![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/image.jpg\")
<\/p>\nBy Roberto Bazlen & Alex Andriesse.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Roberto Bazlen<\/strong> was born in Trieste in 1902, at a time when that city was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was German, his mother Italian \u2014 a double inheritance reflected in his name. Although Bazlen published nothing (apart from translations and a few short articles) in his lifetime, he was a force to reckon with in Italian literary life. He translated Freud and Jung. He advocated for the publication of Italo Svevo. And he helped found Adelphi Edizioni \u2014 the prestigious Italian publishing house helmed by Roberto Calasso, who once said of Bazlen: \u201cHe taught me more than anyone else, without teaching anything”.<\/p>\n The notebooks Roberto Bazlen kept between 1945 and his death in 1965 were not, like the notebooks of many writers, intended to be read by an admiring posterity. Their entries were written out of personal necessity, and for that reason, among others, they reward rereading.<\/p>\n Even when he was writing for publication, Bazlen’s style was telegraphic. \u201cI think it’s no longer possible to write books,” he posits in one entry:<\/p>\n That’s why I don’t write books\u2014 The irony, of which Bazlen was well aware, is that his footnotes often require his readers to supply footnotes of their own. Some of his entries are traditionally aphoristic: \u201cMegalomania is the first step toward greatness,” or \u201cIntelligence is a tool \u2014 and this tool has ended up in the hands of morons”. Others suggest, in the course of a sentence fragment, enough material for an essay: \u201cWestern mythology gives us the characters of the drama, not the drama,” or \u201cTo die fulfilled and curious<\/em>“. <\/p>\n What follows are two separate sections from Bazlen’s notebooks which he himself wrote under the rubric of \u201cDeath”. They form only a small part of the wealth of fragments, false starts, and private letters that compose Notes Without a Text and Other Writings<\/em>, introduced and edited by Calasso, published for the first time in English by Dalkey Archive Press.<\/p>\n \u2014 Alex Andriesse<\/p>\n DEATH (I)<\/strong><\/p>\n Love and death: in the days of cellular division there was only death by catastrophe (annihilation) \u2014 Death from internal exhaustion (conflict) begins only with sexuality \u2014<\/p>\n At the age of 33 \u2014 Christ \u2014 Lorenzo de’ Medici \u2014 (Buddha at 66). On the other hand, Titian from cholera: otherwise he would have continued to paint, always better and better \u2014<\/p>\n Not knowing how to die.<\/p>\n Death in Europe. (The abolition of death.) Pasteur anecdote. Forty-three years without death.<\/p>\n The new death: on land Messina \u2014 on water Titanic (\u201cThe fenced-off ways of death”) \u2014 world war. The deathless man: the petit bourgeois \u2014 the communist. Death for the petit bourgeois \u2014 resignation or dismissal. The smuggling of death into communism: the persecution of the bourgeoisie, the war \u2014 (Man is born after the theft of a bicycle).<\/p>\n To invent a new death.<\/p>\n Dead or collapsed at my critical age (42 years old), in my situation: The next redeemer will be over 84.<\/p>\n Lao-Tse, the only one who doesn’t die \u2014 he leaves.<\/p>\n DEATH (II)<\/strong><\/p>\n Every love story is, without exception, a story of four. (Love is for two, but love is story-less.) Problem of the triangle (Wagner, Ibsen, those virility complexes!). Isolde, the bourgeois drama: The fourth is always death<\/em>.<\/p>\n Socrates is the first Western plebeian, he abolishes death (the plebeian is the deathless man). This is why, without any anxiety, like a satisfied storekeeper, he drinks the hemlock, secure in the conviction that \u201cup there” everything will be more cheerful. (From the bowl of hemlock to the mug of beer.) And the sacrifice of the rooster! As if to say: paid in advance and insured.<\/p>\n To die fulfilled and curious<\/em>.<\/p>\n The more anonymous the enemy becomes (because he is), the more devastating the weapons \u2014 it’s always an individual man who is hit (though it may be all the inhabitants of Bikini).<\/p>\n Novalis: l’acte philosophique est le suicide<\/em>, etc. Nothingness reached too quickly \u2014 faced with slow-paced nothingness, distilled nothingness, experienced in every capillary through the karmic surmounting of the problems of our ancestors (and not that in the beginning there was fear and hunger).<\/p>\n The art of dying every second\u2014 Everything that doesn’t want to die has to croak. <\/p>\n It’s a world of death \u2014 once people were born alive and slowly they died. Now we are born dead \u2014 and some of us slowly manage to come to life.<\/p>\n
\nAlmost all books are footnotes, inflated into volumes (volumina<\/em>).
\nI<\/em> write only footnotes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/notes-without-a-text-roberto-bazlen-9781628973129.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\nAestheticism \u2014 Rilke \u2014 criminality (diverted to the colonies) \u2014 politics of the postwar era.<\/p>\n
\nSpinoza \/ ? \/ Napoleon
\nKierkegaard
\nPascal \/ sister
\nNietzsche \/ sister
\nVan Gogh
\nKafka<\/p>\n
\n(to understand that every second stands in opposition to the transformation of the others).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Alex_Andriesse_card.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n