the king is dead, long live the king

dreamt Papa died. Was upset but not very emotional. Saw Y.Rand who i haven't encountered in over four years and though i didn't want to be a pity-case (my brother just said hi and walked away, no need to vomit his emotions into the lap of anyone who comes along) , couldn't help myself and blurted out immediately "my father just died" after which i burst into tears on his shoulder. He knows what it's like to lose a parent. I also remember talking to some girl who felt sorry for me and telling her that now i was a millionaire because of the life insurance policy. economy of relationships. how bizarro.

bulgakovian conditioning

The only way to revive a mortally wounded cat is with a swig of benzyne

frenzied philosophy

Not necessity but excess, not efficiency but messiness, not sufficiency but overflowing abundance. Much of civilization is built upon the structured attempt at turning away from the violence of this realization. The anxiety caused by the overwhelming freedom of its implications drives the need for necessity.

Dasein's nightmare

Ja, aus der Welt werden wir nicht fallen. Wir sind einmal darin.

dreams

I had a dream last night: I was revisiting a scene from my past (which didn't actually happen, but rather it was a dream I had years ago...), in which the familty et al was swimming in this pool that was beside a large river, kind of a wayside of sorts. My brother was already there, and my father and uncle and cousins... I was showing someone else this memory, like I had gone back in time. And I say to them, "oh, I'm about to arrive, I came late with my mother." Then we see my mother swim up the river with a five-year-old me, and get into the pool where the family is swimming and playing. The child-me looks extremely fragile, like those kids who have a slight autism, more vulnerable than the rest. His baby hair is very sparse in one place (as if he'd had brain-surgery??) I feel sorry for him, for his weakness, his difference, his fragility. And just then he looks at me, our eyes lock, and there's a flash of understanding in his eyes, as if he knows he is looking at himself. I feel exposed for a second, before he looks away and starts playing with my mother who is holding him.

underground men

I am not a fighter. What does one do with this wretched awareness? Having survived Zarathustra’s visions only to awaken to the cold realization that I cannot exist at the edge of such an echoing abyss, that at such heights of excess my lungs choke on the thin air of fear… The race I belong to knows the wail of mourning better than the cry of battle. Do I have the strength to envision on my own, to become a prophet without a God, to invent some alternative method of madness that will alleviate the burden of this existence?

escape artist

To evade the present at all costs
I tried to bury myself in the future, in the tombs of temporality
A refugee of time
An emigrant of the infinitely echoing solitude of the moment

wailing walls

How to get behind oneself? To reach back to the normative structures of value that govern our comportment to the world and determine our self-conception? Is it possible? Or perhaps there is no “behind”, no a priori (however relativized and contingently historical) of values into which we have been socialized or traumatized? Are the internalized paternal forces merely another myth, is the parable of patriarchy an illusion? But even accepting that, how does that help, naming it as an illusion does not dispel its power. How does one escape an illusion? Can dreamers commit suicide? Brecht believes that Kafka envisioned a nightmare from which he never awoke. Is this to be my fate as well? I see a prisoner in a sealed room walking from wall to wall and inscribing names on each of them, hoping that they will disappear. When he gets tired of a name he crosses it out and writes another. An attempt to crack open language and extract its emancipatory juices. In the end, he slumps in a corner and gazes absently at the word-stained walls.