The Tenth Gate

Salvador Dalí - Illumined Pleasures, 1929

Musique Du Jour: White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane

Planning Paris: Part One

Sebastian Munster (attributed) - Lutetia, vulgari nomine Paris, urbs Gallia maxima (Paris), from Cosmographia, 1569

Paris, 2008

'Begin at the beginning,' the King said, very gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'

From Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Typically, at the beginning of their courtship, a pair of lovers will spend inordinate amounts of time quizzing each other (usually to a chorus of disingenuously flirtatious glances) about their pasts. My question is: Why should things be any different with a city one has fallen in love with?

As I begin planning my next trip to Paris, my mind is pleasantly agitated by what I have learned about it (I want to say "her" - perhaps next time I will) from books and, more powerfully, by my memories of her (there - I've said it!) from previous trysts. One nourishes; the other arouses. One conjures her through the eyes of strangers; the other by means of fragrant reveries.

I feel for the person who is unable - or, even worse, unwilling - to lavish a city with affectionate, immoderate curiosity. I pity them because every question they fail to ask is yet another faltering step in what should be a mutual seduction.

C'est la vie? . . . Not for me.

Musique Du Jour: My Favourite Letter is U, Uni and Her Ukelele (aka Heather Marie Ellison)

Replay IV

The Ghosts of Innocence

Loretta Lux (b. 1969) - Girl with Marbles, 2005


I use children as a metaphor for a lost paradise.

Loretta Lux

Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

Ambrose Bierce

I'd give all the wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life's decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer day.

Lewis Carroll

Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections in the next.

Cesare Pavese

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

George Eliot

You Still Lookin' At Me?

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). The most recently discovered portrait photograph of Vincent van Gogh, found in the collection of his cousin, Anton Mauve. Research suggests that it was taken when Vincent was working in Goupil's in The Hague, so he would have been between sixteen and twenty years of age.


"The noeme of Photography is simple, banal; no depth: "that has been". I know our critics: What! a whole book (even a short one) to discover something I know at first glance? Yes, but such evidence can be a sibling of madness. The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence - as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence, The image, says phenomenology, is an object-as-nothing. Now, in the Photograph, what I posit is not only the absence of the object; it is also, by one and the same movement, on equal terms, the fact that this object has indeed existed and that it has been there where I see it. Here is where the madness is, for until this day no representation could assure me of the past of a thing except my intermediaries; but with the Photograph, my certainty is immediate: no one in the world can undeceive me. The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand "it is not there", on the other "but it has indeed been"): a mad image chafed by reality."

Roland Barthes

"'But I don't want to go among mad people, ' Alice remarked.
'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'"

Lewis Carroll

"In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!"

J. G. Ballard

"The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness."

Jean Cocteau

"Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise."

Michel Foucault

The Ghosts Of Innocence

Loretta Lux (b. 1969) - Girl with Marbles, 2005

"I use children as a metaphor for a lost paradise."

Loretta Lux

"Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age."

Ambrose Bierce

"I'd give all the wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life's decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer day."

Lewis Carroll

"Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections in the next."

Cesare Pavese

"Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow."

George Eliot