***********************************************************
ABOVE THE JUMP... SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
***********************************************************

Postcards from the Gods: Forest Fringe at the Gate – 1

Postcards from the Gods: Forest Fringe at the Gate – 1: [ first draft – still needs a bunch of formatting, and probably some more writing. Not to mention pictures and all that jazz. Still, thought...

The Story of Habermas's Chair

The extraordinary professor was a professor without a chair. Until two years later when he left the chair that he was without, preferring to be seated. There was a chair prepared elsewhere, left vacant by someone else, someone who had wronged him; someone who, as he saw it, had tried to to sit on him. Comeuppance came. He now had the other man's chair. The chair was procured, as these things often are, not by circumstance but by the enemy's friend.

Philosophically, he was content. Sociologically, he was a victor. He was seated. But time unseated him, and he left the chair, preferring now to stand and direct further South. And there he remained, chairless, institutional rather than universal. Until his masterwork completed, he took against standing, preferring to direct from a seated position. And so he returned to the chair he had left, the only chair that had ever been his, the chair of his enemy: the chair he left vacant ten years before. He remained in that chair for ten more years, until he walked, in order, finally, to sit things out.

But there was to be no rest. For eternity permanently visiting, he is now condemned to crouch.

He took out a large flat knife, put a flame to the blade, and focused. He was cutting up some hash that I'd brought him. I put my hand on his wrist, and stroked the black hairs. I laid my other hand on the table, palm up. His eyes flickered. Knives speak louder than words.

Epilogue

You hope, yes,

your books will excuse you,

save you from hell:

nevertheless,

eithout looking sad,

without in any way

seeming to blame

(He doesn't need to,

knowing well

what a lover of art

like yourself pays heed to),

God may reduce you

on Judgment Day

to tears of shame,

reciting by heart

the poems you would

have written, had

your life been good.

WH AUDEN

Lovers

I am standing before you. You before me. You can see it now - if you choose. The stances have shifted, but the movements are the same.

So, how about this? This time, let us be honest at least.

Right now see, I'm not interested. But I promise to love you within a week. In two, I'll sleep with someone else, but I'll regret it in three. In four you'll have changed. In five you'll change your mind. And because I thought to let it go, and this time do it right, I won't let go.

And I promise I'll never forgive you for it.

A psychoanalyst speaks...

"All social transformation is necessarily doomed to failure and horror because humans are necessarily flawed and horrible. Often I’m inclined to agree. Between what I’ve heard from my patients– you do learn a thing or two about people in analysis –and what I’ve observed, we’re a pretty vile lot. Nonetheless, I am not convinced by claims that such social transformations are doomed to horror. I do, however, find myself wondering whether psychoanalytic political theory does not end up unwittingly repeating this narrative of human nature. Is not the psychoanalyst saying precisely the same thing when he claims that there’s an irreducible real, that there’s always the swerve of drive, that we’re always duped by the unconscious? As a result, is not psychoanalysis an inherently conservative ideology? The question isn’t rhetorical."