The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Kundera

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

"She said he had made love to her like an intellectual. [...] she was capable of giving the most concrete of acts an abstract significance and her own dissatisfaction a political name."

"For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women."

"We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past."

"They wanted to efface hundreds of thousands of lives from memory and leave nothing but an
unstained age of unstained idyll. But Mirek is going to land his whole body on that idyll, like a stain."

The truth about communism- I don't care how much people want to go back- these lives were REAL and they did EXIST.

"[...] every love relationship rests on an unwritten agreement unthinkingly concluded by the lovers in the first weeks of their love."

"The mystic must not be afraid of ridicule if he wants to go to the limits, the limits of humility or the limits of sensual pleasure."

"There are two laughters, and we have no word to tell one from the other."

Funny- the laughter of the angel is to promote order and rationality while the devil's laughter is to "deprive everything of meaning"- which is why the devil's laughter is more powerful, for it undermines reason.

"And these others (I am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles."

Everyone wants to be part of a ring dance, where you lose yourself and become free- everything becomes innocent. No matter what society- communists, baptists, anarchists (yes they have societies too)- it is a joy to be part of something, constantly moving round and round. It's interesting the narrator, still wants to go back to the dance- even though they kicked him out mercilessly.

"[...] throughout the world the angels had occupied all positions of authority, all the general staffs, had taken over the left and the right, the Arabs and the Jews, the Russian generals and the Russian dissidents."

All of these orders are the angels- they are all the same- they are all "fighting for the future of the human race".And anyone against these orders need to be exterminated- which is what Kundera explains- laughter is the ultimate antidote to undermine these powers. He clumps in all parts of the system- even the opposition. All of them are part of the same wish for an order. And the devil is there to undermine all of this authority and destroy it's seriousness. Which is why laughter is from the devil.

Wait- are people within the circles part of the societal orders? Or are these orders just means to provide a reason for dancing? And that the dance itself is what matters, no matter which ideology brought united these hands together.After all- Kundera says laughter is a sensual pleasure: "But by now the three dancing women were unaware of the others, they were concentrating entirely on themselves and on their sensual pleasure." In a way they are laughing the way the devil laughs- without any purpose. They are forming this circle within a social code/construct, and so they always disappear from this world- the laughter takes them away.

The girls have found some logic through laughter- anything which they can't explain they attribute it to "comic effect" and therefore solving the problem.

"[...] farther and farther from my country into the deserted space of a world where the fearsome laughter of the angels rings out, drowning all my words with its jangle."

So since he was out of the circle of innocence- he was doomed to live in this order of things- where the angels are actually evil. I think he flipped the roles- and made the devil good and the angels bad. For maybe in the communistic world that's how it was- everything appeared not as it was.

Basically people didn't believe in the system- they just wanted to be free internally.
Just like the Professor- he also wants to find his own circle, his own laughter- where relief/refuge is found from his loneliness. He is left in reality, while the circle creates an ideal dimension.

"We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them. [...] What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is not a difference in passions but one passion's different results."


Our stories are important and not the results- some get lucky.

"Yes, I realize you don't know what I'm talking about, because beauty vanished long ago. It vanished under the surface of the noise-the noise of words, the noise of cars, the noise of music-we live in constantly. It has been drowned like Atlantis. All that remains of it is the word, whose meaning becomes less intelligible with every passing year." 

He's saying that we can hear the beauty of silence through some insignificant object falling- silence needs to be heard, for it is beautiful.

Beautiful commentary on what the ostriches told Tamina- about themselves! It's funny, we live our lives thinking that certain things mean something, that people are interested in us. But in fact- they couldn't care less- they are interested in themselves. I also loved how he made fun of the guy who was talking about his orgasms, same as an ostrich talking about what he ate that day. Bullshit- bla bla bla. Constant wasting of words.

"Someone who writes books is either everything (a unique universe in himself and to all others) or nothing. And because it will never be given to anyone to be everything, all of us who write books are nothing. We are unrecognized, jealous, embittered, and we wish the others dead. In that we are all equals: Banaka, Bibi, I, and Goethe."

