Fenêtres: II

[Quotes from Jean-Bertrand Pontalis' Windows, part 2]

"You assume he is our father. No, he's mine, I am his daughter. I'm the one he loved.
— How do parents go about convincing each of their children that they were the favorite one? And how can one be satisfied with the conventional statement, "I love you both the same"?
— J. slams the door when her husband, who had not concealed his affair with B. from her, declares, thinking it would placate her, "But I love you. I love you both, one as much as the other," making his case worse by adding, "in different ways." " (62 - 63)

"Hypermnesia, this hypertrophy of recording memory, all this energy concentrated in order to forget nothing. [...]
— Forgetting is necessary to give thickness to time, to access perceptive time. This test of mourning, of loss, of the separation with one's self is what frees us from reproducing sameness. A memory that would desire no loss is a dead memory. A living memory demands forgetting. Dead memory recorded everything except the living moments of today, which cannot be recorded.
— Hypermnesia, insomnia: they are sisters. Memory is what is asleep in us, our still waters." (69)

"Trying day, tiring, session after session, they all look alike, they all keep endlessly repeating themselves, I've heard it a hundred times [...]
— At night, to distract me from this day that doesn't end, I pick up a novel [...] It often happens, said Therese, that one invents sicknesses for oneself after a death. It's a way of feeling less alone. You split in half if you will. You take care of yourself as if you were an other. You are two again: myself and the one I"m taking care of. [...]
— A monad without doors or windows. Hostile in front of everything that would disturb self-reliance.

Analysis is, perhaps, along with love, the only experience that takes you "out of yourself." " (81 - 83) 

"Clearings: light, fragile rays of sun through the leaves, opening, but opening through a crack that for so long was not visible. [...]

— In my clearings, I am never alone." (113 - 114)

Mourning the Memory of a Streetcorner

"[E]verything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss.  Swallowed and preserved.  Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject."



The ramp down to the river ... the butter chicken place, for international calling cards; the gay coffee shop, where C. saw R. through the window; the lemongrass chicken vermicelli bowls with D.; the bad date with N. at the hipster restaurant; the Italian place where A. showed off her girlfriend; the art-house theatre, with every ghost ...  "Rest assured, your love is pure" ... a flute refrain, an ascent, a stolen past ... turning everything into salt ... I have to pretend you aren't there or anywhere.

Fenêtres: I

[Quotes from Jean-Bertrand Pontalis' Windows, part 1]

"Geography: The sunken part of the earth's surface, situated below sea level and generally filled in with water.
— These depressions have always been of unequal depth, which allows the following distinctions: a neritic zone or all marine waters that lie at depths of less than 3,000 meters, a pelagic zone that extends from 3,000 to 5,000 meters deep and an abyssal zone that includes large marine craters beyond 5,000 meters deep. [...]
— The abyssal mother at the very bottom of depression?" (26 - 27)

"I can only trust signs and no sign is reliable. [...]
— Hypochondria: my organs persecute me. My organs: so many objects inside of me became my present and potential adversaries, merciless attackers. I am now their prey.
— Jealous passion: she is hiding something from me, she lies, she has a life of her own and that's it -- I have nothing left in me except this "object," I am conflated with it. I am possessed [...]
— When the woman he thought he loved left him -- she was his, he was hers -- this man became a hypochondriac." (38 - 39)

"Meaning is not the opposite of nonsense. If you work at it, if you "rack your brains," you can always find some meaning in nonsense. Meaning is opposed to the formless, to the meaningless." (55)

"[The sensitive] quickly transform their perceptions, or rather their impressions, into signs, or rather into clues. They extend the empire of uncertain signs well beyond its definite borders [...]
— The jealous type is sensitive, always on the lookout for clues proving that he has been duped -- he isn't always mistaken; the lover also, about signs that would assure him that he is loved -- he is often mistaken." (56 - 57)

"[A]ll our efforts to master what we aren't assured of grasping or retaining, [...] the whole game of representations, which suffer from the lack of presence and that however tireless those representations are as well, they look for it, demand it, this presence.
— All this thread, as fragile as it is, is what connects us to the other, to life. Should it break -- existence is held only by a thread -- then it's death." (60)

Construction is complete...

...a fagborg is 'born.'