silent groves

“Man schätzt das Alter schwer, das man noch nicht hinter sich hat oder auf sich zukommen sieht.”

“It is difficult to see ruins because we see always the ghost of a building standing behind them that tends to explain them. But we imagine it. We always see something lost that gives meaning to what remains. But we hallucinate it. However conscious we are of it, in gathering together remnants of frescoes and shreds of writings, we always commit the irresistible error of believing that what has survived disappearance is a faithful sample of all that has disappeared. But what can we infer from the remains that the chance event of a volcanic eruption has preserved by engulfing them?”

“Only in dreams, in the darkness into which all human beings sink each day, reveal a part of this world on which language turns its back. Only works of art in the daytime approach the edge of the overflow. Only lovers, when trey strip off all that separates them from their nudity, approach the land of desire. In the end, only the works of art capable of representing human body (painting, statuary, photography, the cinema) are able to catch in their nets vestiges of these scenes that originate in this other world of the world.”

“Our origins are more unknown to us than our deaths, in the sense that the ignorance concerning our death has not yet come into being. Our origin is the most unknown of unknowns since it took effect at the same time as ourselves, before our birth, before our hands, before we had language or sight. Even by spying like voyeurs, we cannot bring it back. Even as we express it, we bury it (because the acquisition of language is linked neither to our origins nor our birth).”

“The two primary fears relate to darkness and loneliness. Darkness is the absence of the visible. Loneliness is the absence of the mother or the absence of objects that replace her. Men know these terrors: falling back into the immense formless black abyss of the womb, the fear of becoming a foetus again, the fear of drowning, the anxiety at throwing oneself into the void, the terror of going back to the non-human. Once the riddle has been solved by Oedipus, then the riddling sphinx of Thebes, who is at once lion, bird and woman, throws herself to her death from the summit of Phikeion. Icarus’ fall took over, in the imagination, from the diver’s tomb.”

“To subjugate a woman is the same verb as to kill the enemy. Eros and Thanatos both have this power of mastering, of passive nudity, of carrying off to another domus - in short, this same capacity to shatter limbs or 'members'. The first domus is the belly of woman. The second domus to which the man abducts women in order to reproduce and to reproduce the domus. The third domus is the tomb.”

“Our lives are bounded by two unknowns: the primal scene and the moment of death. These two unknowns haunt us and suddenly come together. Pythagoras wrote that all souls were ‘originally made because of birth’.”

“This confusion of genii and souls can be seen in the very name lovers invent for their love, which has persisted in the English words 'dame' or 'madam'. Domina was the name the slaves gave to the matron. She is the one who 'dominates' the domus. In calling his love domina (dame, mistress), the lover breaks with his status and becomes her slave.”

“In ancient Greece, then in the Etruscan world and, last, at Rome itself, love and death are the same thing. Love carries one off to another home (Helen being carried off to the citadel of Troy). Death carries one off to another home (Persephone being whisked away to the subterranean world of burnt or buried bodies). Eros and Thanatos are the two great possible abductions. First, they are the two great gods that perform a social ‘relocation’ (one into the house of the living husband; the other into the tomb of the dead one). Second, physically, the two abducted women are plunged into the same state: intermittent or permanent sleep. This is why Hypnos is linked as much to Hades as to Eros. Moaning of desire or the last moans of the dying, the raptus is in each case a carrying-off into the night. The psychology, in its most elementary state, remained the same for a long time. Abduction, in its basic root, makes no distinction between pothos and êros. The desire for the absent one, sleeping or awake, does not differentiate the mourned from the lover. What is the domus of the absent one? The tomb, the heart. When Electra carries the iron urn containing the false ashes of Orestes before the living Orestes who stands before her, the scene is an overwhelming as the striking metaphor Tacitus introduces when he states that the heart is the ‘tomb’ of those one has loved. Tacitus constructs a comparison the force of which - as simple as it is ancient - we have lost. The hear is the ‘infernal domus’ of phantasm of the person one loves, just as the tomb is the ‘living heart’ wherein dwell the ‘shades’ of those who have quitted the ‘light’ of this world in flames.”

“Roman houses were books first and memories second. One should never forget that, when one enters a Roman house, one is stepping into ‘the pages of a book’, one is going into a memorandum, and one must then immediately turn over in one’s mind Cicero’s assertions, from the latter days of the republic, that we find so difficult to understand: ‘Places are very like wax-lined tablets or papyruses. Images (simulacris) are like letters (litteris). The arrangement and the disposition of images are like writing. The fact of making a speech is comparable to reading’ (Ad Herennium 4, De Oratore). These statements are those of an orator who learnt his speeches by heart while looking at his walls.”

“Two bodies in rapture are invisible; they twist around one another, entwine with one another; lose themselves in the excess of delight that is invisible to the closed eyes of those who bury themselves in that delight as though in a night more nocturnal than night itself. The intensity of what makes up the extent of a man’s joy lies beyond his view. Its representation does not communicate that intensity. Indeed, by differentiating it, it denies it. It flees from it. And that is also why it flees from it. We are right to hate erotic etchings. Not because such representations are thought shocking, but because they are false. Because the never-present scene, the forever ‘un-presentable’ scene will never be able to be ‘re-presented’ to the human being who is the fruit of it.”

“Man’s night is his past and the home of every dreamer is enwrapment in the past. The most ancient past isn’t the womb but the vagina.”

“Greek and Roman societies did not dissociate biology from politics. The body, the city-state, the sea, the fields, war and works of art were all confronted with a single vitality, all exposed to the same risk of sterility, subject to the same appeals for fertility.”

“Why, two billion years ago did nature divide species into two and subject them to this very ancient heritage, the function of which is as random as it is unpredictable, which leaves each person’s origin permanently uncertain, which haunts bodies and obsesses minds?

“Borders are bureaucratic fault lines, imperious and unfriendly. It’s not surprising that so many look forward to a world without borders. Their existence is routinely critiqued by academic geographers who cast them as hostile acts of exclusion. And yet where, in a borderless world, could we escape to? Where would it be worth going? <...> For borders are far more than lines of exclusion - their profusion reflects the varied nature of people’s political and cultural choices. The paradox of borders is that they close down free movement yet suggest a world of choices and possibility. For all their faults, there is something exciting about the way borders snake over the land, about their power to impose ideas and history upon the dumb earth.”