An extremely cyncial view on writing. I cannot say that I agree- some are more enlightened than others- some understand their lives/experiences more.

"[...] the universe of his blood and thoughts!"

That sounds so funny.

"Worshipers are disarmed when faced by a woman, because they're still in their mothers' shadows. In every woman they see a messenger from their mother and submit to her. Their mothers' skirts spread over them like the sky."

"It's just those details-poorly chosen clothes, slightly flawed teeth, delightful mediocrity of soul-that make a woman lively and real. [...] I assure you, my friend, your small-town woman is just what a poet needs, and I congratulate you!"

That makes me feel so much better about myself :)

"[...] because to understand is to merge and to identify with. That is the secret of poetry.
We consume ourselves in the beloved woman, we consume ourselves in the idea we believe, we bum in the landscape we are moved by."

Love and laughter: "Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter."

Ah sensuality is not love.

"Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery."

"The child plays a wrong note on his violin over and over until the teacher goes mad and
throws him out the window. As he falls, the child is delighted by the thought that the nasty teacher will be charged with murder."

"That was litost talking! A man possessed by it takes revenge through his own annihilation.
The child lies shattered on the sidewalk, but its immortal soul is going to be eternally thrilled because the
violin teacher has hanged himself from the window catch."

Poor students- another word for it would be 'loser'- someone who always gets the short end of the stick. And yet like Kundera said, these ones rise higher and higher through their poetry. And then they float high above us- where they belong.

Also a beautiful memorial to his group of Czech poets and the nonsense they used to discuss. 

The possibility of a death of a people comes with death itself.

"[...] because love is a continual interrogation."

"That the infinitude of the exterior world escapes us we accept as natural. But we reproach ourselves until the end of our lives for lacking that other infinitude. We ponder the infinitude of the stars but are unconcerned about the infinitude our papa has within him."

Not specifically our father- but a person close to us. We want to go into the universe of another person and not the universe around us.

This novel is not about the angels- but about the people that were outcasts from the circle- the ones who were lost because they lost something.

Sadness connects one to their past.

"Whoever wishes to remember must not stay in one place, waiting for the memories to come of their own accord ! Memories are scattered all over the immense world, and it takes voyaging to find them and make them leave their refuge !" 

"And so she closed her eyes again to enjoy her body, because for the first time in her life her body was taking pleasure in the absence of the soul, which, imagining nothing, remembering nothing, had quietly left the room."

She found refuge in the past- before everything happened. There was nothing to forget for then, nothing had yet begun.

"If fascination with the word "forward" has become universal, isn't it mainly because death is already speaking to us from nearby?"

Today's music:
There is no more boisterous, no more unanimous agreement than the agreement with being. About
that, Arabs join with Jews and Czechs with Russians. Bodies toss in rhythm, drunk with their awareness that they exist. That is why no work of Beethoven's has ever been experienced with such great collective passion as this unvaryingly repetitive thrumming of guitars." 

YOLO- drunk with the awareness that we exist!!!!

I see- the system makes us want to forget- which is why we join these circles of sensuality- to forget our past, to forget everything. But the narrator couldn't be part of it- he was outside of it all, doomed and yet able to observe and be conscious. Then we forget- we forget what is happening even around us. That is why Kunder mentions the music of today- in fact it is another way of chanting, just like in the soviet regime. Like he says, music has returned to a state before it's great achievements, back when it was primeval. And in this way- just like Tamira, we are able to ignore everything around us, all of our pain.

"Or to put it another way: sexuality freed from its diabolic ties to love had become a joy of angelic simplicity."

The secret of regimes' putting hope in children:
"Children are the future not because they will one day be adults but because humanity is becoming more and more a child, because childhood is the image of the future.
He shouted "Children, never look back !" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles."

And it's marvelous how today's young generation has no concern for remembering anything- it is a government's dream.

"Whether Celts or Slavs inhabit Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians conquer Bessarabia,
is more or less the same to the earth."

Thanks Kundera :) So true!

I like his explanation on "the best progressive idea possible"- provocative enough to shock people but modest enough to get supporters- therefore it will always be safe.

