Before anything else, to see is to divide. I don’t believe in totalities; only fragments.
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It’s not necessary to explain everything. The bizarreness of things is perfectly normal. Anything that’s worth writing about deserves not to be explained.
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An artist is a human being between colors and nothingness.
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Find my best side and look at me from that angle only.
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It is one thing to go against the grain; but what sort of pervert would go against his own grain—
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What species of fool could rejoice in knowing that the world (the world of wind, trees, buildings, stones, flowers) does not need him?
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Some residue always remains of unfulfilled dreams; only the most realized of dreams are effaced utterly.
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In the future, buildings will be designed to appear and function more and more like human bodies: exteriors will breathe and sense with the suppleness of skin; interiors will be as baroque and labyrinthine as human entrails, or as the soft grey corridors of the brain.
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I could never trust the appearance places have of not remembering the people who have passed through them.
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In
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The beauty of others disfigures me.
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Space is curved, compressed, intensified about the beautiful body as it is about the heavenly bodies.
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A beautiful male body could be compared to landscapes, fruits, animals, musical instruments, and all those other tedious things women’s bodies have been in painting and poetry. For me all that’s not enough: it must reverberate; it must transform the space around it into a fabulous theater; it must perform miracles like the saints; it must have a voice to make one afraid of it, or to make one want to destroy it.
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Who will write the epic of male bodies?
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The prurient public as well as the Neanderthals of science are too much concerned with the matter of what sort of genitals happen to be hanging on the person one desires and what horrible childhood trauma could have made one’s compass point south or east or west rather than north. What impudence! What presumption! And what a lack of simple tact!
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The phenomenon of sexual behavior between men should be considered (zoologically) not so much an aberration as a refinement.
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Scenes of males in sexual congress: desultory fragments that seem to disengage themselves momentarily from the great Fresco of human sexuality....
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Apropos of the tact of the basset hound wandering by in a scene from a homosexual pornographic movie: If only we could abide sex between men in the same incidental disinterested way....
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I find it admirable to develop the capacity, not so much to experience every kind of passion, but to draw a picture of it in one’s own style, imbuing it vicariously with one’s own passions, in such a way as to be able to apprehend the particular beauty of it.
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If we could go beyond our instinctive revulsion to the idea of coprophilia, we might find it remarkable that a substance could be transformed, by passion, into its opposite. (What, after all, is our current obsession with garbage but a more social and salutary mania along the same lines?)
How arbitrary passion is, even for us, with our less picturesque ones! And how wonderful, since it is capable of exalting and transforming objects which others see as worthless.
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After one glance the predator turns away from those fish which, no matter how delectable they may appear to others, do not suit precisely his tastes. So it is in our passions: no matter how inexplicable they may appear, there is always a principle in operation; always an increase in the energy of the system; always multiplication and cross-pollination; always life and metamorphosis.
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It has always been characteristic of great artists who happened to love members of their own sex to be able to extrapolate, from their own experience, forms of love with which they were not directly familiar; and it has always been characteristic of most who loved members of the opposite sex not to do the same in return. Yet it requires no genius to do so, only tact.
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If only one could induce or manufacture in oneself the pure exaltations one feels when one is in love without having need of the object itself, or the clumsy machinery of amorous relations, or the disappointments of reality, or the pain of never being able to possess...
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The jealous person is like the dog that growls when another comes near its food—no matter how much of it there may be to go around.
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What is important in love is not the emotion itself but how it is articulated. Love is not an emotion: it’s an invention.
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Social cubism: the capacity to look at something from one’s own perspective and then from the perspective of another person and then from the perspective of still another and so on; to feel the truth of each perspective; and finally to resolve each view as in a cubist painting.
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One must regard humans (in cross-sections of time), entrapped in the viscous internal machines they have fashioned for themselves, not with pity or disgust, but rather as ontogenetic specimens which, no matter how atavistic, have their precise and instructive place in the great spiralling natural history of humanity.
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What should draw us together is not what we have in common, but rather our differences. Differences produce conflicts only in those who lack tact; in those in whom the vibrations of difference pass through the dampers of morality and prejudice. Differences should not be reduced, but rather magnified and multiplied, providing more possibilities for refinement and passional attraction.
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Two people meet. They see immediately that they have nothing in common; there is no music, no affinity; perhaps they can’t stand the sight of each other. Yet it may be that this one holds the exact key to what the other one desires, or to what the other needs to pursue what he desires. And perhaps that one in turn possesses some small thing, some knowledge, some link, some skill which could form the basis of an exchange. The two need only to find a language through which to communicate their needs. Or perhaps an intermediary. But no such thing exists. Therefore, nothing happens, both remain miserable, and there goes the empire.
What we need is a matchmaking of passions, not only sexual, but spiritual, artistic, political, cultural, and so on.
What we need are a lot of really good rides and a few master showmen to arrange them into a great amusement park.
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Political activity begins with an amiable readiness to overlook one’s personal distaste for other people.
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One who has (fortunately) never experienced reality as an inimical pressure (like the soil atop the coffin of a person who has been buried alive, or like the column of water that bears down upon creatures at the bottom of the ocean) – such a person might not be able to grasp to what extent the whimsical could be a matter of the greatest importance for those who have.
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Camp is like a private garden where one may enter, without any vestige of leaden seriousness, and breathe the rejuvenating air of hilarity. Others may see us as merely laughing, but what we are really doing is surviving.
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The relief Life feels on excusing itself abruptly from the tables of the Moribund...
* * *
Invent tiny roller
coasters: to survive, one must find a way of transforming one’s paralyzing real
or imagined terrors into miniature roller coasters big as the
* * *
There is something of us that flees high up into the branches of the mind, transforming itself to air or light or electricity as mortals were once transformed into birds, leaving the machine below to run itself. Perhaps it consists only in the idiosyncratic trails of electrons dancing through the synapses, but this would make it no less otherworldly.
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Inhabit every idea, every form, every music, till you find your dreamboat...
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Though this one fails, though that one dies, always another body, always another way.
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