(Article Is Dated For A Few Years Ago, Dated By The Missionary Ending Up As A Pincushion.)

Louise Bourgeois, He Disappeared into Complete Silence, 1947

I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1

NIETZSCHE AND THE THEORY OF THE DRIVES

“Suppose we were in the market place one day, and we noticed someone laughing at us as we went by: this event will signify this or that to us according to whether this or that drive happens at that moment to be at its height in us—and it will be a quite different event according to the kind of person we are. One person will absorb it like a drop of rain, another will shake it from him like an insect, another will try to pick a quarrel, another will examine his clothing to see if there is anything about it that might give rise to laughter, another will be led to reflect on the nature of laughter as such, another will be glad to have involuntarily augmented the amount of cheerfulness and sunshine in the world—and in each case, a drive has gratified itself, whether it be the drive to annoyance, or to combativeness or to reflection or to benevolence. This drive seized the event as its prey. Why precisely this one? Because, thirsty and hungry, it was lying in wait” Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudice of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche. 1881

Doctor, that is kind of you

– Nothing is harmless anymore. The small joys, the expressions of life, which seemed to be exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have a moment of defiant silliness, of the cold-hearted turning of a blind eye, but immediately enter the service of their most extreme opposite. Even the tree which blooms, lies, the moment that one perceives its bloom without the shadow of horror; even the innocent “How beautiful” becomes an excuse for the ignominy of existence, which is otherwise, and there is no longer any beauty or any consolation, except in the gaze which goes straight to the horror, withstands it, and in the undiminished consciousness of negativity, holds fast to the possibility of that which is better. •Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life, Theodor Adorno

[...]I suppose you want to see my rags’, she said. Gripping the table with both hands, I turned to face her. Still sitting, she lifted one leg high and wide above her head, and to open her gash still further, used the fingers of both hands to draw the folds of skin apart. Thus, Madame Edwarda’s ‘rags’ looked at me, hairy and pink, and as full of life as some revolting squid. I stammered softly: ‘Why are you doing that?’ ‘You can see,’ she said, ‘I am GOD’. ‘I’m going crazy.’ ‘Oh no you’re not, you’ve got to see: look!’ Her harsh voice sweetened, becoming almost childlike as she said with such weariness, with the infinite smile of abandon: ‘Darling, the fun I’ve had . . .’ Holding her provocative position, her leg still raised in the air, she spoke to me with an air of command: ‘Kiss me!’ ‘But . . . ,’ I protested, ‘in front of all these people?’ ‘Of course!’ I trembled. I stared at her, motionless, and she smiled back so sweetly that I trembled again. At last, staggering forward, I got down on my knees and pressed my lips to that living wound. Her naked thigh caressed my ear and I thought I heard the sound of a sea swell, the same sound you hear when you put your ear to a large conch shell. In the absurdity and confusion of the brothel (I felt I was choking, flushed and sweating with the heat) I remained strangely suspended, as if Madame Edwarda and I were losing ourselves on a night of wind, alone together at the edge of the ocean. [...] Madame Edwarda went ahead of me . . . rising into the clouds. The room’s noisy indifference to her happiness, to the measured gravity of her step, was both a royal consecration and a flowering festival: death itself was present at the feast in the guise of what is called, in the nakedness of the brothel, ‘the butcher’s cut’. . . Madame Edwarda, Georges Bataille *Madame Edwarda: a figure which, in Hegel’s words, ‘attains its truth only when it finds itself in absolute laceration’, when the life of the spirit ‘contemplates the negativity of death face to face and dwells with it’. _Illustrations for Madame Edwarda by René magritte, 1946

Sacrifice

‘me’, I exist—suspended in a realized void—suspended from my own dread— different from all other being and such that the various events can reach all other beings and not 'me’ cruelly throw this 'me’ out of total existence. But, at the same time, I consider my coming into the world—which depended on the birth and on the conjunction of a given man and woman, then on the moment of their conjunction. There exists, in fact, a unique moment in relation to the possibility of me—and thus the infinite improbability of this coming into the world appears.

•Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess Selected Writings, 1927-1939

Video

Where is it coming from, this echo, this huge No that surrounds you, silent as the folds of the yellow  curtains

Margaret Atwood, from “Up”, Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965-1995 (via known-stranger)

Sleep Spaces

"When I shut my eyes phosphorescent blooms appear and fade and come to life again like fireworks made of flesh. I pass through strange lands with creatures for company. No doubt you are there, my beautiful discreet spy. And the palpable soul of the vast reaches. And perfumes of the sky and the stars the song of a rooster from 2000 years ago and piercing screams in a flaming park and kisses. Sinister handshakes in a sickly light and axles grinding on paralyzing roads. No doubt there is you who I do not know, who on the contrary I do know. But who, here in my dreams, demands to be felt without ever appearing. You who remain out of reach in reality and in dream. You who belong to me through my will to possess your illusion but who brings your face near mine only if my eyes are closed in dream as well as in reality. You who in spite of an easy rhetoric where the waves die on the beach where crows fly into ruined factories, where the wood rots crackling under a lead sun." -Robert Desnos