"Less well known is that a woman is not entirely defenseless against that gaze. If she is turned into a thing, then she watches the man with the gaze of a thing. It is as if a hammer suddenly had eyes and watched the carpenter grip it to drive in a nail. Seeing the hammer's malicious gaze, the carpenter loses his self-confidence and hits his thumb."

And we say that objectification is bad! He's talking about sex as the transition of a woman from a creature into an object and to a woman again... my what power he gives men! I don't know whether I fully agree...

"It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly, and whatever it was that a man was ready to lay down his life for a few seconds earlier seems suddenly to be sheer nonsense."

That border is always with us, hovering.

-----
The title is very telling- this book was about Laughter and Forgetting. He wrote a lot about forgetting- basically in the political sphere as well as how individuals want to forget certain things in their past. It is all the same, whether politically or individually- the action of wanting to forget is everywhere. The connection though- between the political and how it affects individuals is that politicians use this desire to forget for their own gain. Various causes such as bettering mankind, environmentalism, christianity, feminism or whatever you want- it is all a medium in which we can connect to others and therefore become free. We all want to be part of a ring, to forget our beginnings and our ends- to become infinite.
Marketa was able to have sexual pleasure when she forgot about her husband (imagined him with his head cut off)- he says so in other places- love sometimes is an obstacle to climax. Reminds me of his other story- where a young couple do role playing and they are able to enjoy sex while forgetting their identities.
Michelle and Gabrielle are both angels' names- from what I understood, they were finding sensuality and a sense of freedom within a society through laughter. I may be wrong of course.
Poets are the ones who will forever be rejected from the "circle" and they experience a sense of "litost" which makes them write masterpieces. For if one were in the circle, one wouldn't have a sense to write. But what we learn from the Tamira character is that once we have exterminated the past with our freedom won through sensuality- we are nothing anymore. And she lived out her existence paranoid whether she will step on the line or not (hopscotch). We become obsessed with an insignificant detail- which doesn't give meaning to our lives. So which is better- suffering or ignorance?
The part about laughter I didn't fully understand. Basically laughter is undermining what is serious and real and gives us a freedom to escape all that. And in that way we can forget about our current suffering- but is it from the devil or from the angels? The angels seem to be evil in this book so I don't know.


A lot of concepts- more than I can process right now- so much to think about! I am sure I will read this again someday- when life experience will give me the ability to understand it more. It seems to me that he has so many messages hidden. Oh Kundera- Tell me your secrets! :)


Edgard Varese- apparently the Father of Electronic Music! He's very beautiful.

Pub- Pdf 

Possible Explanation on The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Found this on youtube- such a privilege to hear a lecture without going to class- which was the part I hated most:




NOTES:

The person which changes history is rarely ever prepared for it- it just happens.
Experience- meditation and learning something from them not simply things happening to you.
Not only let time pass but give time to things around you and CARE about them.
Aha so he's jumping around in time! Now the existence of those weird passages make sense.
"The world is mysterious but the world offers us a kind of intimacy that does correspond ultimately to some of our deepest desires."-it's all real.
Can we share being with someone else? It's funny I asked myself the same question and personally I think it will always be limited- what we are able to share.
Objects can become personal and can take on emotions.

The passage about the girls going to the city is very interesting- he's actually talking about the role of women throughout the centuries- and how they've always had to do all the work "both sides of the dialogue" (in a relationship). Not within society specifically but within a relationship- within love.
Love shows us reality.
The Prodigal Son was lacking reality- the love was not real for him.
Love imposes demands on the ones whom you love.
It opens us up to a life in which not all of our questions can be answered but at least can be asked.

