Some cut-ups and some comments

“A true grammar,” I read Roland Barthes saying yesterday, “would not have an infinitive for the verb ‘to love.’” Before they were a book, Fragments of a Lovers’ Discourse were a heavily psychoanalytically inflected seminar. That seminar has now just come out as a book in French, which is why I say I was reading him say so yesterday. It’s a beautiful idea. Love is only ever relational. I love you. She loves him. We love her. Barthes seems to be saying that in a real grammar loving could only ever be conjugated with the grammatical persons doing and being done by love.

“You have to live stories before you can tell them.” That sentence gets repeated a lot in what I’ve thought of for a long time as one of my favorite movies: Godard’s Passion. Right now, I’m taken up by living a few of my own. So I’ve been a little out of touch.

Living a few of my own and reading a few of a few others. Guillaume Dustan, looking back at his books: “The book stops in 1995, when I meet Marcelo. I was coming home. It wasn’t the end of my story with sex, but it was the end of my journey alone. So it was another story. Posing other narrative problems. The story not of one but of two transformations: my slow sobering up; and his. But I think those transformations are already there in the book’s background, which is why the book was possible with its tonality, bearing life, or at least I hope so. I really want to talk about it, but I have to wait. I’m waiting for it to be obvious. You have to wait because I’m trying to do things that are less and less easy. As soon as it becomes easy, you have to do something else. Or else it’s no use. It’s thanks to all of this that I know myself better and better.”

Dustan, for a book with photos of DJ’s: “An ideal arrangement of places exists. There have to be mirrors or shadows. For enchantment. Space. For not bumping into each other. Darkness. For not getting tired. Heat. For being comfortable. Usually I get up on the podium. It’s the right place to do what I want to do. Anything at all. Anything at all doesn’t come easy. It’s easier if there’s a prop.”

The lion will roar soon. Or? He’ll just walk out of the room. And come back.