After the death of my father, he began, when a not entirely meager amount of capital fell into my hands, I hurriedly departed for France. I was lucky, above all else, to become acquainted with Marseilles before the Twenties had come to an end. Apart from all the other things for which it stood to me at that time, it was Marseilles, the home town of Monticelli, to whom I owed everything in my art.


As for my capital, I left it untouched in the small private bank which had satisfactorily advised my father for decades. Moreover, the firm's junior director was, if not quite my friend, then an especially good acquaintance. He also promised me, with the utmost assurance, that he would keep a sharp eye on my deposit during the long period of my absence and, in the event a favorable chance of making some investment should arise, that he would immediately notify me. "You merely need to leave us a code word," he concluded. I looked at him perplexed.. Suppose we were to wire you and the telegram came into the wrong hands. We protect ourselves by arranging a code name for you to sign your telegraph orders with instead of your own."

I understood and yet for a moment was perplexed. After all, it's not always that easy to just slip into a strange name, like a costume.

To me it was as if the pressure of a thousand atmospheres which this whole world of images was urging and convulsing and staggering beneath were the same force which tests itself in the firm hands of a sailor on women's thighs and women's breasts after a long voyage; the voluptuousness which urges a red or blue velvet heart from out of the mineral world of a shell pyx so that it may be pricked by pins or brooches; the same force which quakes the streets on payday.

Much more likely, it was an attempt to surrender myself completely to the city which had gently taken me by the scruff of the neck with a magical hand.  I had a view of one of the black narrow streets of the port district which are like the trace of a knife's incision in the body of the city.

Only now did I realize that the hashish had long begun to work its effect, and if the transformation of tins of powder into boxes of bonbons, chrome-plated cases into bars of chocolate and wigs and toupees into pyramids of cake had not already tipped me off to the fact, then my own laughter had been enough of a warning. For the high begins with such laughter or with laughter which, being quiet and intimate, is all the more blissful.

And now I also recognized it in the infinite tenderness of the wind which was ruffling the fringe of the awning on the other side of the street.

My gaze fell upon the creases in my white beach-trousers. I recognized them, creases of the burnoose;
my gaze fell upon my hand.

I recognized it, a brown, Ethiopian hand.

And as my lips continued to purse tightly together, refusing the drink and words alike,

a smile rose to them from within me,

a haughty, African, Sardanapalan smile,

The smile of a man who is on the verge of seeing through the course of the world and destiny.

For whom things and names no longer contain secrets.

Brown and silent I saw myself sitting there...

That was the last clear thought which I formulated that night. The next one was bequeathed me by the noon paper which, when I awoke on the bench in the hot afternoon sun overlooking the water, read:

>>SENSATIONELLE HAUSSE<<

or

SENSATIONAL HIGH !

--walter benjamin

: Drunk couple lean on a concrete green flaked wall bisected by a brown  wide stripe.   One  from the window.

 3 : 1  7  am.

Boy  tired, a girl bored.  Music noone is aware of.    M. Ward distant.  No words.   Weird Daniel piano.

 Beige ashtray, crusted spine.

B  Friday, the lake?

G  Need to study.  Morning or afternoon

B  If morning you'll never go

G  You won't leave me or the bed

B  that's a good plan

G  We won't know until  morning

B   I can't imagine later that morning will count

G  Sleep.  Lets go.

B  One more beer or I'll walk asleep

G  Its a long walk,

B  No sitting?

G  Not every week.

B  Glory days-no lines

G  no memory

B  Can't stop memory.  I remember things never tried  or  never wanted.  (drains green bottle back)      

   Many things I forgot like fifth grade.

G  Couldn't have been  interesting.   I don't remember how old.

B  So if you would remember tomorrow what would you do?

G  You don't want to know. Not the lake, maybe not  you.

B  Too late to tell me.

G  Pay or leave money.

B  Five minutes

 Fifteen minutes later, he hid a beer.  He  grabs the steel in the glass door and they walk into  yellow light.

