RainyCoast

In the collection of the Galleria nazionale di arte antica in Rome, there is a painting by Giovanni Serodine that represents the meeting of the apostles Peter and Paul on the road to their martyrdom. The two saints, immobile, occupy the center of the canvas, surrounded by the wild gesticulations of the soldiers and executioners who are leading them t0 their torment. Critics have often remarked on the contrast between the heroic fortitude of the two apostles and the tumult of the crowd , highlighted here and there by drops of light splashed almost at random on arms, faces, and trumpets. As far as I am concerned, I maintain that what renders this painting genuinely incomparable is that Serodine has depicted the two apostles so close to each other (their foreheads are almost stuck together) that there is no way that they can see one another. On the road to martyrdom, they look at each other without recognizing one another. This impression of a nearness that is, so to speak, excessive is enhanced by the silent gesture of the barely visible, shaking hands at the bottom of the painting. This painting has always seemed t0 me to be a perfect allegory of friendship. Indeed, what is friendship other than a proximity that resists both representation and conceptualization? To recognize someone as a friend means not being able to recognize him as a “something.” Calling someone “ friend” is not the same as calling him “white,” “Italian,” or “ hot,” since friendship is neither a property nor a quality of a subject. Giorgio Agamben, The Friend

…Because in your mind, you’re mad. But in conversation you have the chance of not being. Your mind by itself is full of unmediated anxieties and conflicts. In conversation things can be metabolized and digested through somebody else — I say something to you and you can give it back to me in different forms — whereas you’ll notice that your own mind is very often extremely repetitive. It is very difficult to surprise oneself in one’s own mind. The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd. We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred. -Adam Phillips, interviewed by Paul Holdengräber

Theoretically there is a perfect possibility of happiness: believing in the indestructible element in oneself and not striving towards it. -Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

"There is really nothing but resistance to be analyzed; there is no true self waiting in the wings to be released." -S. Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

For decades, a classic joke has been circulating among Lacanians to exemplify the key role of the Other’s knowledge: a man who believes himself to be a kernel of grain is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to convince him that he is not a kernel of grain but a man; however, when he is cured (convinced that he is not a kernel of grain but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back, trembling and very scared—there is a chicken outside the door, and he is afraid it will eat him. “My dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a kernel of grain but a man.” “Of course I know,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken?” Therein resides the true stake of psychoanalytic treatment: it is not enough to convince the patient about the unconscious truth of his symptoms; the unconscious itself must be brought to assume this truth. The same holds true for the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism: we can imagine a bourgeois subject attending a Marxism course where he is taught about commodity fetishism. After the course, he comes back to his teacher, complaining that he is still the victim of commodity fetishism. The teacher tells him “But you know now how things stand, that commodities are only expressions of social relations, that there is nothing magic about them!” to which the pupil replies: “Of course I know all that, but the commodities I am dealing with seem not to know it!” This is what Lacan aimed at in his claim that the true formula of materialism is not “God doesn’t exist,” but “God is unconscious.” “[T]he true task is not to convince the subject, but the chicken-commodities: not to change the way we speak about commodities, but to change the way commodities speak among themselves.” — Žižek, S., 2014. Žižek’s Jokes: (Did you hear the one about Hegel and negation?), A. Mortensen (ed.). Cambridge: MIT Press. pp.67-68

I feel best when my sense of emancipation preserves the memory of what it emancipates from. -Jacques Derrida

The work with kids I did was group therapy and I did it with a brilliant therapist who is still a good friend. And there were kids, you know, from… I guess the youngest might have been fourteen but they were mostly in their middle to late adolescence, sometimes up to twenty-five or thirty. And I guess the effect of it was mostly that you didn’t have to be afraid of anything that the mind does. Even though you can be thunderstruck at it, at its absurdity and sometimes obscenity, there really wasn’t anything to be afraid of. And I think that may have helped me write some poems that I might not have been able to write otherwise. Just that, being able to say “Oh, look, this is what mind does. And so what? Let’s think about it or talk about it or write about it.” If I got anything from that work, it would have been that. Although there were scary things too: kids trying to kill themselves, and sometimes succeeding. But basically it was that: realising how many different things consciousness can do, and how forgivable almost all of it is. -C.K. Williams In conversation with Ahren Warner

“A little hypocrisy and a little compromise oils the wheels of social life” - Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

“Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one s up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.” - Franz Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks

