Enjoyment is the word which names momentarily achieving a lack that continues to frustrate for having been achieved momentarily. We are greedy insatiable need-driven bipeds.

Normal depressives are those who succeeded in failing to be born without making a production function out of the aftermath.

She is the rare theoretical analyst (a figure almost driven extinct by selection pressure and a fertile path-dependent form of method evolution) who won’t talk about the breast out of fear of letting the drive for a fulsome account come to a head.

Two people encounter the idea that “the grief of the nurturant mother can hardly be assuaged by the authoritarian, pragmatic father,” framed as a metaphor for politics. One reaches for a gun, the other reaches for culture. Can you predict the reach of which person will exceed his grasp?

Non sequitur, for old times sake

The attache’ was tall dark and unbearably boring in conversation. His virtue consisted in knowing that he put people to sleep, so he talked very little, and therefore become aloof and brooding and unbearably attractive. This trait of being a bore, but a hidden one, came on despite or because of having been educated at Harvard and later Oxford (being rich and connected, not smart and driven), after which he had been lightly recruited to join an acronym task force which placed people in embassies and trained them in the light duties of lubricating logistical and supply chain details and generally making life easier for people with real tasks facing real exigent dangers out there in the wilds. The attache’ his name was Christian. He feared his personnel file included details about his predilection for tying up and being tied up by his wife. It was not unfounded as a fear.

He had to leave the Christmas party to go to the embassy at Corfu, as an asset coming and going from Athens needed to go through the cleaning profile. Four eggnogs in, as it turned out. Three turns from the embassy gates, he was grabbed. Three hours later he had 7 fingers left. Four hours later he was down a foot. He did not know, much to his regret, what had gone down in Athens. It was his last Christmas.

With apologies to latraemont, Nell (not the Jodie Foster movie) is a patron saint of the bon mot. you need not follow her take on the performative or yourself know how to do things with words to grok her here:

Catholics, like Orthodox Jews, believe that God wants your good deeds and the performance of certain rituals and isn’t that interested in what goes on in your head. Martin Luther’s big breakthrough was sola fide, the origin of today’s dainty capitalist egos.

A fitting aporia, on this celebrated (if not acknowledged) day of cosmic immanence, and so ends the third of three themes on the notion of mourning.