.

And by a prudent flight and cunning save A life which valour could not, from the grave. A better buckler I can soon regain, But who can get another life again? Archilochus

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Alone

- h/t Nietzsche's Girl
"Faith is always good"
was the last thing she wrote.
And as P.S. the sentence below,
I will never forget.

You are lonely for so long,
did you learn to be alone.

And you're lonely for so long,
until you learn to be alone.

I was walking around.
It was dark.
In my hand
a light was burning.

I was confused,
but also relieved.
Starting today, I need
just me.

Because you're lonely for so long,
until you learn to be alone.
And you will remain alone
until one learns.

Monday, April 9, 2012

Staring into the Mirror, Attempts to Negate the Abyss, & the Levitating Ego

In Senso the fragmented nature of identity is established early, perhaps most emphatically in the scene where Franz and Livia walk the streets after the performance. Franz picks up a fragment of a mirror from the ground, and stares at his reflection, commenting: “I always look when i pass a mirror. It’s to affirm that i exist.”Lacan’s Mirror Stage

His desire to locate himself as an entity relates to Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the Mirror stage: the stage an infant passes through when becoming a subject. According to Lacan, the moment when an infant sees his reflection for the first time is an essential stage in identity formation – this is the moment at which the infant sees for the first time himself not as simply an attachment to his/her mother, a breast, etc, but as a complete, single entity.

This phase produces the ‘ideal-i’ or the self image which the subject always attempts to re-create in himself. Franz’s constant desire to “keep looking” expresses the loss of identity popularized by postmodern theorists – a breakdown in the mirror stage. Franz is ultimately unknowable and confusing to Livia, because his identity is in broken into fragments like the mirror he picks up and later discards. He cannot locate himself, and perhaps this is why he creates the false identity of the lover, the seducer, the hero, the soldier. Franz explains that his generation adopts the signifiers of identity: “Our generation are children,” and he continue, “we like wearing uniforms.”