letters

The Outskirts

"That was Kathy's take too, also that it didn't really matter where you situated yourself since the centrifuge of history would eventually pluck you up and switch you round. It was the thing right now to take people from the outskirts, the wallflowers if you like, and try to look at events through their eyes. No one cared about Napoleon or Darwin, it was more interesting to be obscure, almost unheard of, a failure, a total creep."

~~ from Crudo by Olivia Laing

Numbness

"Numbness mattered, it was what the Nazis did, made people feel like things were moving too fast to stop and though unpleasant and eventually terrifying and appalling, were probably impossible to do anything about. She'd been reading a book by Philip Guston. On 23 October 1968, Guston had been in conversation with Morton Feldman at the New York Studio School. He'd been thinking a lot about the Holocaust, he said, especially the concentration camp Treblinka. It worked, the mass killing, he told Feldman, because the Nazis deliberately induced numbness on both sides, in the victims and also the tormentors. And yet a small group of prisoners had managed to escape. Imagine what a process it was to unnumb yourself, he said, to see it as it actually was. That's the only reason to be an artist; to escape, to bear witness to this."

~~ from Crudo by Olivia Laing