hellohappy

For one might say that a gift that could be recognized as such in the light of day, a gift destined for recognition, would immediately annul itself.

So, when I say ‘For every argument there is an equal and opposite one,’ I am in effect saying ‘For every argument I have considered, which purports to establish something dogmatically, it seems to me that there is another argument purporting to establish something dogmatically, which is opposite to it, and which is equally plausible or implausible.’

You are a victim of the rules you live by.

Lacan’s definition of love (‘Love is giving something one doesn’t have…’) has to be supplemented with: ‘…to someone who doesn’t want it.’

To a student who wanted to know where I stood with regard to the author of Zarathustra, I replied that I had long since stopped reading him. Why? “I find him too naive…”

I hold his enthusiasms, his fervors against him. He demolished so many idols only to replace them with others: a false iconoclast, with adolescent aspects and a certain virginity, a certain innocence inherent in his solitary’s career. He observed men only from a distance. Had he come closer, he could have neither conceived nor promulgated the superman, that preposterous, laughable, even grotesque chimera, a crotchet which could occur only to a mind without time to age, to know the long serene disgust of detachment.

What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being. The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical ‘mechanisms.’ There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically ‘normal’ forms of alienation. The ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the ‘formal’ majority as bad or mad.

The body manifests the stigmata of past experience and also gives rise to desires, failings, and errors… . The body is the inscribed surface of ideas… the locus of a dissociated Self… and a volume in perpetual disintegration.

Art, which puts us on the path of complete destruction and suspends us there for a time, offers us ravishment without death.

I often dream about falling. Such dreams are commonplace to the ambitious or those who climb mountains. Lately I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock, but it would not hold. Gravel gave way. I grasped for a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me. I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed. It is written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness.

In this passage from sun to sun, his days were organized according to a rhythm whose deliberation and strangeness became as necessary to him as had been his office, his restaurant, and his sleep in his mother’s room. In both cases, he was virtually unconscious of it. But now, in his hours of lucidity, he felt that time was his own, that in the brief interval which finds the sea red and leaves it green, something eternal was represented for him in each second. Beyond the curve of the days he glimpsed neither superhuman happiness nor eternity—happiness was human, eternity ordinary. What mattered was to humble himself, to organize his heart to match the rhythm of the days instead of submitting their rhythm to the curve of human hopes.