---
Interesting lecture- I liked his analysis on women- which I didn't pick up on while reading the book- like many other things. Still don't understand his analysis of his family and the vanishing house. A little bit more clear on what the book is about- basically how to love. And I guess the prodigal son connects with his learning how to love. He was angry that no one understood who he REALLY was- they just loved him blindly. This can easily happen in a relationship- when we love our partner based on an ideal and not the real person within them, and actually not even having an interest- for we love our ideal more. And then he realized that this selfless love is enough to understand him- for love doesn't need to be concrete- it encompasses all. From what I understand- which doesn't mean much- is that love doesn't need to be concrete, because it engulfs every detail of our soul, no matter WHICH detail it is. If that makes any sense. For example- I don't know EXACTLY what I love about you, which detail in your soul and where it is located- such as CONCRETELY what you are feeling- but I love it all anyway, even though I can't put my finger on it exactly. If that makes ANY sense.
I don't know I was struggling with this question as well- and I guess it DOESN'T matter if the person knows exactly the world within me, because their love can reach every part of my soul without them knowing the direction.
 That doesn't make sense does it? I don't know. All I know is that it encompasses the REAL without even our knowledge or know-how. In short: it does it's own thing and it is beyond us.

The Notebooks Of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rilke

As an introduction- I just left all of my impressions while reading this book- so 

please excuse my freaking out when I thought Malte died (some creepy ghost walking

around- like a horror movie- sorry I am affected by today's media). Also I still 

don't understand many things- like what does the vanishing house mean. Why are dead

people walking around- why is he TALKING to dead people? Or maybe I just misunderstood

everything which is quite possible. In the end, though, it doesn't really matter

what I understood because I don't read books for "plots"- I read them for their 

concepts, and trust me- I got some very delicious ones from this book. Very 

satisfying I must say! If you want to be super confused and not understand lit

anymore- read this! Anyway I must read this again and again- throughout the years. 

Rilke though- there's a very special place in my heart for him. Not as high as

Dostoevsky- because Rilke is too delicate to concern himself with the insanity 

of consciousness- but all the same, very special.  

"God! it's all  there. God! It's all there waiting for us. We come along, we find 

a life, ready-made, off the peg, and all we have to do is put it on. 
You want to go, or you are forced to: 'No trouble at all, sir. Voila 
votre mort, monsieur'*." 

"And had anyone thought to ask what might be the cause of it all, what 
might have called down this glut of destruction upon this closely 
guarded room, there would have been only one answer to give: death."

It's very funny how the living react to the material possessions of a deceased one, 

how odd and ridiculous it becomes. For it is irrelevant to the death itself.

"To write a single line of verse one must see many cities, people, things, one 

must know animals, one must feel birds flying and know the movements flowers make

as they open up in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in

unfamiliar  regions, unexpected encounters, and partings which one saw coming long 
before;" 

"And having memories is still not enough. If there are a great many, one must be 
able to forget them, and one must have the patience to wait until they return. 

For the memories are not what's essential. It's only when they become blood within

us, become our nameless looks and signs that are no longer distinguishable 

from ourselves—not until then does it happen that, in a very rare moment, the 

first word of a verse rises in their midst and goes forth from among them." 

"At the same time they're living among other people, not the 'third' persons but

the two, about whom such an incredible number of things might be said and of whom

not a word is ever spoken, though they suffer and do things and don't know how to 

help each other."

How weak and helpless the "unimportant" characters are. 

"Ah then: is it possible to believe that one could have a God and not use 
him?" 

"Similarly it's all scattered about within me, -- the 

rooms, the staircases which opened onto the ground 

floor with such great elaborateness and other narrow 

circular stairways in whose darkness one travelled like

blood through veins; the tower rooms, the high 

balconies, the unexpected galleries one was urged along

from the little entrance door: --all that is still 

within me and will never cease being within me. It's 

as if the image of this house had plunged into me from

an infinite height and smashed to pieces on the 

foundation of my being. "

What memories can become within you- they materialize within your blood within 

your veins. They ARE you. This is an extremely poetic passage- someone should 

make a drawing based on this. Imagine how beautiful it can be- all of these

fragments. I am absolutely fascinated with the combination of the material and the

abstract.  

"I saw an old man who was blind and shouted. That's what I saw. Saw."

I'm absolutely in love with his style. He is so direct and simple and yet extremely

witty. 

"Also there was the sweet lingering smell of neglected breast-feeding 
babies, and the smell of anxious children setting off to school, and 
of the muggy beds of older lads. And a lot of the smells were those 
that had come up from below out of the chasm of the street; they'd 
evaporated; and others had dripped down in the rain which over cities 
is not pure."

