Bokelskere.no

Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl. In the dialogues Plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint. Plato does not call fucking pharmakon, but then again, while he talks plenty about love, Plato does not say much about fucking.

It calms me to think of blue as the color of death. I have long imagined death's approach as the swell of a wave—a towering wall of blue. You will dream, the world tells me, has always told me. You will descend into a blue underworld, blue with hungry ghosts, Krishna blue, the blue faces of the ones the loved. They all drowned too. To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you? If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones good for sucking and head down to the river. Any river will do.

Vincent van Gogh, whose depression, some say, was likely related to temporal lobe epilepsy, famously saw and painted the world in almost unbearably vivid colors. After his nearly unsuccessful attempt to take his life by shooting himself in the gut, when asked why he should not be saved, he famously replied, "The sadness will last forever." I imagine he was right.

At one point in history, to approximate the color of ultramarine, which comes from lapis, which for quite some time was available in only one mine, in what we now call Afghanistan—Sar-e-Sang, the Place of the Stone—and had to be journeyed out via hundreds of miles of treacherous trade roads, Westerners would churn up cheaper pigments with blood and copper. Generally speaking we don't do this anymore. We don't store our oils in the bladders of pigs. We go to the store. If we want to know what a phosphene is, we don't mash our fists into our eyes. We Google the word. If you're depressed, you take a pill. Some of these pills are bright blue. If you're lonely, there's a guy on Craigslist two blocks away who says he has an hour to kill and a dick longer than a donkey's. He has posted a photograph to prove it.

Goethe describes blue as a lively color, but one devoid of gladness. "It may be said to disturb rather than enliven." Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

Krimgåte e. Markus:

han begynte å tale til dem [stolte elite-teologer]
i lignelser:

En mann plantet en vingård.

Han satte et gjerde omkring den og gravde en vinpresse
og bygde et vakttårn,
og så leide han den ut til vingårdsmenn og drog utenlands.

Da tiden kom, sendte han en tjener til vingårdsmennene
for å få sin del av vingårdens frukt hos dem.

Men de tok og slo tjeneren, og sendte ham tomhendt bort.

På nytt sendte han en annen tjener til dem,
og ham slo de i hodet og hånte ham.

Og han sendte en annen, og ham slo de ihjel.
og slik gjorde de med mange andre:
noen slo de, og noen drepte de.

Nå hadde han bare sin eneste sønn igjen, som han elsket;

ham sendte han til sist, til dem, idet han sa:
De vil nok vise aktelse for min sønn.

Men disse vingårdsmenn sa til hverandre: Dette er arvingen;

kom, la oss slå ham ihjel, så blir arven vår!

Og de grep ham og slo ham ihjel, og kastet ham ut av vingården.

Hva skal nå vingårdens herre gjøre?
Han skal komme og gjøre ende på vingårdsmennene,
og overgi vingården til andre.

Har dere ikke lest dette i Skriften:
Den sten som bygningsmennene forkastet, den er blitt hjørnesten -

av Herren er dette gjort, og det er underfullt i våre øyne.

Og de søkte å gripe ham, men fryktet for folket;
for de skjønte at det var om dem han hadde talt lignelsen.
De forlot ham og gikk bort.

(Markus ev. kap.12)

How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

If concealment is the single weapon, then a villain is never a villain: one smiles to the very end.

The world was a frightening place, yes, he knew: unlasting, what could be forever? or only what it seemed? rock corrodes, rivers freeze, fruit rots; stabbed, blood of black and white bleeds alike; trained parrots tell more truth than most, and who is lonelier: the hawk or the worm? every flowering heart shrivels dry and pitted as the herb from which it bloomed, and while the old man grows spinsterish, his wife assumes a moustache; moment to moment changing, changing, like the cars on the ferris wheel.

Any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.

Before birth; yes, what time was it then? A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now: these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned hearts, change only.

You think people was meaner then than they are now? the deputy said.
The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said. I don't. I think people are the same from the day God first made one.

You reckon there are just some places the good lord didn't intend folks to live in?
Could be, said the sheriff. He's got a bullheaded bunch to deal with here if it's so though, ain't he?
Damned if he don't.