I wasn’t asking because I didn’t know the answer; I was asking to hear you speak to me.

I relished the discomfort in a secret, perverse way, the way I relished the hickeys and bruises that came from hookups and one-night stands.

That emptiness— the running makes the nothing possible, take one away from one’s self.

I was drawn to the mix of beauty and pain like watching the way butterflies settle on a carcass to taste the blood.

“It’s perilous to think of them as chosen. Perhaps a better phrase to use is wound appeal, which is to say: the ways a wound can seduce, how it promises what it rarely gives” — Leslie Jamison, Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain

“A wound marks the threshold between interior and exterior; it marks where a body has been penetrated”

the night itself could be a rhapsody of possibility, a place where things happened

Kristeva’s theory of abjection. The space of the abject is a cast-off, rejected space, a space where boundaries break down, between self and object, the self become object.

This is something we all do, cope by aestheticizing our pain.

“It’s no surprise that for a lot of artists, gaming the system is more appealing, or simply more feasible, than changing it” — Johanna Fateman

“The crisis of engulfment can come from a wound, but also from a fusion: we die together from loving each other” — Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

It’s as though being a lover is the sole construction that keeps his self discrete. Without an object on which to project, Barthes’s self dissolves: it is nowhere, no place.

on aperture vs flash — “There are the two ways. One lets light in slowly. The other is a violation.”

To turn the camera on a subject is to subject it to your interpretation of the truth. There is violence in it, and there has been violence often in it, but the violence arises from where the subject disagrees with the story the image tells.

John Durham Peters about Hegel — “Language is resistant to our intent; nonetheless, it is also the most reliable practical means of persuasion we have. Though language is a dark vessel and does not carry quite what I, as a speaking self, might think it does, it still manages to coordinate action between selves more often than not.”

Plato — compared conversation to erotic love because both require the same kind of absolute communion. The most ideal way to exchange thought itself was, or so he hoped, a kind of telepathy as one experiences in the heavens. We were to have pure transmissions between our souls. But the trouble with that now is our main tool is language

There is a balance in ekphrasis — of translating the language of one form into another without falling back on visual description.

I rely on the language of the body too often, when I think no other language will serve.

There was a promise. . . in the morning, in even the tiniest sliver of morning, the sky only just beginning to lighten.