SMELLS!!! The smells of our FEELINGS- what we emit from inside of us- without even

knowing! And there's one wall which traps in all the smells brought in by the wind.

I'm sorry at this rate I'll be copying/pasting the whole book: 

"Yes, he knew he was withdrawing himself from everything, not only from 
human beings. One moment more and everything would be gone from his 
mind and this table and this cup and the chair he was clinging to, 
everything in his daily life, everything close to him would have 
become unintelligible, foreign, difficult. So he sat there and waited 
for it to have happened. And he offered no more resistance."  

We cling to the material objects in order not to retreat within ourselves.  

"Though the world does look good to me. What 
would I do in another one? I would so like to remain among the 
meanings which have become dear to me, and if there were something 
that really has to change I would want, at the very least, to be 
allowed to live among dogs who have a world that is related to ours 
and has the same things."

What do you think it means to remain with your meanings? To remain in a world of 

memories? 

"And with whatever it 

is that comes along there also appears a whole tangle of confused 
memories that hang from it like wet seaweed from some sunken thing. 
Lives that you could never have heard of emerge from the depths and 
blend in with what had really happened, and they oust the past that 
you thought you knew; for in what rises is a new rested strength that 
had always been there and is weary from too frequent remembering." 

How frightening- it was there all along. And you thought you knew!

"Your heart drives you out of yourself, your heart pursues you and you are 
already almost outside yourself and can no longer get back in."

He has an almost crude appreciation of the music genius- comparing the music after 

Beethoven's death to semen spewing out while the musicians play with it but aren't 

satisfied. "But, Master, if, somewhere, a virginal young man were to lay his 
wakeful ear beside your music, he would die of bliss, or he would 
carry infinity inside him and his fertilised brain would burst from 
sheer birth." The birth happens in the mind due to the music fertilizing 

the idea. 

Fame- "And now they go around with you as if as if you were like them. 
And they take your words around with them in the cages of their 
darkness and reveal them in public places and tease them a little out 
of their safety." 

And:  

"They suspected that in all of this they had acted as he had willed them to 
act; they had strengthened him in his solitude and had helped him 
separate himself from them for ever. And now they'd changed their 
method and and were bringing to bear the ultimate form of opposition: 
fame. And at this clamour practically everyone looked up and let 
themselves be entertained." 

An extremely curious thing about Erik- I didn't realize it until they were talking 

together in the dark that he had died. That this little  boy in fact, was speaking

about dead people as if they were alive. It even begs the question- is Malte also 

dead? Because he keeps describing his fevers. 

Beautiful description about him and his lover- both on an island with a lion and a 

unicorn. I wonder whether that's connected to the drawings of islands when he 

was a child?

"Now, when so much is changing, they too want to change. 
They're very close to giving up on themselves and to thinking about 
themselves in the way that how men might speak of them in their 
absence. This seems progress to them. Already they're almost persuaded 
that you search for one pleasure and then another and then an even 
greater one: that life consists in this, if you don't want to lose it 
through some kind of silliness. They've already begun to look around, 
to search; they whose strength has always resided in being found." 

Sometimes we want to force change. We are always on the brink of something.

I don't understand the part about the house vanishing. Furthermore my suspicion is

growing that they're all dead. "'We're rising up around here like ghosts, 'and 
helped us back down the steps." and

"It became clear to me that all these recognisably grown up people who just a 
short time ago had been talking and laughing were going round back 
bent busying themselves with something invisible, and that they were 
admitting they couldn't see the something that was there. And what was 
terrifying was the fact that it was stronger than all of them." 

Why does the house vanish again?? What does it symbolize? Is it their death- their 

past existence? 

"No, no, there's nothing in the world that we can imagine, not the 
least thing. It's because everything is composed of so many single 
details that are unforeseeable. We ignore them in the hurry of using 
our imagination, so we don't know they're missing. But realities are 
slow and indescribably detailed."

Our imagination is hurried and to a point even desperate.

"For now I knew that out there things were going along with the same complete 
indifference, and that also out there was nothing except my 
loneliness. The loneliness that I had brought upon myself and to whose 
size my heart no longer bore any comparison. I thought of people I'd 
walked away from and I didn't understand how one could abandon people." 

