ponder

"The Thing is thus presented to the subject as his Sovereign Good, but if the subject transgresses the pleasure principle and attains this Good, it is experienced as suffering/evil … because the subject ‘cannot stand the extreme good that this Thing may bring to him’. It is fortunate, then, that the Thing is usually inaccessible."

- Dylan Evans, An introductory dictionary of Lacanian psychoanalysis (entry for “Thing”)

literacki

“Emotion, if the sense of life is inscribed therein, cannot be subordinated to any useful end.
Thus the paradox of emotion is that it wants to have much more sense than it does have.
Emotion that is not tied to the opening of a horizon but to some nearby object, emotion within the limits of reason only offers us a compressed life.
Burdened by our lost truth, the cry of emotion rises out of disorder, such as it might be imagined by the child contrasting the window of his bedroom to the depths of the night.
Art, no doubt, is not restricted to the representation of horror, but its movement puts art without harm at the height of the worst and, reciprocally, the painting of horror reveals the opening onto all possibility.
That is why we must linger in the shadows which art acquires in the vicinity of death.

If, cruel, it does not invite us to die in ravishment, art at least has the virtue of putting a moment of our happiness on a plane equal to death.”

— Georges Bataille, L’Art exercise de la cruauté, 1949

ponderous

The imperfect is the tense of fascination: it seems to be alive and yet it doesn’t move: imperfect presence, imperfect death; neither oblivion nor resurrection; simply the exhausting lure of memory.
~R. Barthes

ponder

When the opposing forces unite within,
  there comes a power abundant in its giving
  and unerring in its effect.
  Flowing through everything.
  It returns one to the First Breath.
  Guiding everything.
  It returns one to No Limits.               
                                                  ~Lao Tzu

literacki

“The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

ponderous

"To all desire for escape you must oppose contemplation and its resources. It it useless to leave; you must move across to things that overwhelm you with new impressions, things that suggest an endless flow of unsuspected considerations."

- Francis Pogne 

ars poetica

"I am where I was:
I walk behind the murmur,
footsteps within me, heard with my eyes,
the murmur is in the mind, I am my footsteps,
I hear the voices that I think,
the voices that think me as I think them.
I am the shadow my words cast."

- Octavio Paz, closing lines to “A draft of shadows”,

ars poetica

He realizes that for days now
he hasn’t been lying,
but saying other people’s truths,
which is worse. ”

—Stephen Dunn, from “Nocturne,” Poetry

literacki

No more photos. Surely there are enough. No more shadows of myself thrown by light onto pieces of paper, onto squares of plastic. No more of my eyes, mouths, noses, moods, bad angles. No more yawns, teeth, wrinkles. I suffer from my own multiplicity. Two or three images would have been enough, or four, or five. That would have allowed for a firm idea: This is she. As it is, I’m watery, I ripple, from moment to moment I dissolve into my other selves. Turn the page: you, looking, are newly confused. You know me too well to know me. Or not too well: too much. 

—Margaret Atwood, The Tent

literacki

They had always this queer power of communicating without words . 

—Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

literacki

The scene is memory and is therefore non-realistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. 

—Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

quotable

"We always see our worst selves. Our most vulnerable selves. We need someone else to get close enough to tell us we’re wrong. Someone we trust."
— David Levithan

pondering

"There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart. The most destitute men often end up by accepting illusion. That approval prompted by the need for peace inwardly parallels the existential consent. There are thus gods of light and idols of mud. But it is essential to find the middle path leading to the faces of man."

— "Absurd Creation," The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus

ponder

“If you stare at the center of the universe, there is coldness there. A blankness. Ultimately, the universe doesn’t care about us. Time doesn’t care about us. That’s why we have to care about each other.”

— David Levithan, Every Day

pondering

                                                     

"Just as we now love one another by telephone and work not on matter but on machines, we kill and are killed by proxy. What is gained in cleanliness is lost in understanding."

— Albert Camus

ponder

 

“This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.”

