Adversaria (5)
‘Take a story from a place and drop it into another place and it doesn’t necessarily make sense, at least not at first. Like people, stories don’t always travel well. Nothing belongs everywhere, and some things only belong somewhere. But some stories, when they travel, can spark strange things in unmeasured hearts’ —Paul Kingsnorth (Savage Gods, p. 31)
‘Why is it that destroying things is an activity to share with someone you love, while repairing things is done alone?’ —Akiko Busch (Everything Else Is Bric-a-Brac, ‘Damage’, 20%)
‘Sometimes, very briefly, a blank moment—a kind of numbness—which is not a moment of forgetfulness. This terrifies me’ —Roland Barthes (Mourning Diary, trans. Richard Howard, 31 October 1977)
‘It is, when all is said and done, when faced with the subject of death that we feel most bookish’ —Jules Renard (Journal, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, December 1893)
‘We all think we have reason to reproach Nature and our destiny for congenital and infantile disadvantages; we all demand reparation for early wounds to our narcissism, our self-love. Why did not Nature give us the golden curls of Balder or the strength of Siegfried or the lofty brow of a genius or the noble profile of aristocracy? Why were we born in a middle-class home instead of in a royal palace? We could carry off beauty and distinction quite as well as any of those whom we are now obliged to envy for these qualities’ —Sigmund Freud (‘Some Character-Types Met With in Psycho-Analytic Work’, in Collected Works, vol. 14, p. 315)
‘What’s remarkable about these notes is a devastated subject being the victim of presence of mind’ —Roland Barthes (Mourning Diary, trans. Richard Howard, 2 November 1977)
‘…the way we attach value to things is both impossibly arbitrary and very, very precisely measured’ —Akiko Busch (Everything Else Is Bric-a-Brac, ‘Rewards’, 21%)
‘Sometimes, in a macabre imitation, I stop int eh middle of the road and open my mouth the way his was open on the bed. […] My laziness feeds on his death. My only inclination is to contemplate the picture that struck so terribly at my eyes.’ —Jules Renard (Journal, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, July 1897)
‘Everything seemed normal. That’s what “normal” is for. It’s a word we use to paint over the cracks in what we fail to live with’ —Paul Kingsnorth (Savage Gods, p. 80)
‘Solitude = having no one at home to whom you can say: I’ll be back at a specific time or who you can call to say (or to whom you can just say): voilà. I’m home now’ —Roland Barthes (Mourning Diary, trans. Richard Howard, 11 November 1977)
‘We must of course guard against thinking of every event whose cause is unknown as “causeless.” This, as I have already stressed is admissible only when a cause is not even thinkable. But thinkability is itself an ida that needs the most rigorous criticism’ —C.G. Jung (Synchronicity, trans. R.F.C. Hull, p. 102 (¶967))
‘Chaotic, erratic: moments (of distress, of love of life) as fresh now as on the first day’ —Roland Barthes (Mourning Diary, trans. Richard Howard, 29 November 1977)
‘I thought I wanted to belong. I thought I needed to have a place, a people. But every time I find a place, I don’t fit into it. Something takes me away from it, from the campfire to the slopes o the mountain. Every time I could belong, I push it away. So I suppose this must be who I am. Or, this must be part of who I am, one faction, jostling with the others’ —Paul Kingsnorth (Savage Gods, p. 120)
‘…places exist in memory almost entirely differently than they exist in the material world.’ —Akiko Busch (Everything Else Is Bric-a-Brac, ‘Music’, 53%)
‘…it’s when we’re busy, distracted, sought out, exteriorized, that we suffer most. Inwardness, calm, solitude make us less miserable’ —Roland Barthes (Mourning Diary, trans. Richard Howard, 19 March 1978)
‘At Harvard he discovered, lying in idleness, a fund for the support of psychic research and he put it to work’ —J.B. Rhine (New Frontiers of the Mind)
‘Despite the fact that the statistical method is in general highly unsuited to do justice to unusual events, Rhine’s experiments have nevertheless withstood the ruinous influence of statistics. Their results must therefore be taken into account in any assessment of synchronistic phenomena’ —C.G. Jung (Synchronicity, trans. R.F.C. Hull, p. 64 (¶911))
‘How annoying to be in mourning! Every moment you must remind yourself that you are sad.’ —Jules Renard (Journal, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, September 1897)
‘…by remembering it he had made the story his; and insofar as I have remembered it, it is mine; and now, if you like it, it’s yours. In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle’ —Ursula K. Le Guin (Dancing at the Edge of the World, ‘It Was a Dark and Stormy Night; Or, Why Are We Huddling about the Campfire?’, p.30)