#petiot

“I thought friends of mine had confused their concern for a desirable value with contempt for the low. Value (or the object of moral longing) isn't something that can be attained. No one is to be seen as unworthy of love. Speaking as a malcontent, I'm instinctively sympathetic. I no longer see an ideal when confronted with decline. It is a sad thing and a sorry sight to see the collapse of most people, their heroic ardors and moral determination turning into stifling narrow-ness. Often their stubborn inflexibility indicates the fact of wavering (simpering Christians, bombastic activists). What I like is only love-making, desire . . .

In categorical condemnations, when we call someone a "slime" while overlooking the "sliminess" we don't want to see in ourselves, the very harshness of insensitivity for which we censured him is intensified by our own meanness. It's the same with the police— society approximates procedures similar to those it condemns.

Complicity, first in the crime itself and then in ignoring it, unites humanity in the most intimate way possible.

Union with another fuels unending hostility. In the excesses of lovemaking, I'm driven not only to kill but to keep from fainting and falling down at the prospect. If I could, I'd fall shrieking in despair.

But rejecting despair, and continuing to live happily and playfully (without a motivation for this), I love in a tougher, truer way, to the extent that life is worth loving.

The chance belonging to lovers is lovers' luck: the evil (disequilibrium) to which they're driven in lovemaking compels them. They're endlessly sentenced to destroy the harmony between themselves and at night to begin combat. These maneuvers and wounds are the cost of their uniting.

Moral value is the object of our desire and what we die for. It's not always an "object" (with a definite existence). Desire often is associated with an indefinite presence. God and a woman who is loved are parallel. Contrasted to them would be nothingness and woman's nakedness irrespective of any particular woman).

Logically, indefiniteness has a negative sign.

I really hate complacent laughter, the cliquish humor of the so-called witty.

Nothing is less characteristic of me than bitter laughter.

I laugh innocently and divinely. I don't laugh when I'm depressed—and when I do laugh, I'm having fun.

Embarrassed at having laughed (with friends) at the crimes of Dr. Petiot. The laughter that in all likelihood has the summit as its object arises from our not being conscious of it. Like the friends I mentioned, I'm moved from nameless horror to mindless laughter. Beyond laughter there is death, desire (love), fainting, and the ecstasy associated with horror, a horror transfigured. In this beyond, laughter stops, though I retain my awareness of it. Attempts to continue with this and pry open the beyond would make laughter something "intended" and so ring false from lack of simplicity. Spontaneous and unrestrained laughter opens on the worst, preserving in the worst (death) a weightless feeling of wonder (at the devil God, at blasphemies, or transcendence! The universe is humble, my laughter is its innocence).

Laughter blesses where God curses. Unlike God, humanity isn't condemned to condemn. Laughter can be filled with wonder if that is what humanity wants it to be—it can be light and it itself can bless. What if I laugh at myself?

Petiot used to say to his patients (according to Q):

"I think you're anemic. You need calcium."

He'd make them appointments for calcium treatments on rue Lesueur.

And what if I said that the periscope used on rue Lesueur is the summit?

Horror and disgust would make me feel like throwing up.

Can nearness to the summit be discerned in wrenching horror and disgust?

Do only coarse and primitive types give in to their compulsions to use the periscope?

From the theological viewpoint the analogue of the periscope is Calvary. With both, sinners get off on the results of crimes that they committed. For believers, just the imagery is enough. However, this crime of the crucifixion is their crime, and they associate repentance with action. For them perversion ought to be equated with shifting consciousness, involuntary dissimulation of action, lack of manliness, flight.

Not long before the war, I dreamed of being struck by lightning. Inside me I felt a wrenching and a great terror. At the same time there was a sense of something wonderful and transfiguring: I was dying.