The Passions

Hölderlin.

Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own…

Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own, if I can put it that way. Naturally, the other’s body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will be always your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn’t unite. The fact you are naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other. What is real is narcis­sistic, what binds is imaginary. So there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, concludes Lacan. His proposition shocked people since at the time everybody was talking about nothing else but “sexual relationships”. If there is no sexual relationship in sexuality, love is what fills the absence of a sexual relationship. Lacan doesn’t say that love is a disguise for sexual relationships; he says that sexual relationships don’t exist, that love is what comes to replace that non-relationship. That’s much more interesting. This idea leads him to say that in love the other tries to approach “the being of the other”. In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other. The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary the mediation of the other is enough in itself. Such is the nature of the amorous encounter: you go to take on the other, to make him or her exist with you, as he or she is. It is a much more profound conception of love than the entirely banal view that love is no more than an imaginary canvas painted over the reality of sex.

Badiou -  In Praise of Love.  Serpent’s Tail 2012.

Secrecy

Secrecy flows through you, a different kind of blood. It’s as if you’ve eaten it like a bad candy, taken it into your mouth, let it melt sweetly on your tongue, then allowed it to slide down your throat like the reverse of uttering, a word dissolved into its glottals and sibilants, a slow intake of breath—

And now it’s in you, secrecy. Ancient and vicious, luscious as dark velvet. It blooms in you, a poppy made of ink.

You can think of nothing else. Once you have it, you want more. What power it gives you! Power of knowing without being known, power of the stone door, power of the iron veil, power of the crushed fingers, power of the drowned bones crying out from the bottom of the well. Margaret atwood

IX — Oh to be idle loving idleness!

Like a fierce beast self-penned in a bait-lair, My will to act binds with excess my action, Not-acting coils the thought with raged despair, And acting rage doth paint despair distraction. Like someone sinking in a treacherous sand, Each gesture to deliver sinks the more; The struggle avails not, and to raise no hand, Though hut more slowly useless, we’ve no power. Hence live I the dead life each day doth bring, Repurposed for next day’s repurposing. Fernando Pessoa

I ought to have a special hell for my anger, a hell for my pride, - and a hell for sex; a whole symphony of hells!

I am weary, I die. This is the grave and I'm turning into worms, horror of horrors! Satan, you clown, you want to dissolve me with your charms. Well, I want it. I want it! Stab me with a pitchfork, sprinkle me with fire. Arthur Rimbaud’s Night in Hell from “A season in hell”

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

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Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

Augustina von Nagel - The Thinker, 1997

« We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable. They even make it accessible, like a house. They structure time, furnish it. . .

Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways. . .

[T]oday, many forms of repetition, such as learning by heart, are scorned on account of the supposed stifling of creativity and innovation they involve. The expression ‘to learn something by heart’, like the French apprendre par cœur, tells us that apparently only repetition reaches the heart. In the face of increasing rates of attention deficit disorder, the introduction of ‘ritual studies’ as a school subject has recently been advocated as a means of reviving the exercise of ritual repetition as a cultural technique. Repetition stabilizes and deepens attention. Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity. »

— Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals