Publié en 1970

We want to be all we can
we want to know all we can
we want to feel all we can
all there is
all there was
all there will evoooooo
be

What an interesting finger
let me suck it

It’s not an interesting finger
take it away

The statement is pointless
The finger is speechless

It is boring that you are frightened
you are boring me by being interested in me

In trying to be interesting,
you are very boring.

You are frightened of being boring, you
try to be interesting by not being interested,
but are interested only in not being boring.

You are not interested in me.
You are only interested that I be interested in you.

You pretend to be bored
because I am not interested
that you are frightened
that I am not frightened
that you are not interested in me.

They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

Man vergleiche zum Beispiel das verliebte Treiben auf einer Wiese und in einem Auto, bei einem Spaziergang der sich Liebenden außerhalb der Stadtmauern oder auf einer Straße von Manhattan. In den erstgenannten Fällen hat die Umgebung teil an der libidinösen Besetzung, kommt ihr entgegen und tendiert dazu, erotisiert zu werden. Die Libido geht über die unmittelbar erogenen Zonen hinaus - ein Vorgang nichtrepressiver Sublimierung. Demgegenüber scheint eine mechanisierte Umgebung ein solches Selbstüberschreiten der Libido zu unterbinden. Bedrängt in ihrem Bestreben, den Bereich erotischen Genusses zu erweitern, wird die Libido weniger »polymorph« , weniger der Erotik jenseits lokalisierter Sexualität fähig, und diese wird gesteigert.

For example, compare love-making in a meadow and in an automobile, on a lovers’ walk outside the town walls and on a Manhattan street. In the former cases, the environment partakes of and invites libidinal cathexis and tends to be eroticized. Libido transcends beyond the immediate erotogenic zones—a process of nonrepressive sublimation. In contrast, a mechanized environment seems to block such self-transcendence of libido. Impelled in the striving to extend the field of erotic gratification, libido becomes less « polymorphous », less capable of eroticism beyond localized sexuality, and the latter is intensified.

Qu’en serait-il d’une question qui n’impliquerait pas de réponse ? Elle ne diviserait pas le monde en deux : la demande, la réponse ; elle se tiendrait d’emblée en leur milieu, éclatante de leur contradiction, et cependant fermée à la discontinuité que la contradiction engendre. Pareille question ne saurait pas ce qu’elle est, car niant sa nature et se niant elle-même, elle se contenterait justement d’être ce qu’elle est.
Il va donc falloir « jouer jusqu’à la mort », me donnant la comédie de ces mots qui ne sont pas ce qu’ils vont tout d’abord paraître — qui ne sont pas là pour manifester un savoir saisi, mais pour le dépenser, au fur et à mesure.
« Tous les chemins mènent à Rome », me disait-on, et encore : « Chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous. » Ces principes proclamaient à l’évidence qu’on doit nécessairement aller quelque part. Autrement dit qu’il existe un lieu qui capitalise toutes les directions et un dieu en qui se capitalisent tous les actes. Ces deux figures coïncidaient d’ailleurs pour engendrer l’Unité en laquelle « tout se retrouve » car « rien n’est perdu ». Cette grande unité capitaliste permettait d’être seul, d’être moi, puisqu’elle garantissait la totalité pour plus tard. »
Écrivant, tout ce que je sais, c’est que je ne sais rien, mais il y a imminence d’un savoir, et cette imminence entretient l’écriture tout en étant, elle-même, entretenue par la supplication de l’écriture, qui désire faire durer pour se faire durer. Et rien de plus. Rien au-delà.
Mais ne faut-il pas se battre continuellement à l’intérieur de ce même carré :
je -> me -> dérobe -> où -> je -> me -> connais
!     !
je <- me <- connais <- où <- je <- me <-dérobe
bien qu’il soit tragiquement risible de tourner ainsi en rond !
La poésie, parfois, s’évade, mais il reste encore à s’évader de la poésie.

