Le Poison

Wine can conceal a sordid room
In rich, miraculous disguise,
And make such porticoes arise
Out of its flushed and crimson fume
As makes the sunset in the skies.

Opium the infinite enlarges,
And lengthens all that is past measure.
It deepens time, and digs its treasure,
With sad, black raptures it o'ercharges
The soul, and surfeits it with pleasure.

Neither are worth the drug so strong
That you distil from your green eyes,
Lakes where I see my soul capsize
Head downwards: and where, in one throng,
I slake my dreams, and quench my sighs.

But to your spittle these seem naught —
It stings and burns. It steeps my thought
And spirit in oblivious gloom,
And, in its dizzy onrush caught,
Dashes it on the shores of doom

— Charles Baudelaire, "Poisons"

Locked In

The tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast-
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.

Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them.
A child - so high - you are,
And all this is folly to the world.

-Ezra Pound, "A Girl"

Che Vuoi?

...and if ever truthfully answered, wouldn't the phantasmatic coordinates of fantasy be destroyed?

If "individuation is a relation conceived as a pure or absolute between, a between understood as fully independent of or external to its terms - and thus a between that can just as well be described as 'between' nothing at all" (Hallward 154), its status is then that of a pure antagonism. Its structure was deployed by Lacan apropos sexual difference which, as a difference, precedes the two terms between which it is the difference: the point of Lacan's "formulas of sexuation" is that both masculine and feminine position are two ways to avoid the deadlock of the difference as such. This is why Lacan's claim that sexual difference is "real-impossible" is strictly synonymous with his claim that "there is no sexual relationship." Sexual difference is for Lacan not a firm set of "static" symbolic oppositions and inclusions/exclusions (heterosexual normativity that relegates homosexuality and other "perversions" to some secondary role), but the name of a deadlock, of a trauma, of an open question, of something that RESISTS every attempt at its symbolization. Every translation of sexual difference into a set of symbolic opposition(s) is doomed to fail, and it is this very "impossibility" that opens up the terrain of the hegemonic struggle for what "sexual difference" will mean. And the same goes for the political difference (class struggle): the difference between Left and Right is not only the difference between the two terms within a shared field, it is "real" since it is not possible to provide its neutral description - the difference between the Left and the Right appears differently if perceived from the Left and from the Right: for the first, it signals the antagonism which cuts across the entire social field (the antagonism concealed by thje Right), while the Right perceives itself as the force of moderation and social stability and organic unity, with the Left reduced to the position of an intruder that disturbs this organic stability of the social body - for the Right, the Left is as such "extreme."

- Slavoj Zizek, "Deleauze and the Lacanian Real"

Evolutions

“On the philosophico-ontological level, this is what Lacan is aiming at when he emphasizes the difference between the Freudian death drive and the so-called “nirvana principle” according to which every life system tends toward the lowest level of tension, ultimately toward death: “nothingness” (the void, being deprived of all substance) and the lowest level of energy paradoxically no longer coincide, that is, it is “cheaper” (it costs the system less energy) to persist in “something” than to dwell in “nothing,” at the lowest level of tension, or in the void, the dissolution of all order. It is this distance that sustains the death drive: far from being the same as the nirvana principle (the striving toward the dissolution of all life tension, the longing for the return to original nothingness), the death drive is the tension which persists and insists beyond and against the nirvana principle. In other words, far from being opposed to the pleasure principle, the nirvana principle is its highest and most radical expression. In this precise sense, the death drive stands for its exact opposite, for the dimension of the “undead,” of a spectral life which insists beyond (biological) death.”

- Salvoj Zizek, "The Puppet and the Dwarf"

Coloured Red

The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.

In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes
its ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.

It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.

Unfortunately, we must
murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera
a cool
sun,
profound,
inexhaustible,
populates the salads
of Chile,
happily, it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it's time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of earth, recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.

Pablo Neruda, "Ode to Tomatoes"
Coming to Buñol, Valencia, Spain, on August 26, 2015

Repulsions

Desirability's Obverse

delirious diamond woman
bare milk drunk smell
one thousand screams
above

enormous peach
I recall a black dress
repulsive goddess
shadowing those who moan
their language

ugly blue sun
raw honey
tough tongue
mother please

I ask her to elaborate

"symphony of feet
together with the beat

spray
drool
smear
or whatever "

Michael Sinclaire, "Fridge Magnet Poetry" (Mar 27, 2013)

Toreador o Torero?

