Slept more than 12 hours last night/today for the first time, quite a treat for a person who is afraid to/can’t sleep. It is as if I was in a form of surrendering, a moment of trust, and temporary relinquishing all senses of control, a mere state of happiness. Heading to Lisa‘s, I shall start writing this blog again…
Probably should promise never to quote Barthes again, but listening to Dindi on loop for the past 3 days, and spending a day at MOMA seeing lots of deranged images today, made me think of this fragment; heck, I am not sleeping anyway…
“In the loving calm of your arms”
étreinte / embrace
the gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill,
for a time, the subject’s dream of total union with
the loved being.1. Besides intercourse (when the Image-repertoire goes to the devil), there is that other embrace, which is a motionless cradling: we are enchanted, bewitched: we are in the realm of sleep, without sleeping; we are within the voluptuous infantilism of sleepiness: this is the moment for telling stories, the moment of the voice which takes me, siderates me, this is the return to the mother (“In the loving calm of your arms,” says a poem set to music by Duparc). In this companionable incest, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled.
2. Yet, within this infantile embrace, the genital unfailingly appears; it cuts off the diffuse sensuality of the incestuous embrace; the logic of desire begins to function, the will-to-possess returns, the adult is superimposed upon the child. I am then two subjects at once: I want maternity and genitality.
3. A moment of affirmation; for a certain time, though a finite one a deranged interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction): fulfillment does exist, and I shall keep on making it return: persist in wanting to rediscover to renew the contradiction — the contraction — of the two embraces.
— A Lover’s Discourse Roland Barthes
Amorous passion is a delirium; but such delirium is not alien; everyone speaks of it, it is henceforh tamed. What is enigmatic is the loss of delirium: one returns to . . . what?
– A Lover’s Discourse Roland Barthes
cacher / to hide
A deliberative figure: the amorous subject
wonders, not whether he should declare his love
to the loved being (this is not a figure of avowal),
but to what degree he should conceal the
turbulences of his passion: his desires, his
distresses; in short, his excesses (in Racinian
language: his fureur).1. X, who left for his vacation without me, has shown no signs of life since his departure: accident? post-office strike? indifference? distancing maneuver? exercise of a passing impulse of autonomy (“His youth deafens him, he fails to hear”)? or simple innocence? I grow increasingly anxious, pass through each act of the waiting-scenario. But when X reappears in one way or another, for he cannot fail to do so (a thought which should immediately dispel any anxiety), what will I say to him? Should I hide my distress — which will be over by then (“How are you?”) Release it aggressively (“That wasn’t at all nice, at least you could have . . .”) or passionately (“Do you know how much worry you caused me?”) Or let this distress of mine be delicately, discreetly understood, so that it will be discovered without having to strike down the other (“I was rather concerned. . .”)? A secondary anxiety seized me, which is that I must determine the degree of publicity I shall give to my initial anxiety.
2. I am caught up in a double discourse, from which I cannot escape. On the one hand, I tell myself: suppose the other, by some arrangement of his own structure, needed my questioning? Then wouldn’t I be justified in abandoning myself to the literal expression, the lyrical utterance of my “passion”? Are not excess and madness my truth, my strength? And if this truth, this strength ultimately prevailed?
But on the other hand, I tell myself: the signs of this passion run the risk of smothering the other. Then should I not, precisely because of my love, hide from the other how much I love him? I see the other with a double vision: sometimes as object, sometimes as subject; I hesitate between tyranny and oblation. Thus I doom myself to blackmail: if I love the other, I am forced to seek his happiness; but then I can only do myself harm: a trap: I am condemned to be a saint or a monster: unable to be the one, unwilling to be the other: hence I tergiversate: I show my passion a little.3. To impose upon my passion the mask of discretion (of impassivity): this is a strictly heroic value: “It is unworthy of great souls to expose to those around them the distress they feel” (Clotilde de Vaux); Captain Paz, one of Balzac’s heroes, invents a false mistress in order to be sure of keeping his best friend’s wife from knowing that he loves her passionately.
Yet to hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don’t want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other. Lavatus prodeo: I advance pointing to my mask: I set a mask upon my passion, but with a discreet (and sily) finger I designate this mask. Every passion, ultimately, has its spectator: at the moment of his death, Captain Paz cannot keep from writing to the woman he has loved in silence: no amorous oblation without a final theater: the sign is always victorious.4. Let us suppose that I have wept, on account of some incident of which the other has not even become aware (to weep is part of the normal activity of the amorous body), and that, so this cannot be seen, I put on dark glasses to mask my swollen eyes (a fine example of denial: to darken the sight in order not to be seen). The intention of this gesture is a calculated one: I want to keep the moral advantage of stoicism, of “dignity” (I take myself for Clotilde de Vaux), and at the same time, contradictorily, I want to provoke the tender question (“But what’s the matter with you?”); I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby I gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses; that the other will see, in the fact, no sign.
5. In order to suggest, delicately, that I am suffering, in order to hide without lying, I shall make use of a cunning preterition: I shall divide the economy of my signs. The task of the verbal signs will be to silence, to mask, to deceive: I shall never account, verbally, for the excesses of my sentiment. Having said nothing of the ravages of the anxiety, I can always, once it has passed, reassure myself that no one has guessed anything. The power of language: with my language I can do everything: even and especially say nothing.
6. … so that a long series of verbal contentions (my “politenesses”) may suddenly explode into some generalized revulsion: a crying jag (for instance), before the other’s flabbergasted eyes, will suddenly wipe out all the efforts (and the effects) of a carefuly controlled language. I break apart:
Connais donc Phédre et toute sa fureur.
Now you know Phaedra and all her fury.– A Lover’s Discourse Roland Barthes
this is quite funny… love how Barthes whines… 
55th Street & Madison Ave. after luncheon at Aquavit this afternoon…
first photo taken with my spanking new iPhone 3G S… I caved…
riding my very pink bike for the very first time in the Riverside Park… I LOVE IT!!!!!!
The very very first bike of my life — hard to imagine, me + a bike, or me “on” a bike, since I made such a big deal over dressing down, wearing flats, and won’t be caught again hiking all that stuff… Guess one DOES change, well, a little bit at a time at least… this is after all, a very very very PINK bike 
ps nope, haven’t taken it outdoor yet, waiting for bff Derek’s back to get better so I can have a guide… I am too scared to go out with it… LOL well, eventually I will need to ride it everyday going up and down the bike route in the Riverside Park 
Engulfment is a moment of hypnosis. A suggestion functions, which commands me to swoon without killing myself. Whence, perhaps, the gentleness of the abyss: I have no responsibility here, the act (of dying) is not up to me: I entrust myself, I transmit myself (to whom? to God, to Nature, to everything, except to the other).
– A Lover’s Discourse Roland Barthes
Have been wildly entertained by Baudelaire’s squibs… this one is certainly one of my favorites…
“The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.
Only the brute is really potent. Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.
To fornicate is to aspire to enter into another; the artist never emerges from himself.
I have forgotten the name of that slut. Bah! I shall remember it at the last judgment.
Music conveys the idea of space.
So do all the arts, more or less; since they are number and since number is a translation of space.
To will every day to be the greatest of men!â€
