You are a human being. The human part of you is a seeker. Seeking eventually leads to frustration, confusion and failure of finding the truth. We reach a point when seeking just stops. It is at this point that we start discovering BEING! It is through the human seeking that we finally find what doesn’t work. Embrace your humanity. Through this allowing and surrender of humanity we find what we have always been…BEING ITSELF!! It is through separation that we find Oneness!
Emotional feeling is Energy-Motion (emotion) brought about by thought. Any thought believed to be real acts on the body as sensation.
Quite out of the blue a bizarre and compelling idea came to my head today: that we have ended up as human beings through forgetfulness, through lack of attention, and that in reality we are creatures participating in a vast, cosmic battle that has probably been going on since time immemorial, and which, for all we know, may never end. All we see of it are glimmers, in blood-red moons, in fires and gales, in frozen leaves that fall in October, in the jittery flight of a butterfly, in the irregular pulse of time that can lengthen a night into infinity or come to a violent stop each day at noon. I am actually an angel or a demon sent into the turmoil of one life on a sort of a mission, which is either carrying itself out without my help, or else I have totally forgotten about it. This forgetfulness is part of the war – it’s the other side’s weapon, and they’ve attacked me with it so that I’m wounded, invalided out of the game for a while. As a result, I don’t know how powerful or how weak I am – I don’t know anything about myself because I can’t remember anything, and that’s why I don’t try to look for either weakness or power in myself. It’s an extraordinary feeling – to imagine that somewhere deep inside, you are someone completely different from the person you always thought you were. But it didn’t make me feel anxious, just relieved, finally free of a kind of weariness that used to permeate my life.
Olga Tokarczuk. House of Day, House of Night. Trans. Anotonia Lloyd-Jones. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2003. p 72-73
Derrida describes an ‘unnatural’ ghostly haunting whereby the dead are taken into us, but they are not internalized as they would be under more ‘normal’ circumstances (a psychoanalytic view of mourning) – he labels this as ‘terrifying.’
Derrida recounts his 1982 arrest in Czechoslavakia on trumped-up drug charges …
see also this clip in which Derrida plays ‘himself’ in the film and comments upon ghosts as they pertain to cinema and representation itself; the late Pascale Ogier (1958-1984) plays ‘Pascale’ who is questioning Derrida.
Dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death which was not yours, which you have thus neither known nor lived, but under the threat of which you believe you are called upon to live; you await it henceforth in the future, constructing a future to make it possible at last––possible as something that will take place and will belong to the realm of experience.
—Maurice Blanchot. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. p 65.
To see our own face as it is would be madness, since we would no longer have any mystery for ourselves and would, therefore, be annihilated by transparency. Might it not be said that man has evolved into a form such that his face remains invisible to him and he becomes definitively unidentifiable, not only in the mystery of his face, but in any of his desires?
—Jean Baudrillard. The Perfect Crime. Trans. Chris Turner. London & New York: Verso, 2008. p 6-7.
然後，牛津大學出版社「世界經典」系列的英譯本The Flowers of Evil (iv) 就是我花錢買的第一本英文書吧，扉頁上的墨跡指證，那是1993年10月19日，一本翻過又打開另一本，也就是這樣開始接觸英語世界建構的「世界文學」。十年以後，受著指導老師的影響，我的碩士論文中有一章是以波特萊爾幾首詩作為例子，討論到第二帝國（1852-1870）的巴黎重建大計，令巴黎的街道與社鄰空間由席捲歐洲的革命現場變成方便軍車與資本快速調動的馬路城市之同時，在拿破崙「子姪」與政商利益集團的高壓管治下，城市住民所經驗的各種社會意義上與精神上（psyche）的流離、斷裂，人身自由與政治權利的受壓，如何以一種厭煩、沉悶（ennui）的癥候方式呈現於波特萊爾的創作，換言之，厭煩、沉悶並不是個人偶然的心理狀態，而是歷史性的。
還有人要談波特萊爾嗎？
我知道的「波特萊爾」似乎更像個原地流放的的零餘者、前朝遺孤。回憶讓詩人無論身處那裡都被一種隔世感、錯置感所折磨，正因為回憶無所憑證，光亮的新城與廢墟無異。第二帝國大肆托建的時代之都，呼召歷史、標誌傳承（追宗認祖從拿破崙一直追溯至古羅馬戰神Minerva）,可是此光榮「歷史」所取消、取締的一切，不能做訪、不允憑弔。煤氣燈點亮的繁華巴黎，不過是管治者搭建的舞台布景，當「歷史」可以重複，現實不過一齣荒謬鬧劇。(v) 每一棟新蓋的建築，每一種新鮮事物都刺著詩人的心事，都變成失落（loss）與一切所失去的（all that is lost）的託寓（allégorie）(vi)，外間一切變得特別擾人，厭煩、納悶的取態乃是一種保存自我的防衛機制，這無疑與學院中人天天在說波特萊爾是「城市漫遊者」、是「Dandy」的說法大相逕違：
More Memories than if I’d lived a thousand years!
A giant chest of drawers, stuffed to the full
With balance sheets, love letters, lawsuits, verse
Romances, locks of hair rolled in receipts,
Hides fewer secrets than my sullen skull.
It is a pyramid, a giant vault
Holding more corpses than a common grave.
—I am a graveyard hated by the moon
Where like remorse the long worms crawl, and turn
Attention to the dearest of my dead.
[…]
Nothing is longer than the limping days
When under heavy snowflakes of the years,
Ennui, the fruit of dulling lassitude
Takes on the size of immortality.
—Henceforth, o living flesh, you are no more!
You are of granite, wrapped in a vague dread,
Slumbering in some Sahara’s hazy sands,
An ancient sphinx lost to a careless world,
Forgotten on the map, whose haughty mood
Sings only in the glow of the setting sun. (vii)
_________________________
i) 文題取自波特萊爾（Charles Baudelaire），〈天鵝〉，《惡之華》（Les Fleurs du Mal）。莫渝譯，台北：志文，1985。頁280.
ii) 同上。頁278-279。
James McGowan的英譯：
A swan, who had escaped from his captivity, / And scuffing his splayed feet along the paving stones, / He trailed his white array of feathers in the dirt. / Close by a dried out ditch the bird opened in his beak, / Flapping excitedly, bathing his wings in dust, / And said, with heart possessed by lakes he once had loved: / ‘Water, when will you rain? Thunder, when will you roar?’ / I see this hapless creature, sad and fatal myth, / Stretching the hungry head on his convulsive neck, / Sometimes towards the sky, like the man in Ovid’s book — / Towards the ironic sky, the sky of the cruel blue, / As if he were a soul contesting with his God!
見：Charles Baudelaire. The Flowers of Evil. Trans. James McGowan. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1993．
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