Somatic Compliance and the Dream Fragment :: Deriving a Derivative from the Dora Case Study
Why are you conducting this interview?
So that I can find out what is been declassified.
Why is that necessary?
It is a way to keep alert, a kind of sanitation.
Why are you conducting this interview?
So that I can protect myself.
From what?
From people’s imagination.
How can you protect yourself with words?
Words ward off oblivion.
Why are you conducting this interview?
It is a way of realizing guilt.
Why are you conducting this interview?
I want to crystalize the daily situation of talking to myself.
Lucas Samaras (AutoInterview 1971)
Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. — Hélène Cixous
Art is not about art. Art is about life…Art will continue, because…it is about the hurt of not being able to express yourself properly, to express your intimate relations, your unconscious, to trust the world enough to express yourself directly in it. It is about trying to be sane in this situation, of being tentatively and temporally sane by expressing yourself. All art comes from terrific failures and terrific needs that we have. It is about the difficulty of being a self because one is neglected. Art is a way of recognizing oneself…Without fear nothing in the world would ever be done. – Louise Bourgeios (p 167, 173…)
One of my favorite collectors collected white stones, each the size of a pebble and each representing a beautiful moment. These stones had a mysterious value to him and to no one else. Some people collect good luck charms like a penny on the street. Eery time they find one they get titallated.
Is the social worker collecting a collection of saved lives? What about the need to collect friends? What about diaries? My diaries are a form of collecting and they have no use to anybody but me.
The only saving grace of collecting is its transitional value…hopefully there is a transition from the world of the object to the world of ideas.
–Louise Bourgeios, Artforum, 1994, vol 32.
Theories and schools, like microbes and globules, devour each other and by their struggle to ensure the continuing of life. – Marcel Proust
productively procrastinating Pierre Bourdieu
“Just do your work. And if the world needs your work it will come and get you. And if it doesn’t, do your work anyway. You can have fantasies about having control over the world, but I know I can barely control my kitchen sink. That is the grace I’m given. Because when one can control things, one is limited to one’s own vision.” — Kiki Smith
https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200807/final-analysis-kiki-smith-creative-struggle
Joan Didion — “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.”