Don’t think that fate is more than the destiny of childhood;
how often you outdistanced the man you loved, breathing, breathing
after the blissful chase, and passed on into freedom….
….
(….Like an outstretched arm
is my call. And its hand, held open and reaching up
to seize, remains in front of you, open
as if in defense and warning,
Ungraspable One, far above.)

Rilke, Rainer Maria Rilke, what a lyrical rhythmical name you have…

The flowers grew to a height of about two metres, their slender stems, like rods of glass, bearing a dozen leaves,
the once transparent fronds frosted by the fossilised veins. At the peak of each stem was the time flower, the size of a
goblet, the opaque outer petals enclosing the crystal heart. Their diamond brilliance contained a thousand facets, the
crystal seeming the drain the air of its light and motion. As the flowers swayed slightly in the evening air, they glowed
like flame-tipped spears.
(from J.G. Ballard’s Garden of Time)

However, these two reasons for not marrying her love do not cover the entire field. One is tempted to claim that the Princess enumerates them in order to conceal the third, perhaps the crucial one: the jouissance, the satisfaction brought about by the very act of renunciation, of maintaining the distance towards the beloved object. This paradoxical jouissance characterizes the movement of drive as that which finds satisfaction in circulating around the object and repeatedly missing it. The three reasons thus refer to the triad of ISR: the symbolic moral prohibition, the imaginary concern for the balance of pleasures, the real of drive. – Along these same lines, one should interpret the other great mysterious feminine “No!”, that of Isabel Archer at the end of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady: why doesn’t Isabel leave Osmond, although she definitely doesn’t love him and is fully aware of his manipulations? The reason is not the moral pressure exerted on her by the notion of what is expected of a woman in her position – Isabel has sufficiently proven that, when she wants, she is quite willing to override conventions: “Isabel stays because of her commitment to the bond of her word, and she stays because she is unwilling to abandon what she still sees as a decision made out of her sense of independence.”24 In short, as Lacan put it apropos of Sygne de Coufontaine in Claudel’s The Hostage, Isabel is also “the hostage of the word.” So it is wrong to interpret this act as a sacrifice bearing witness to the proverbial “feminine masochism”: although Isabel was obviously manipulated into marrying Osmond, her act was her own, and to leave Osmond would simply equal depriving herself of her autonomy.25 While men sacrifice themselves for a Thing (country, freedom, honor), only women are able bto sacrifice themselves for nothing. (Or: men are moral, while only women are properly ethical.) And it is our contention that this “empty” sacrifice is the Christian gesture par excellence: it is only against the background of this empty gesture that one can begin to appreciate the uniqueness of the figure of Christ. (zizek on lacan)

I see behind you, behind the
mirror of your eyes, the crush of dangerous shadows, the dead,
who look greedily through the empty sockets of your eyes, who
moan and hope to gather up through you all the loose ends of
the ages, which sigh in them. Your cluelessness does not prove
anything. Put your ear to that wall and you will hear the rustling
of their procession. the red book P327

damn i wish i learned how to draw that gun.

dad’s in icu trying to detox again. i’ve been sleeping for days.

in the book, but also in life.
he wasn’t sure if he could trust what he thought he could see.

in this story by barthelme, the narrator speaks of constanze, whom he implies is smart in strange ways, but also rather dumb…says “what i’m trying to suggest is, she’s in a delicate relation to the real…she took care of me that time i had my little psychotic episode…the really dreadful thought, to me, is that her real might be the real one…no use crying over spilt marble…” p.94

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
(william butler yeats)

“The pattern is looking for something to attach itself to, trying to hang on to its own existence by finding some new material to center itself upon (call the pattern a spirit or ghost…the ghost is looking for a new body to enter)” (Pirsig)