My name isn’t really Clara, but Thea. That’s not in my passport. My religious upbringing, as I’ve told you, has been strictly orthodox and I’m sure I correspond to what my mother and father think a good daughter ought to be.

I have suffered a great many bodily ills, the worst an irritation which has persecuted me like a waking nightmare for two years. Another torment is my over-developed sensitivity. I react violently to sudden noises, intense light (I’m blind in one eye) or unpleasant smells. The normal pressure of a dress, for instance, can drive me mad with pain. When I was fifteen, I married a young Austrian actor. I wanted to start in the theater, but the marriage was unhappy, I had a child who died, and I went back to the school in Switzerland. Now the dry twilight rattles above the child’s head. I can’t go on. I cry now.

My glass eye also weeps.

I pretend I am a saint or a martyr. I can sit for hours at the big table in the closed room (where we played the forbidden records.) I can sit for hours gazing at the palms of my hands. Once a redness appeared out of my left palm, but no blood. I pretend I am sacrificing myself for my brothers. I am saving them from mortal danger. I pretend ecstasy and speak to the Holy Virgin. I pretend faith and disbelief, defiance and doubt. I pretend I am a rejected sinner with an insupportable burden of guilt. Suddenly I reject the guilt and forgive myself. It’s all a game. I am pretending.

Within the game, I am the same, sometimes extremely tragic, sometimes boundlessly exhilarated. All with the same small effort. I confided in a doctor (I’ve been to so many doctors.) He told me that my dreaming and idle life were damaging my psyche. He prescribed specific things that would force me to leave the prison of my egocentricity. Order. Self-discipline. Tasks. Corsets. My father, who is so gentle, so wise and coolly calculating, says that I should not worry, that everything exists in all things, and living is a torment that one overcomes with resignation, but preferably without cynicism. I am not keen on that kind of effort, so I’m thinking of going even further into my games, taking them more seriously, if you understand what I mean.

(from The Magic Lantern)

so the bat quivers across the porcelain of evening.

…so we live here, forever taking leave

from rilke’s eighth elegy

Her face is as white as a piece of paper and she doesn’t even talk; and she spends the whole day as if she were in a dream or something, half asleep and half awake. Why, yesterday I put my hand on her forehead like this, and she was burning up. And you’d just finished sprinkling holy water on her to shoo the spirits away. That old man is the one to blame for all this-he doesn’t believe in anything, not even so much as the mother that bore him. We’ve got to pray, we’ve got to ask God to help. That child is not well. Tomorrow first thing in the morning I’m going to go out and find me some ironweed leaves and some rue to work against the spell, and make her a bath to sit in. She’s thirteen, and that’s a dangerous, dangerous age. I’ll tell you, she might be going to turn out to be a medium. But anyway-this is a hard test, a test of what’s in store for her to bear. These days she spends the livelong day, her whole life, you might say, looking out the hall window. Like there was something to see out that window-and you can’t even see the street…But I tell you, the devil himself is in this house. Tell me the truth-do you pray every night? Well, then, from now on you better not sleep so much. Look at that face and tell me it doesn’t look like the face of the dead…May God forgive me for what I’ve said, and for what I didn’t say, too, and ought to have. You’ve got to fight it. My advice to you would be for you all to move out of this house. I believe there’s some evil or something buried here…Some evil, or an evil eye, or some kind of hex or other. Her bed might be right on top of where it’s buried, that might be what it is. Move her bed, or at least make her sleep with her head down at the foot. Look at that face, what does it look like to you?…Give her lots of spiritual waters to drink. A little bottle of Turn-the-tables.

The Palace of the White Skunks, Reinaldo Arenas

who gave benign answers and reassuring blessings. every time i confronted god with the realities i witnessed, he turned into something ugly and revolting. a spider-god, a monster…

from ingmar bergman’s winter light, second movie in his ‘trilogy of faith’ or lack thereof, after through a glass darkly, so important…

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.