TIME = MONEY funny character this Nikolaj Kusmitsch! Rilke managed to bring a 

classic russian literature feel in this astounding work. 

"And as he sat there in the dark room with 
his eyes wide open he began to understand that what he was feeling now 
was real time passing. He actually recognised all these seconds, all 
tepid, uniform, but fast, fast." 

Ok I think this is my new favorite book- it even surpasses Notes from the Under-

ground. How could one even ever think of this?

"You see, humans --if we're 
allowed, simply in passing, to compare them with tin lids-- humans 
sit on their occupations with the greatest reluctance and ill-humour."

Why yes let's compare lids and human beings. "Let's 
be perfectly honest and say: basically they're thinking of only one 
thing which is jumping down as soon as they can and roll about and 
make tinny sounds."

But I get it- it refers to our significance and our purpose in life. We each have 

our own use- we each are a lid which corresponds to our fulfillment in life. 

"From that time onwards his blood knew 
it was inside a lost man and it wanted to leave." 

Personifying blood as if it was another organism within us. It signifies the 

demon within us- the thing we cannot help. An animal, our passions. 

"No, Bettina is the one who has become more real in me; 
Abelone, who I knew, was like a preparation for her and for me now she 
had disappeared into Bettina as if into her own instictive self." 

A human being prepared him for being able to understand a concept, a character. 

"The woman who is in love 
always surpasses the man she loves because life is greater than fate. 
Her devotion wants to be immense: this is her bliss. But the nameless 
sorrow of her love has always been this: that what is asked of her is 
that her devotion be kept within limits." 

It is our misfortune and curse. Life is greater than fate- for life is always 

changing and is flexible. It can breathe, it is an organism, a creature. 

"They walk past the houses, 
people are continually coming along who blot them out, they go on 
fading until they are nothing." 

There's something terrible about having the power to make people fade away. 

"But somewhere there's still a piece of 
our disguise clinging to us that we've forgotten about. There's a 
trace of exaggeration on our eyebrows; we don't notice that the 
corners of our mouths are twisted. And this is how we go around, an 
absolute laughing-stock: neither a real being nor an actor."

"To be loved means to be consumed by fire. To love is: giving light 
with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to 
endure."

Using the parable about the Prodigal Son and how he did not want to be loved makes 

me wonder whether it is in fact about Malte himself. How interesting, that for some

unconditional love can actually hurt and drive one away. "For in his loneliness, he 
had loved and loved again, each time wasting his whole nature and 
entertaining inexpressible fears for the freedom of the other person. 
Slowly he had learnt to shine the rays of his emotion into his beloved 
instead of consuming the emotion in her." He learned to give love, instead of 

taking love away. And yet he craved for love to be given to back to him. I think

he found love in the sacred, in something spiritual- something beyond him. 

"I see more than just him. I see his whole existence, which 
was then taking up the long love to God, the silent goalless toil of 
it."

-----------------------------------------------------------

I have to be honest- I didn't really understand this book, but it has made a 

tremendous impression on me. I love parts of it- descriptions of places, of ideas

and concepts, of people... So sweet and delicate. He has extremely weird 

observations about life- and about his consciousness. I admire this book- and it 

has a special place in my heart. But yes the problem is that some parts confused me

especially about his family, and certain passages which he rambled on and on- like

about the king. I still don't know what the point of that is. I think my next task

is to read explanations based on this book and maybe clear some things out. But I 

always hate reading interpretations because they are not close to what I feel 

about the book- for me being close to a spiritual experience.  

I love what he wrote about death- I thought about it a lot- one time on the metro-

imagining what Rilke said- that it's there within us growing. It was strange to 

look at the people and see in each death, while their physical bodies are growing

and stretching so full of life. And the part about the lid will never leave my 

memory- I have to ponder on that some more... we all should. Oh Rilke what wonders

you have blessed me with- my mind is full of riches! 

Also in my search for finding some explanation to this book- I found this wonderful 

art book by Ben Shahn (For the sake of a Single Verse): 

Very cool!!! :) I wish I lived in a country where this would be available... 

-- 

Pub Pdf- Translated by William Needham