— David Levithan, Every Day

quoth the madman

“Emotion, if the sense of life is inscribed therein, cannot be subordinated to any useful end. Thus the paradox of emotion is that it wants to have much more sense than it does have. Emotion that is not tied to the opening of a horizon but to some nearby object, emotion within the limits of reason only offers us a compressed life. Burdened by our lost truth, the cry of emotion rises out of disorder, such as it might be imagined by the child contrasting the window of his bedroom to the depths of the night. Art, no doubt, is not restricted to the representation of horror, but its movement puts art without harm at the height of the worst and, reciprocally, the painting of horror reveals the opening onto all possibility. That is why we must linger in the shadows which art acquires in the vicinity of death.

If, cruel, it does not invite us to die in ravishment, art at least has the virtue of putting a moment of our happiness on a plane equal to death.”

— Georges Bataille, L’Art exercise de la cruauté, 1949

ponder

From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth. Consciousness illuminates it by paying attention to it.

—Albert Camus,from “Philosophical Suicide” in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Vintage, 1942

ponder

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.

—Alan Watts 

ponder

"The slow arrow of beauty: What do we desire when we look at beauty? To be beautiful ourselves. We imagine that beauty carries with it great happiness, but this is a mistake."

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

 

ars poetica

"I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one."

- Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Afternoon On A Hill

ponderous

"The only good reason for two people to get married is if it is impossible for them not to."

- Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

literacki

"You shall learn to grasp the necessary injustice in every For and Against, injustice as inseparable from life, life itself as conditioned by the sense of perspective and its injustice."

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human I, Preface

ponderous

"All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world. The outcome of his thought, ceasing to be renunciatory, flowers in images. It frolics – in myths, to be sure, but myths with no other depth than that of human suffering and, like it, inexhaustible. Not the divine fable that amuses and blinds, but the terrestrial face, gesture, and drama in which are summed up a difficult wisdom and an ephemeral passion."

— "Absurd Creation," The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus

ponderous

“Ancient moon priestesses were called virgins. ‘Virgin’ meant not married, not belonging to a man - a woman who was ‘one-in-herself’. The very word derives from a Latin root meaning strength, force, skill; and was later applied to men: virile. Ishtar, Diana, Astarte, Isis were all called virgin, which did not refer to sexual chastity, but sexual independence. And all great culture heroes of the past, mythic or historic, were said to be born of virgin mothers: Marduk, Gilgamesh, Buddha, Osiris, Dionysus, Genghis Khan, Jesus - they were all affirmed as sons of the Great Mother, of the Original One, their worldly power deriving from her. When the Hebrews used the word, and in the original Aramaic, it meant ‘maiden’ or ‘young woman’, with no connotations to sexual chastity. But later Christian translators could not conceive of the ‘Virgin Mary’ as a woman of independent sexuality, needless to say; they distorted the meaning into sexually pure, chaste, never touched.”

— Monica Sjoo, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

quoth the madman

“Oh, love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.”

— Hermann Hesse, Wer lieben kann, ist glücklich. Über die Liebe

quoth the madman

“As a reliable compass for orientating yourself in life nothing is more useful than to accustom yourself to regarding this world as a place of atonement, a sort of penal colony. When you have done this you will order your expectations of life according to the nature of things and no longer regard the calamities, sufferings, torments and miseries of life as something irregular and not to be expected but will find them entirely in order, well knowing that each of us is here being punished for his existence and each in his own particular way. This outlook will enable us to view the so-called imperfections of the majority of men, i.e., their moral and intellectual shortcomings and the facial appearance resulting therefrom, without surprise and certainly without indignation: for we shall always bear in mind where we are and consequently regard every man first and foremost as a being who exists only as a consequence of his culpability and whose life is an expiation of the crime of being born.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

quoth the madman

 

"Individuals certainly make one another, physically and mentally, but do not make themselves."
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology

ponderous

"The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie."
- Joseph Brodsky