Playing with mania today. I'm still in the amusement phase and not yet near the inevitable frustration and headache part. I'm simply going to cut and paste these passages that I'm allowing to steep before I comment as to why they intrigue me. Come to your own conclusions. Or don't. I'm in a very apathetic mood concerning you. You understand. Or maybe you don't. It doesn't much matter to me at the moment.

[...]In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.[...]

[...]What are we, in fact, what is our character, if not the condensation of the history that we have lived from our birth-nay, even before our birth, since we bring with us prenatal dispositions? Doubtless we think with only a small part of our past, but it is with our entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire, will and act. Our past, then, as a whole, is made manifest to us in its impulse; it is felt in the form of tendency, although a small part of it only is known in the form of idea.[...]

-Henri Bergson (of course!):Creative Evolution
Chapter 1: The Evolution of Life -- Mechanism and Teleology

And this, which makes me giggle in it's obvious simplicity that it's almost impossible to understand it's true intricate complexity:

[...] I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place.

In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.[...]

--M. Foucault "Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias"

*thanks to a fellow journalscaper for reminding me of Foucault. I'd name you but frankly I can't remember your name nor can I bother with it. When I'm in a more giving mood I'll search you out and name you as is apropos.

And this (also from Foucault) about Jesuit colonies, in this case, specifically Paraguay:

[...]The daily life of individuals was regulated, not by the whistle, but by the bell. Everyone was awakened at the same time, everyone began work at the same time; meals were at noon and five o'clock-, then came bedtime, and at midnight came what was called the marital wake-up, that is, at the chime of the churchbell, each person carried out her/his duty.[...]

Was Pavlov a Jesuit? Which takes me to a very recent chat about Pavlov and my own sexual proclivities (details of which I may or may not get into here, you voyeuristic brats).

Anyway, I'm going to roll around in these passages, rub them all over my body and gorge on them until I have no choice but to spit them out covered in my own flavour.


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