i can’t wish the rain to fall; i wish i could. falling rain is the best form of water; the most pure and the most honest. rain never lies; the sounds it utters are real. because i cannot wish the rain to fall; i lie. i bring my knees into my chest and sit for hours on end under the falling water of the shower. it’s not rain, but neither am i, and so unlike the rain, i can lie.
a storm passed by me a few minutes ago, leaving the house in ruins. a change swept across the surface of the floor very gracefully; as if it had always been there, looming just around the corner. i have walked past it may times during the comings and the goings of my daily life, still i never saw it coming. if i had seen it then maybe i could’ve held on more tightly to the walls of my bedroom and survived the passing of this night. flowers are blooming on the outside of these remains. cats are still purring and cars are still bustling. it all seems to be going alright until the moment it isn’t. the breeze caught me by surprise because of the violence in it’s voice. it sounded like what i would have imagined silence to sound like; a violence that can not be described outside the walls of this room. the sound of its silence seeped in through the cracks in the pavement and found its way with caution and stealth. had it been noticed then it’s silence would’ve have been broken by the sudden sound of dismay. violence is intensified in the dark. when you can see what’s coming it can’t hit you hard enough to turn noise into silence.
he stood at the doorway and paused for a moment. he never looked back but in his pause he left himself behind. he walked out the door to a place different than the one he had left behind. a place where the person that he left behind could never survive.
a few steps in the muddy streets made him wander off onto a road less traveled; a road not deemed worthy to be put on any map. days went by as the road narrowed slowly; in the end he found a ladder.
People change and forget to tell each other.
– Lillian Hellman
It seems to be a fact that the moment you believe something to be true, you find out that it is not. This speaks to the idea that the reality of the matter is that there are no truths.
We are all chasing after something that doesn’t exist, and it seems as though it isn’t this “truth” or our desire for it that pulls us forward towards it. I believe that it’s more of a force that is pushing us from behind.
Desire is born out of lack, you would never feel the desire for something unless you feel that you are lacking. This also means that desire is born at an instant; at the first instant that you feel lacking. It is that initial lack that drives us forward (if you can even say forward because that implies positive progress).
We’ll never find satisfaction, because we aren’t enough. We are always lacking.
I am lacking…
pure, simple, happy and honest. seems easy enough but it doesn't always work out that way. honest comes easily to me, you know unless my unconscious knows something that i don't. pure is a state of mind, and it fluctuates, as many things tend to do. hand in hand with simple, maybe you can't have one without the other. happy is tricky, especially for me, not because i'm never happy or i think it's impossible, but because happy to me is a mood and not a destination.
Hysteria is a language. One we don’t understand, but a language, non-the less. It takes its form as a chapter in the history of art, and not medicine. The reason for this shall be clear once we’ve started to read it’s meanings; the meanings that it creates through images and signs; the meanings not that we create, but the meanings that create us.
To claim that hysteria is a language, can be based on a number of variables, many of which stand to be questioned and verified. Freud, as did many others, saw hysteria through psychoanalytical eyes that placed hysteria among the vast river of neuroses that exist in our unconscious. According to Freud, the unconscious functions as a language. It is made of a million chains of signifiers that migrate and explode to create meaning, to create us. So is it not logical to say that hysteria too, functions as a language and through specific chains of signifiers. What about the many images of hysteria that we are left with today? The images left behind by Dr. Charcot and his famous, if not infamous clinic of “mad” women. They too speak to us, a language that we are familiar with today, but yet still remains a mystery; the language of the image. We are bombarded with images everyday, but how do we see these images?
We look at these images to see representations, representations of the “real” world, of the world to which we belong to, and the world in which we understand and perceive everything to be true. Images of the Visible.
But what if we were to look at images, not as just as representations of the world that we know, but manifestations of a world that we do not know. What if these images spoke a language that we have yet to understand by simply listening to what the image is saying. Images of the Invisible.
It is through this reading of the images of hysteria that we might be able to cross over into a place unfamiliar to us, a place where hysteria is the real, where hysteria is understood. Through finding these signifiers and understanding the associations that they form, can help us travel along the different chains of signifiers. Then we might be able to communicate with an image. Not only understanding what we see, but also understanding what the image itself is saying. And through studying images of hysteria in this way, then we will be able to understand what hysteria is saying.
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