol, illness – these drifting experiences open it a little. Sometimes prolonged reading holds it ajar. Another’s style of consciousness inflects one’s own; an odd syntactic manner, a texture of embellishment, pause. A new mode of rest. I can feel physiologically haunted by a style. It’s why I read ideally, for the structured liberation from the personal, yet the impersonal inflection can persist outside the text, beyond the passion of readerly empathy, a most satisfying transgression that arrives only inadvertently, never by force of intention. As if seized by a fateful kinship, against all the odds of sociology, the reader psychically assumes the cadence of the text. She sheds herself. This description tends towards a psychological interpretation of linguistics, but the experience is also spatial. I used to drive home from my lover’s apartment at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. This was Vancouver in 1995. A zone of light-industrial neglect separated our two neighbourhoods. Between them the stretched-out city felt abandoned. My residual excitement and relaxation would extend outwards from my body and the speeding car, towards the dilapidated warehouses, the shut storefronts, the distant container yards, the dark exercise studios, the pools of sulphur light, towards a low-key dereliction. I would feel pretty much free. I was a driver, not a pronoun, not a being with breasts and anguish. I was neither with the lover nor alone. I was suspended in a nonchalance. My cells were at ease. I doted on nothing.”
― Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal

“Where did the men get the gold
So extraordinarily
Leaving little of me left
And from what men
(The men that burn in my heart)
I should escape. I am ashamed.
If the men turn towards me
Where are the rights of my solitude?”
― Lisa Robertson, The Men: A Lyric Book

“Now language and money circulate using the same medium, a grammar which is digital, horizontal and magnetic, and politically determined. Maybe all language will be eventually administrated as an institutional money: a contained and centrally monitored instrumental value. On the other hand, the digitization of value could mean that language in its vernacular expression can infiltrate and deform capital’s production and limitation of social power. If it is to be the latter, then vernacular language’s magnetism will reorient the polis.”
― Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias

“What do poems have to do with an ethics of conviviality? Poems are beginners. The urgent social abjection of the poem might act as shelter to a gestured vernacular. Covertly the poem transforms that vernacular to a prosodic gift whose agency flourishes in the bodily time of an institutional and economic evasion. Let us suppose here that poems are those commodious anywheres that might evade determination by continuously inviting their own dissolution in semantic distribution. In”
― Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias

“The gaze is a machine that can invent belief and can destroy what is tender. In this way it is like an animal or a season or a politics, or like the dark bosco of the park. Our scopic researches aligned us, we liked to think, with the great tradition of the natural philosophers, for whom seeing was indeed and irrevocably inexperienced, and wherein the admission of such inexperience served as an emblem or badge of belonging. What can we claim about the park, about the sorrows that are and were not our own?
second walk Nothing. We simply sign ourselves against silence.”
― Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture

“Since I couldn't then write the poems I wanted to write, I would be the poet of the anonymous fuck. This was not so much a substitution as a technique of self-invention, an experimental method for the grandness of becoming. Other poets, I would later learn, had mentors, whatever mentors were. I had fucking.”
― Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal

“We would like to gently expand the technique of intuition because it admits change that remains sincere to experience without depending on the past. Intuition reveals the negative space of habit, carving an urgent threshold from the commonplace.”
― Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture

“Some fantasies are wigs and some are crinolines. Some fantasies are aleatory grottos or downspouts.”
― Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture

“Yet in the city I was discovering, the collage of fantasy, pigment, quotation, and architecture that I walked through daily in my outfits and my obsessions, I came to notice small-scale transpositions, tiny openings within the texture of the present, where choices towards a freed thinking could be possible.”
― Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal

“Do you ever wish to quit the daily comedy of transforming into the I-speaker without abandoning the wilderness of sensing? The sensation isn’t morbid; it is ultimately disinterested.”
― Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal

“I stood in the horizontal and vertical cultures of words like a bar in a graph.”
― Lisa Robertson, R's Boat

“Tattered Europe caking up in corners of abandoned rooms. Your goodness lifts like a cock. Tell me if you haven’t had grief. Whatever grief is becoming. You adore its heavy beauty.”
― Lisa Robertson, Cinema of the Present

“Delusion needs an architecture;”
― Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal

“I am the first suckling among multa, your artifice, your animal, gaudy with cries, gaudy with hunger and lovely with hunger and hunger.”
― Lisa Robertson, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip

“Let feminism be this girl raging at a chandelier.”
― Lisa Robertson, Cinema of the Present

“following the movement of thinking, a woman escapes the confinement of identity, moving into the open of language. The most temporary membranes serve as shelter. Amongst these membranes, speaking begins, plays its tenuous continuities near and in spite of the accreted institutions that compel anyone to obey, violate and buy, to be situated by identity’s grid. But”
― Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias

“Previously I mentioned the spiritual diorama. Just for the satisfaction, I’ll repeat myself. “It is hard to make great and remarkable faults in a spiritual diorama.” We knew our happiness was dependent on such faults—proportional errors, say, which expanded the point where the passional and the social meet, or the misapplied tests for chemical residues, which revealed only the critical extravagance of our narcissism. Yet our attraction was inexplicably towards the diorama.”
― Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture

“For Meschonnic, poetry is the critique of the duality of the sign, and rhythm is the poem’s – and thus the subject’s – agency. It is only within such a continuously enacted critique that the subject can emerge as irrevocably ethical. He used the term “geopoetics” to prise open the conventional cultural and geographic borders that disallow the free movement of subjectivization as continuous rhythm. Within his proposition, politics does not refer to the spatialized economics of governance, but to the necessary proposition of a shared linguistic duration. And, too, within this proposition, we don’t know definitively what language is – this is why it can remain open as an inquiry. Meschonnic’s work on rhythm claims orality as the mode of the political. In his words, in Politique du rythme:”
― Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias

“Chiaroscuro is also the technique of the uncanny. I am etched with unknowing as I continue. I have crossed into a material reserve that permits a maximum of intuition, the “as if ” of a speculative thinking, which is outside of knowledge. Reading shows the wrongness of the habitual reification of “the social” and “the personal” in a binary system of values. It submits this binary to a ruinous foundering. And so, an erotics.”
― Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretiun, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias

“Generosity of the dead. This states The big problem of poetry. Who could Speak for the buildings, for the future of the dead The dead who are implicated in all I can say? On this very beautiful surface Where I want to live”
― Lisa Robertson, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip