The moment has filled up with blue - Jose Emilio Pacheco

["The continuance of auto-eroticism is what makes possible to retain for so long the easier momentary and imaginary satisfaction in relation to the sexual object in place of real satisfaction, which calls for effort and postponement."
Sigmund Freud

"...I learned that dangerous means of assisting it (ce dangereux supplement), which cheats Nature and saves up for young men of my temperment many forms of excess at the expense of their health, strength, and, sometimes, their life...If once he acquires this dangerous habit (supplement) he is ruined. "
J.-J. Rousseau

"The presence that isthusdelivered to us in the present is a chimera....Something promises itself as it escapes, gives itself as it moves away, and strictly speaking cannot even be called presence. Such is the constraint of the supplement, such, exceeding all the language of metaphysics, is this structure "almost inconceivable to reason"....The supplement is madening because it is neither presence nor absence and because it consequently breaches both our pleasure and our virginity."
Jacques Derrida


I don't want to get over you
I guess I could take a sleeping pill and sleep at will
Don't have to go through what I go through
I guess I could take Prozac, right
And smile all night
At somebody new,
Somebody sweet and nice
That will help me get you off my mind
But I don't want to get over you.

The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs ]




WALTER BENJAMIN LEAVES PARIS

Come closer and I'll whisper good-bye in your ear.
Thank you for letting me know you, for sharing
an immense minute of my existence.
It will all be forgotten, of course.
There never was anything and what was once nothing
has the boundless space of nothigness
for it tomb.
But not everything is nothing:
something always remains.

A truce between adversity and catastrophe
and the fear and glory of having been born,
a few hours and a city will remain,
the ever more distant glow of this sad time.

Come closer and I'll whisper good-bye in your ear.
Good-bye. I'm leaving now.
But I'm taking these hours with me.

Jose Emilio Pacheco, From City of Memory [trans. Cynthia Steele and David Lauer, 1997, City Lights, San Fransisco (the legendary bookshop of 'Monsanto'!)]


["(T)he compulsion to repeat also recalls from the past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure, and which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction even to instictual impulses which have since been repressed (being) incompatible with reality...None of these things can have produced pleasure in the past, and it might be supposed that they would cause less unpleasure to-day if theu emerged as memories and dreams instead of taking the form of fresh experiences. They are of course the activities of instincts intended to lead to satisfaction; but no lesson has been learnt from the old experience of these activities having led instead only to unpleassure. In spite of that they are repeated, under pressure of a compulsion."
Sigmund Freud]


The city has no history
only martyrology.
Country of pain,
capital of suffering
the broken centre
of the great, unending disaster.

Jose Emilio Pacheco, From I Watch the Earth, Ibid


"A schizophrenic out on a walk is a better model than a neurotic
lying on the analyst’s couch" Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1972 (1977, 2000) p.2

Under the skin the body is an over-heated factory,
and outside,
the invalid shines,
glows,
from every burst pore.

Antoin Artaud, Van Gogh, ['Did you hear that? She said Van Gof!-Van Gof! Who is that? Woody Allen, Manhattan] the Man Suicided by Society IN Artaud Anthology (trans. Mary Beach and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, City Lights [again!, San Fransisco, 1965)