Le point de départ de la critique de la société du capital actuelle doit être la réaffirmation des concepts de domination formelle et de domination réelle comme phases historiques du développement capitaliste. Toute autre périodisation du processus d’autonomisation de la valeur, tel capitalisme concurrentiel, monopoliste, d’Etat, bureaucratique, etc., sort du domaine de la théorie du prolétariat, c’est-à-dire de la critique de l’économie politique, pour faire partie du vocabulaire de la praxis de la social-démocratie ou de l’idéologie léniniste codifiée par le stalinisme.

Impatient as we were for all of them to join us,
The land had not yet risen into view : gulls had swept the gray steel towers away
So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth
Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things – boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them --
Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last.
And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.

They are the same aren’t they,
The presumed landscape and the dream of home
Because the people are all homesick today or desperately sleeping,
Trying to remember how those rectangular shapes
Became so extraneous and so near
To create a foreground of quiet knowledge
In which youth had grown old, chanting and singing wise hymns that
Will sign for old age
And so lift up the past to be persuaded, and be put down again.

The warning is nothing more than an aspirate « h » ;
The problem is sketched completely, like fireworks mounted on poles :
Complexion of evening, the accurate voices of the others.
During Coca-Cola lessons it becomes patent
Of noise on the left, and we had so skipped a stage that
The great wave of the past, compounded in derision,
Submerged idea and non-dreamer alike
In falsetto starlight like « purity »
Of design that had been the first danger sign
To wash the sticky, icky stuff down the drain – pfui !

How does it feel to be outside and inside at the same time,
The delicious feeling of the air contradicting and secretly abetting
The interior warmth ? But the land curdles the dismay in which it’s written
Bearing to a final point of folly and doom
The wisdom of these generations.
Look at what you’ve done to the landscape --
The ice cube, the olive --
There is a perfect tri-city mesh of things
Extending all the way along the river on both sides
With the end left for thoughts on construction
That are always turning to alps and thresholds
Above the tide of others, feeding a European moss rose without glory.

We shall very soon have the pleasure of recording
A period of unanimous tergiversation in this respect
And to make that pleasure the greater, it is worth while
At the risk of tedious iteration, to put first upon record a final protest :
Rather decaying art, genius, inspiration to hold to
An impossible « calque » of reality, than
« The new school of the trivial, rising up on the field of battle,
Something of sludge and leaf-mold, » and life
Goes trickling out through the holes, like water through a sieve,
All in one direction.

You who were directionless, and thought it would solve everything if you found one,
What do you make of this ? Just because a thing is immortal
Is that any reason to worship it ? Death, after all, is immortal.
But you have gone into your houses and shut the doors, meaning
There can be no further discussion.
And the river pursues its lonely course
With the sky and the trees cast up from the landscape
For green brings unhappiness – le vert Porte malheur. « The chartreuse mountain on the absinthe plain
Makes the strong man’s tears tumble down like rain. »

All this came to pass eons ago.
Your program worked out perfectly. You even avoided
The monotony of perfection by leaving in certain flaws :
A backward way of becoming, a forced handshake,
An absent-minded smile, though in fact nothing was left to chance.
Each detail was startlingly clear, as though seen through a magnifying glass,
Or would have been to an ideal observer, namely yourself --
For only you could watch yourself so patiently from afar
The way God watches a sinner on the path to redemption,
Sometimes disappearing into valleys, but always on the way,
For it all builds up into something, meaningless or meaningful
As architecture, because planned and then abandoned when completed,
To live afterwards, in sunlight and shadow, a certain amount of years.
Who cares about what was there before ? There is no going back,
For standing still means death, and life is moving on,
Moving on towards death. But sometimes standing still is also life.

Le sérieux ne réside pas ici dans la frénésie avec laquelle ce suppôt s’attache à son phantasme impulsionnel, mais dans la force irréductible avec laquelle les impulsions maintiennent le suppôt dans son phantasme, pour se manifester en le dévorant.