The diseased
I want all of you out there to shut up.
I'm going to live the ways we want to live.
What do you want of me now?
Liver, blood, guts?
The only thing left is madness.
You too’re gonna drive yourself to the pits:
You're gonna walk on coals through blazing fires:
You're gonna drink down the world's most painful poisons:
That's what wanting love is.
My man isn't like other men.
He can keep you in prison.
He can make you do anything.
I know why all of you want him.
But worse, what happens
if my Slave Trader
for some stupid reason
happens to like you?
Then you’re screwed:
no more sleep
Nor will he let you keep your eyes.
He compulsions alone can fetter forces wildness.
How many times a spineless being you'll run to
all the weaky friends you formerly despised,
tremulous sorrow will arise with tears shuddering
warts and pimples and fleas’ll appear on your skin
all your wishes’ll go, words are no more,
you'll never again now who you are.
You'll learn to serve him, girl, to be whatever he wants,
to disappear whenever he wants you to go.
You'll learn why people who want, want to die
why the whole world are lies.
Your rich parents ain't helping:
cause Love's more powerful than social climbing.
But if even small you have given footsteps of your failure
how quickly from such a reputation you will be a murmur!
Not I then I will be able to comfort to bear to asking you
‘Cause I'm sick too.
At this point sicker than you.
My disease is forever.
I know no comfort.
Since we're both maniacs,
let’s be nice to each other.
I myself want to live.
I want to burn.
all I ask is no one loves me
in return.
Every evening during the summer at Vermilion Sands the insane poems of my beautiful neighbour drifted across the desert to me from Studio 5, The Stars, the broken skeins of coloured tape unravelling in the sand like the threads of a dismembered web. All night they would flutter around the buttresses below the terrace, entwining themselves through the balcony railings, and by morning, before I swept them away, they would hang across the south face of the villa like a vivid cerise bougainvillaea.
Once, after I had been to Red Beach for three days, I returned to find the entire terrace filled by an enormous cloud of coloured tissues, which burst through the french windows as I opened them and pushed into the lounge, spreading across the furniture and bookcases like the delicate tendrils of some vast and gentle plant. For days afterwards I found fragments of the poems everywhere.
Surely the primary, survival-effective uses of language involve stating alternatives and hypotheses. We don’t, we never did, go about making statements of fact to other people, or in our internal discourse with ourselves. We talk about what may be, or what we’d like to do, or what you ought to do, or what might have happened: warnings, suppositions, propositions, invitations, ambiguities, analogies, hints, lists, anxieties, hearsay, old wives’ tales, leaps and cross-links and spiderwebs between here and there, between then and now, between now and sometime, a continual weaving and restructuring of the remembered and the perceived and the imagined, including a great deal of wishful thinking and a variable quantity of deliberate or non-deliberate fictionalizing, to reassure ourselves or for the pleasure of it, and also some deliberate or semi-deliberate falsification in order to mislead a rival or persuade a friend or escape despair; and no sooner have we made one of these patterns of words than we may, like Shelley’s cloud, laugh, and arise, and unbuild it again.
In recent centuries we speakers of this lovely language have reduced the English verb almost entirely to the indicative mood. But beneath that specious and arrogant assumption of certainty all the ancient, cloudy, moody powers and options of the subjunctive remain in force. The indicative points its bony finger at primary experiences, at the Things; but it is the subjunctive that joins them, with the bonds of analogy, possibility, probability, contingency, contiguity, memory, desire, fear, and hope: the narrative connection. As J. T. Fraser puts it, moral choice, which is to say human freedom, is made possible “by language, which permits us to give accounts of possible and impossible worlds in the past, in the future, or in a faraway land.”
The apparent translucency taken on by obscure historical and political forces in decline (the state, nationalism) can enlist images having their sources in the earth or in nature, in paternity or in maternity. The rational is thus naturalised, while nature cloaks itself in nostalgias which supplant rationalities.
Envoi
Imprisoned by four walls
(to the North, the crystal of non-knowledge
A landscape to be invented
To the South, reflective memory
To the East, the mirror
The the West, stone and the song of silence)
I wrote messages, but received no reply.
Octavio Paz
The repetition of a work of art is like a singularity without connect, and it is not by chance that a poem must be learned by heart. The head is the organ of exchange, but the heart is the amorous organ of repetition. ( It is true that repetition also concerns the head, but precisely because it is its terror or paradox.) Pius Servien rightly distinguished two languages: the language of science, dominated by the symbol of equality, in which each term may be replaced by others; and lyrical language, in which every term is irreplaceable and can only be repeated. Repetition can always be ‘represented’ as extreme resemblance or perfect equivalence, but the fact that one can pass by degrees from one thing to another does not prevent their being different in kind.
On the other hand, generality belongs to the order of laws. However law determines only the resemblance of subjects ruled by it, along with their equivalence to terms which it designates. Far from grounding repetition, law shows, rather, how repetition would remain impossible for pure subjects of law, particulars. It condemns them to change. As an empty form of difference, an invariable form of variation, a law compels its subjects to illustrate it only at the cost of their exchange. No doubt there are as many content as variables among the terms designated by laws, and a many permanences and preservations as there are flutes and variations in nature. However a preservation is still not a repetition. The constants of one law are in turn variables of a more general law, just as the hardest of rocks become soft and fluid matter on the geological scale of millions of years. So at each level, it is in relation to permanent large natural objects that the subject of law experiences its own powerlessness to repeat and discovers that this powerlessness is already contained in the object, reflected in the permanent object wherein it sees itself condemned. Law unites the change of water and the permanence of the river. Elie Faure said of Watteau: ‘ He imbued with the utmost transitoriness those things which our gaze encounters vas the most enduring, namely space and forests.’ This is the eighteenth century method. Wolmar, in La Nouvelle Héloïse, made a system of it: the impossibility of repetition, and change as a condition to which all particular creatures are subject by the law of Nature, were understood in relation to fixed terms ( themselves no doubt, variables in relation to other permanences and in function of other, more general laws). This is the meaning of the grove, the grotto and the ‘sacred’ object. ………
If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive as opposed to the ordinary, an instanteinity opposed to variation and an eternity opposed to permanence. In every respect, repetition s a transgression. It puts law into question, it denounces its nominal or general character in favour of a more profound and more artistic reality.
From Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze
