Tag: i thou

i can’t help it.

reitsc:

I can’t help some things either. 

Every morning I see a woman on the train with calla-white legs napkinned in an orchid-stiff skirt like a fork and knife. She always looks as neat as a pastry I want to eat. 

Other than the reader, the charwoman in that Kafka story is the only one to attribute to Gregor any kind of humanity or intelligence: intention, deception, emotion, and only insofar as she wanted to kill him. Do you think this is the only way of seeing one another as human? By hurting each other’s feelings?

I had lunch with two lawyers and their secretaries, and a paralegal with glassy pupils. I don’t have a personality, nor do I know how to talk like these people. But I’ve been reading the same Marianne Moore poem for a week now, I might be able to recite it to you soon. Fox-glove, giant snap-dragon. A salpiglossis that has spots and stripes. I don’t fit in anywhere. I can help that least of all.

Julia Kristeva

Let us not seek to solidify, to turn the otherness of the foreigner into a thing. Let us merely touch it, brush by it, without giving it permanent structure. Simply sketching out its perpetual motion through some of its variegated aspects spread out before our eyes today, even some of its former, changing representations scattered throughout history. Let us also lighten that otherness by constantly coming back to it-but more and more swiftly. Let us escape its hatred, its burden, fleeing them not through leveling and forgetting, but through the harmonious repetition of the differences it implies and spreads.” 34

from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

How could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? (She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily empty.) It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind. The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant. To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain [ … ] Oh, Mrs. Ramsay! she called out silently, to that essence which sat by the boat, that abstract one made of her, that woman in grey, as if to abuse her for having gone, and then having gone, come back again. [ … ] Suddenly, the empty drawing-room steps, the frill of the chair inside, the puppy tumbling on the terrace, the whole wave and whisper of the garden became like curves and arabesques flourishing round a center of complete emptiness. 

To the extent that we commit violence, we are acting on another, putting the other at risk, causing the other damage, threatening to expunge the other. In a way, we all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot preempt.

Judith Butler

“But I think—and this will hardly surprise you—that the poem has always
hoped, for this very reason, to speak also on behalf of the strange—no, I can no longer use this word here—on behalf of the other—who knows,
perhaps of an altogether other.
This “who knows” which I have reached is all I can add here, today,
to the old hopes” (Paul Celan, GW, Ill, 596 / CP, 48)

HARMONY IN THE BOUDOIR

lunchboxpoems:

After years of marriage, he stands at the foot of the bed and
tells his wife that she will never know him, that for everything
he says there is more that he does not say, that behind each
word he utters there is another word, and hundreds more be-
hind that one. All those unsaid words, he says, contain his true
self, which has been betrayed by the superficial self before her.
“So you see,” he says, kicking off his slippers, “I am more than
what I have led you to believe I am.” “Oh, you silly man,” says
his wife, “of course you are. I find that just thinking of you
having so many selves receding into nothingness is very excit-
ing. That you barely exist as you are couldn’t please me more.”

MARK STRAND

Lightness of touch … Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Wawannaisa), 1991. Photograph: The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

“Untitled” (Last Letter). Photograph: The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

Felix Gonzalez-Torres to Carl George, 1988