[Verse 1]
I'm dancing for your pleasure
I'm falling for your pain
I fight for your attention
Each night until you're sane

I used to be a lover
Took all my meals to bed
I used to have a mother

[Chorus]
But I'm young, young, young
Yeah, I'm young, young, young

[Verse 2]
I used to go to movies
In cars with all my friends
They'd always pick me up
And dropped me at the ends

I've died for your affection
Condemned for all your sins
I haven't got religion

[Chorus]
But I'm young, young, young
Yeah, I'm young, young, young

[Bridge]
And under the bright lights
I hear them call my name again
I'm going over
Take me to San Fermin

(I can’t fall asleep in your arms
No I can’t fall asleep in your arms)

[Verse 3]
I used to write revisions
Got wasted when I cried
I played the church piano
When my father's sister died

I used to be a lover
Took all my meals to bed
I used to have a mother

[Refrain]
But I'm young, young, young

But under the bright lights
I hear them call my name again
I'm going over
‘Cause under the bright lights
Under the bright lights
‘Cause under the bright lights
I hear them call my name
(Can’t fall asleep in your arms)
Please take me to San Fermin
(No I can’t fall asleep in your arms)

Commercial Helotry

We may say broadly that free thought is the best of all safeguards against freedom. Managed in a modern style, the emancipation of the slave's mind is the best way of preventing the emancipation of the slave. Teach him to worry about whether he wants to be free, and he will not free himself. Again, it may be said that this instance is remote or extreme. But again, it is exactly true of the men in the streets around us. It is true that the negro slave, being a debased barbarian, will probably have either a human affection of loyalty, or a human affection for liberty. But the man we see every day - the worker in Mr. Gradgrind's factory, the little clerk in Mr. Gradgrind's office - he is too mentally worried to believe in freedom. He is kept quiet with revolutionary literature. He is calmed and kept in his place by a constant succession of wild philosophies. He is a Marxian one day, a Nietzschite the next day, a Superman (probably) the next day; and a slave every day. The only thing that remains after all the philosophies is the factory. The only man who gains by all the philosophies is Gradgrind. It would be worth his while to keep his commercial helotry supplied with skeptical literature. And now, I come to think of it, of course, Gradgrind is famous for giving libraries. He shows his sense. All modern books are on his side. As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of Earth will be exactly the same. No idea will remain long enough to be realised. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.

G.K. Chesterton, "The Eternal Revolution"

Evocation to le Objet Petit 'a...

Rene Magritte, "The Lovers"

Bending the Notes...

The Rock Star's Gaze - Woman as an Instrument to be Played...

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter of fact about the ice storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May not fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

- Robert Frost, "Birches"

No Where to Go

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

- William Butler Yeats, "The Song of Wandering Aengus"

Battling Minotaurs

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”

― Edgar Allan Poe

1789 Ca ira mon amour

1789 - It'll Be Fine My Love

This fear that undresses me
For having risked your name on my skin
And these tears that wash away your make-up
Come to carry away my senses beneath the waves

Despite everything
The looks that pierce
Near us
The banner that waves
After everything
Who cares, cares, cares, cares...

[Chorus]
It'll be fine my love
Ah! It'll be fine forever
Let us lovers go proclaim our
Forbidden oaths

It'll be fine my love
We will forget the drums
On all the walls, I swear I will write Freedom, dear

I dreamed our bodies, touching each other
Caressed the spirit of our ideas
I put my tongue in your mouth
To savor the essence of your every word

Despite everything
Desire is fragile
Near us
Pleasure in peril
After everything
Who cares, cares, cares, cares...

[Chorus]
It'll be fine my love
Ah! It'll be fine forever
Let us lovers go proclaim our
Forbidden oaths

It'll be fine my love
We will forget the drums
On all the walls, I swear I will write Freedom, dear

My love
It's your life that I'm marrying
On this day
Studded with red roses
Let us lovers go
We have to laugh and dance
See this spring... it's free

It'll be fine my love
We will write on the big day
I will offer you my nights for life
It's a promise

[Chorus]
It'll be fine my love
Ah! It'll be fine forever
Let us lovers go proclaim our
Forbidden oaths

It'll be fine my love
We will forget the drums
On all the walls, I swear I will write Freedom

Cuppa?