Hölderlin.

“Why can’t we stay closed up inside ourselves? why do we chase after expression and form, trying to deliver ourselves of our precious contents or “meanings,” desperately attempting to organize what is after all a rebellious and chaotic process? wouldn’t it be more creative simply to surrender to out inner fluidity without any intention of objectifying it, intimately and voluptuously soaking in our inner turmoil and struggle? then we would feel with much richer intensity the whole inner growth of spiritual experience. All kinds of insights would blend and flourish in a fertile effervescence. A sensation of actuality and spiritual content would be born, like the rise of a wave or a musical phrase. To be full of one’s self, not in the sense of pride, but of enrichment, to be tormented by a sense of infinity, means to live so intensely that you feel you are about to die of life.” Emil M. Cioran from On the Heights of Despair Translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston

I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Hamlet, Act 3, scene 1

The Passions

Narrow paths my passions tread: Laughter rings there, sorrow cries; Sick and sad, with half-shut eyes, Thro' the leaves the woods have shed,         My sins like yellow mongrels slink; Uncouth hyenas, my hates complain, And on the pale and listless plain Couching low, love's lion's blink.

        Maurice Maeterlinck

Aquarium

“And I know it must die, for its hour is o'er; Folding its impotent hands at last, Hands too weary to pluck any more The flowers of the past!”                         

Maurice Maeterlinck

(Article is dated for a few years ago, dated by the missionary ending up as a pincushion.)

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”

Augustina von Nagel - The Thinker, 1997

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.