iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

“his manuscripts and diaries are here with me” Milena to Max Brod; tr. Philip Boehm

[presumably mid-July 1924]

Dear Herr Doktor:
I'm returning the book to you with thanks, please forgive me for not looking you up. I hardly think I could talk about Franz right now, and I'm sure you won't want to speak with me about him at this time either. With your permission, I'll let you know before I come to Prague in September. Please remember me kindly and please convey my best wishes to your wife, whom I once probably wronged without intending to. When you have the opportunity, please make sure my letters which belonged to Franz are burned; I trust you will do so, although of course this is nothing important. His manuscripts and diaries (not at all intended for me, since they were written before he knew me, about fifteen large notebooks) are here with me and, should you need them, are at your disposal. This is as he wished; he asked me not to show them to anyone but you and then only after he died. Perhaps you already know them in part.

Most cordial greetings and I remain yours in friendship
Milena Polák

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Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

“I weep with fear because life is short, the days pass so quickly and nothing lasts forever.”

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Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

“I go, we go. On the way we keep a log-book, the book of the abyss and its shores.” Hélène Cixous; tr. Susan Sellers

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Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Far better depicted in the opening of Compass:

We are two opium smokers each in his own cloud, seeing nothing outside, alone, never understanding each other we smoke, faces agonizing in a mirror, we are a frozen image to which time gives the illusion of movement, a snow crystal gliding over a ball of frost, the complexity of whose intertwinings no one can see, I am that drop of water condensed on the window of my living room, a rolling liquid pearl that knows nothing of the vapour that engendered it, nor of the atoms that still compose it but that, soon, will serve other molecules, other bodies, the clouds weighing heavy over Vienna tonight: over whose nape will this water stream, against what skin, on what pavement, towards what river, and this indistinct face on the glass is mine only for an instant, one of the millions of possible configurations of illusion - look,

Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandell

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Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Soon I will leave and the waves will become words, and this rain, these invisible drops of rain will linger only in memory on my skin. For now, paradoxically, they keep me warm. I’ve written here about relics, about the body, about melancholy; pages upon pages of pouring thought.

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Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

With Ingeborg and rain and sea. “A storm of words starts in my head.”

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Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Under this blinding August sun, the white page too a blinding mirror, writing reveals itself as an entanglement with a temporality that has already ruined us. All I have for you these days is the sea.

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Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

The Thirtieth Year, Ingeborg Bachmann; tr. Michael Bullock

Why have I spent a whole summer trying to destroy myself in intoxication or to intensify my feelings in intoxication?
—Only to avoid becoming aware that I am an abandoned instrument upon which someone, a long time ago, struck a few notes on which I helplessly produce variations, out of which I try furiously to make a piece of sound that bears my handwriting. My handwriting! As if it were important for something to bear my handwriting! Flashes of lightning have passed through trees and split them. Madness has come upon men and inwardly broken them in pieces. Swarms of locusts have descended upon the fields and left the trail of their devouring. Floods have devastated hills and torrents the mountainsides. Earthquakes have not ceased. These are handwritings, the only ones.

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Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

“To write by shreds, by storm clouds, by visions, by violent chapters, in the present as in the archpast, in pre-vision, in the true chaos of verbal tenses, crossing over years and oceans at a god’s pace.” —Stigmata, Writing Blind, Hélène Cixous; tr. Eric Prenowitz

a stormy day at the beach with rough waves and dark skies

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Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

“August is full of panic,” writes Ingeborg Bachmann. So I turn to Lisa Robertson and read about bright winters mornings in Paris as the sea recedes from the edges of a text I have yet to write.

Lisa Robertson’s Riverwork against the backdrop of the sea

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Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

“His stories are sea swells...” —Elias Canetti

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Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

“She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness…”

Blue Eyes, Black Hair. Marguerite Duras. Translated by Barbara Bray.

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Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

“When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come…”

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Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

at night, “a certain dramatics of love”

I love you more than all that has been thought and can be thought. I give my soul to you.

Henriette Vogel to Heinrich von Kleist

Epigraph to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Shattered Love

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Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

“Whatever this crowded world had no room for, I made a place for within myself,” writes Elias Canetti in Notes from Hampstead, in the translation of John Hargraves. Perhaps that is indeed the lesson to take from him. To always make a place within oneself. And to tell stories.

My obstinate rejection of time is now taking its revenge on me. Its passing never existed for me. I never felt it as a river that could dry up. It was all around me, inexhaustible, a sea. I drifted about in all directions; it seemed natural to go on this way. My time would never run out. Everything I undertook was for eternity, and eternities were at my disposal, even for the smallest projects.
I was in search of the old gods, wanted to reconcile them within myself. My intellectual ambitions were fulfilled in the study of many peoples: this was how I atoned for the arrogance of my own forebears. I did not look to history for guidance. The smallest things, because they were on the verge of disappearing, meant more than the biggest. I could not accept ignoring a single life. What-ver this crowded world had no room for, I made a place for within myself. And so now I feel as broad as the world: I feel I touch it everywhere. Year by year the arrogance of

those who live for themselves alone seems more and more alien to me. Today I know how little I am myself, how much of me is in the universal breath of the spirit.
But having attained this goal, I recognize my own futility. I have scorned time, and now it is running out on me.
The things one depends on in the course of a life are grotesque, and it is hard to see how one can guard against them without models.
Telling stories to anyone who will hear them s stories, who doesn't know you, who doesn't expect literature. Life as a wandering storyteller would be nice. Someone says the word, and you tell the story. You never stop, day or night, you go blind, you lose the use of your limbs. But your mouth still serves its function, and you speak whatever is in your head. You have no possessions, only an infi-nite, ever-growing number of stories.
Nicest of all would be if you could live on words alone and did not even need to eat.

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Christina Tudor-Sideri @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

“When does something become a relic?”

Aphrodite bust statue with silver pendant around her neck

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