From an ad in the February 1977 issue of Apollo magazine

The King’s College Choir of Cambridge - Church Music

Argo

1967

January 8, 1950

Did I live with you in a past life? Was I your lifelong partner? Is that why the idea of losing you torments me so much? How long have I been without you? Has it really been a month and twenty days? I’d like to die soon to avoid being a burden to you. I worry that your great compassion for me could become your prison.

January 17, 1950

But I can’t handle this difficult life of continuous separation; my heart is weak and wounded like that of beggars on the street. Though you might not see it, I’ve made sacrifices, too. I stifle my soul, control myself, and don’t air certain complaints and objections that my temperament and habits dictate. When one is in love one makes these sacrifices cheerfully. But you can’t always sacrifice yourself entirely, my love, and not every day.

There are two planes in our life together and they interact like a futurist drawing: the present and the nebulous past, a piece of eternity behind it, together with an ineffable bond of which we’re only dimly aware. This completely dark and mysterious link has more of an effect on me than on you because perhaps in another life I was the one who loved more intensely. This is the time and place to equalize the proportions—to remember, to arrive at justice and equality. That would reassure me; that would be perfection and peace. We don’t have that yet.

Gabriela Mistral's Letters to Doris Dana

Frank Bidart, "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky"

It is the twilight zone between past and future that is the precarious world of transformation within the chrysalis. Part of us is looking back, yearning for the magic we have lost; part is glad to say good­bye to our chaotic past; part looks ahead with whatever courage we can muster; part is excited by the changing potential; part sits stone­still not daring to look either way. Individuals who consciously accept the chrysalis, whether in analysis or in life's experience, have accepted a life/death paradox, a paradox which returns in a different form at each new spiral of growth. If we accept this paradox, we are not torn to pieces by what seems to be intolerable contradiction. Birth is the death of the life we have known; death is the birth of the life we have yet to live.

Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation

Sometimes the world is unreal (I utter it differently), sometimes it is disreal (I utter it with only the greatest difficulty if at all). This is not (it is said) the same withdrawal from reality. In the first case, my rejection of reality is pronounced through a fantasy: everything around me changes value in relation to a function, which is the Image-repertoire; the lover then cuts himself off from the world, he unrealizes it because he hallucinates from another aspect the peripeteias or the utopias of his love; he surrenders himself to the Image, in relation to which all “reality" disturbs him. In the second case, I also lose reality, but no imaginary substitution will compensate me for this loss . . . I am not “dreaming” (even of the other); I am not even in the Image-repertoire any longer. Everything is frozen, petrified, immutable, i.e., unsubstitutable: the Image repertoire is (temporarily) foreclosed. In the first moment I am neurotic, I unrealize; in the second, I am psychotic, crazy, I disrealize.

Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse

'dolman, american or european, c. 1880' in china through the looking glass: fashion, film, art - andrew bolton (2015)

Les Enfants de la nuit - Caroline Deruas - 2013 - France (short film)

and told you i’d miss you so much / on my return // that my body would ache / in the absence of you // an S-shaped lacuna. / it was a foretelling // of this love, that we share / the intensity of y(our) memories // but also a knowing / of what we have, split screen. // the spiraling sensation / you give me, resplendently. // that i am so alive with you / so risen, my skin etched like braille, with // stars that read / our history, in astonishing color. // i do not know / what lies in the lilting / blue windows of our abstract future // but i revere you with a meticulous longing, // with an open, radiating / heart, i’ve let you in.”

Fariha Róisín, "responsibility is not a burden", How to Cure a Ghost

William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course

Con Chim Vành Khuyên, Nguyễn Văn Thông, Trần Vũ, 1962

Where is the mind, Arendt asks, when it withdraws from the world of appearances? It is “Nowhere”: “Though known to us only in inseparable union with a body that is at home in the world of appearances by virtue of having arrived one day and knowing that one day it will depart, the invisible ego is, strictly speaking, Nowhere.” According to Arendt, to truly think, we have to step away from the world of appearance and retreat into ourselves. Once this retreat is effected, we can pull the idea for contemplation into our mind. We move into our mind and out of the body — and there, away from others, and, in a sense, away from ourselves, we can truly practise thinking.

Cynthia Cruz, Disquieting: Essays on Silence

Guattari’s idea is both refreshing and profound. He suggests that when a person experiences psychosis, her psychosis changes according to her surroundings, and, therefore, treating her with fear by locking her up, keeping her in restraints, overmedicating her, and exposing her to other methods of suppression only serves to change her psychosis to a psychosis of fear and paranoia. Who, psychotic or not, in the same situation wouldn’t also feel terror and paranoia? Indeed, there is a legitimate reason to be paranoid and afraid. Further, the shock of being treated inhumanly, the sense of alienation and of betrayal, and, perhaps paramountly, the realization that humans can and do treat other humans in this way, is itself shocking and traumatizing. It is a shock and trauma that alters the psyche, changing the personality of the person who undergoes it.

Cynthia Cruz, Disquieting: Essays on Silence