Hope is reactionary: it cocoons actuality in the gossamer of the tolerable, dulling the thirst for change. Despair is revolutionary: it grinds the knife-edge of the intolerable against the whetstone of actuality, sparking the will to change. Whoever tolerates the present will never risk everything to change it. Only those who realize they have no future left to lose will be willing to stake everything on the total transformation of the present; a transformation in which every envisageable future is abolished, the better to invite the facelessness of what will come. The only appropriate mode of thinking for a culture on the edge of extinction is the thinking that stimulates pain. — Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound

Love bestows innocence. It has nothing to forgive. The person loved is not the same as the person seen crossing the street or washing her face. Nor exactly the same as the person living his (or her) own life and experience, for he (or she) cannot remain innocent. Who then is the person loved? A mystery, whose identity is confirmed by nobody except the lover. How well Dostoevsky saw this. Love is solitary even though it joins. The person loved is the being who continues when the person’s own actions and egocentricity have been dissolved. Love recognises a person before the act and the same person after it. It invests this person with a value which is untranslatable into virtue. — John Berger, “Between Two Colmars,” in About Looking

reminds me there is more choice and power at the margins than immediately apparent too.

In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness —from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis. Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

The first necessity of life is shelter. Shelter against nature. The first prayer is for protection. The first sign of life is pain. John Berger, “The White Bird” (1988 )

Darkness narrows the river’s silver path. I’m heading home myself, up the steep hill, a little breathless. A chill from the woods touches my arm. How we come to evening. Norita Dittberner-Jax, from “Evensong,” Crossing the Water (Nodin Press, 2017)

We live in a culture that venerates wellness and self-improvement, both as industry and personal discipline. Yet the strategies of modern cultural production are bent constantly towards the repression of emotion, the obsessive management of general feelings that, unchecked, might expose two great unspoken truths. The first is that much of modern life is traumatic, unbearable, and profoundly frightening. Acknowledging this openly allows for a second truth, more dangerous in the scope of its possibility: that it might not have to be this way. Laurie Penny, Meltdown of the Phantom Snowflakes

... Yet even today, to look at a tree and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed. There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror. Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door, ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle. Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket gives off - the immeasurable's continuous singing, before it goes back into story and feeling. In Borneo, there are palm trees that walk on their high roots. Slowly, with effort, they lift one leg then another. I would like to join that stilted transmigration, to feel my own skin vertical as theirs: an ant-road, a highway for beetles. I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart. To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch, and then keep walking, unimaginably further. Jane Hirshfield

Even now, decades after, I wash my face with cold water— Not for discipline, nor memory, nor the icy, awakening slap, but to practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted. —Jane Hirshfield, “A Cedary Fragrance,” Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins, 2001)

"Whatever is turned away from is marked as a danger to be faced or a loss to be mourned" -Joseph Smith, Arguing with Lacan

All beings by nature are Buddhas, as ice by nature is water. Apart from water there is no ice; apart from beings, no Buddhas. Hakuin Ekak

Be like the headland against which the waves break and break: it stands firm, until presently the watery tumult around it subsides once more to rest. ‘How unlucky I am, that this should have happened to me!’ By no means; say rather, ‘How lucky I am, that it has left me with no bitterness; unshaken by the present, and undismayed by the future.’ The thing could have happened to anyone, but not everyone would have emerged unembittered. So why put the one down to misfortune, rather than the other to good fortune? Can a man call anything at all a misfortune, if it is not a contravention of his nature; and can it be a contravention of his nature if it is not against that nature’s will? Well, then: you have learnt to know that will. Does this thing which has happened hinder you from being just, magnanimous, temperate, judicious, discreet, truthful, self-respecting, independent, and all else by which a man’s nature comes to its fulfillment? So here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not, ‘This is a misfortune,’ but ‘To bear this worthily is good fortune.’ Marcus Aurelius | Meditations

This is the monstrosity in love, that the will is infinite and the execution confined, that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit. William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

I don’t believe in the virtue of using language for ‘self expression.’ The language that interests me is the one that can actually destroy all the circular, enclosed, narcissistic forms of the subject and of oneself Michel Foucault

People settle for any known set of identifications, however painful, lest they fall out of the familiar symbolic order into the real of anxiety which opens onto a void of actual emptiness at the center of being. Ellie Ragland

To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one’s self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray. — Gilles Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia