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."

X-ian

Kierkegaard, feminists, post-modernism; none of them are systematic.

Congruities are uncommon.

But, typically, all of the parties are concerned and lie, and in three areas: methodology, communicative strategy, and the rejection of procrustean metaphysics.

Which is to say that none would spare the knife in the interest of getting you into bed with them. And all would deny it.

For Fear Failure and Insanity

There are two primordial stuffs,

He said.

fear of:

1.Failure.

Insanity.2

But I think he is wrong

Because there is only

Fear.

And Failure.

And Insanity.

And then there is something else –

The something else that is everything else.

I think it was the everything else he was trying to understand.

And that was way he made a mistake.

Lost (III)

You find
Things
Lose you.
Take place
Elsewhere.
Which has been
Misplaced somewhere,

And also
Somehow replaced:

With the bait,
With the source,
With the draw...

And all this
Is
Now
Yours.

ISM: Are you talking to me?

Lost (II)

You find
Things lose you,
Take place,
Elsewhere:
Is a depository

Prometheus Unbound

PROMETHEUS
MONARCH of Gods and Dæmons, and all Spirits
But One, who throng those bright and rolling worlds
Which Thou and I alone of living things
Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth
Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou
Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise,
And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts,
With fear and self-contempt and barren hope;
Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless in hate,
Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn,
O'er mine own misery and thy vain revenge.
Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours,
And moments aye divided by keen pangs
Till they seemed years, torture and solitude,
Scorn and despair--these are mine empire:
More glorious far than that which thou surveyest
From thine unenvied throne, O Mighty God!
Almighty, had I deigned to share the shame
Of thine ill tyranny, and hung not here
Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain,
Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb,
Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life.
Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, forever!

- P. B. Shelley

The Mask of Evil

On my wall hangs a Japanese carving
The mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer.
Sympathetically I observe
The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating
What a strain it is to be evil.

- Bertolt Brecht

Lost (I)

You find things.
Things lose you.
You take place.
Place loses things.
Things deposit you
Elsewhere.
Where else?
Or else, where?

Word wars

The failed poet
(Sorrel)
Walked up to the failed apologue
(Steven Dedalus)

Sorrel took pity and fed him.
Dedalus took offence and killed him.

Dark Photographs

Ed van der Elsken’s book of photographs, Love on the Left Bank, gives us a fascinating insight into the life actually lived in Paris by the future Situationists, then still rebel Lettrists or Imaginists. The central character, a Mexican—whose point of view the photographer seems to take—has arrived in Paris as a hitchhiker, sleeping out on benches. Soon he makes some new friends and wanders from café to café with an Australian girl, in search of the scene. The book consists mainly of photographs taken in Left Bank cafés, portraits of their denizens napping, embracing, drinking, putting money in the juke-box, playing chess, whispering, selling hashish, reading psychology textbooks, acting as nightclub guides for tourists, begging, playing the guitar, handing out publicity leaflets in the street, painting, grinning, eating cheese sandwiches, sleeping in a news cinema or the metro, arguing, singing, smoking hashish, flirting, getting drunk, picking a fight, dancing, making up, listening to music, just waiting, being sent to jail, dreaming, falling in love. Finally, he returns to Mexico. In fact, it is a very confined life, limited by lack of money and, I suppose, lack of focus, if that’s the word. It seems to be dark all the time. Who knows what happens in the daylight?

- Peter Wollen
'Situationists and Architecture' (NLR April/March 2001)