Breathes, a tree from cement.  All ahead.  He will.

She thinks better.  Needs to leave, waste.

To wake up alone.   Get out early. Drunkenness..  Church in the afternoon.

Voices on a staircase.  The sleeping have given up.

Grey sparrow its head under wing, peering down. Confused jay  alone chirping.

College mopped by singers with arms  tired surrendering.   Profit  in the tile churns up new tools.

Twenty five years later men reach to a shadow, remembering more.

Love snuggles, leagues away into a forever man.

Our personality is almost a shroud over this mind. Certainly our ego is. Only one chef in the kitchen, one master of the house. So we go through different disciplines, religions, searching for this other that must be out there because we are repulsed by our own neural anatomy and will do anything but face it, our singularity.

We may believe and it may serve the brain's interest that we have overcome the challenge to all, of the child, which is the brain's earliest actions but some part of the gel inside the bony shell never forgets its real predicament.

The continuing product of Evolution is the maturation and growing complexity of neural fabric.

Aspects which can be distinguished have to be learned later. Much of early learning is simple labelling.

Is there a value or truth to be obtained by returning to the infant state which the brain appears to desire at all times?

What is society but a series of rooms where cerebra feel comfortable and protected

Spaces which provide necessary rules permitting the mind to hope it is free (e.g. saved) or at least cared for

The infant at first does not recognize its own body and in our own infantile conception of ourselves we do not recognize our anatomical reality as cerebra. We expend 80% of our effort in service, indulgence and even worship of the body. What is winning the war?

What has developed to be enjoyable about sex, beyond neural stimulation or routine pattern is the act of feeling feeling or sensation itself. One feels and can control the feeling of another without need of the body. This is part of the agenda of the brain. Certainly the body is involved, especially as a visual object, but in passion our body feels different, lighter, more neural. Cuddling may look abnormal or strange in public because the body is not behaving as it does in any other activity. The brain is in control and using the body for its own neural stimulation. The body is minimized, almost as if the cerebra are rubbing each other.

Because you can feel feeling you can change how you feel feeling and thus you have all the interest in sadism, pain etc. which is just extreme manipulation as a manifest demonstration of mastery of feeling Dramatic horrible things can happen to you or someone in front of you and because you can control their feeling of your feeling the person has greater tolerance. The more extreme in manipulation the greater power the brain feels. When the brain controls feeling, it feels good because it has demonstrated control of the body. The brain at its primal strategem is scared of everything, even the body.

Violence, battery, murder

Or even sex

Are not inherently attractive.

Children have to lose

through hormonal and cultural application their repulsion for each.

Our rational mind unconsciously seeks sex and violence not because of their minor sensations of escape but the deep inner brain twists even these meager relievers to forget the body. With violence we talk often of these mental states such as blind rage, bloodlust,

Which can empower the body with

astounding strength and remove barriers of conduct.

                                             

The brain's visible drive to escape is not limited to our

species.

The brains of our animal family members same as us, in fight or flight, shut down all unnecessary body and mental functions in order to live in a world of ideas.

We call it distraction and do not grasp the obvious.

What is demonstrated in sports but the planning and control of complex actions during the emotional demonstrations by masses of

ritualized violence?

Abu Ghraib is just a more recent example of thousands of daily scenarios where humans lose elevated provinces of restraint and preference in an oeuvre of survival passions.

We see manifest this incredible drive of the inner mind to master and thereby escape the body's limitations. This inner mind which we fail to recognize becomes visible.

It is the most powerful force on the planet.HERE.

In general, one begins to play games with spaces.

Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances of assent with nothingness, with the base and the banal.

Rather, a thick, self-woven, self-spun spiderweb in which world affairs hang strewn about like the corpses of insects sucked dry.

What he says lags endlessly far behind what we would so gladly have credited him with and believed him capable of had he remained silent.

I lay upon the bed really with the absolute certainty that, in this city of hundreds of thousands, where only one person knew me, I would not be disturbed, when there was a knock at the door.

Versailles is not too great for one who has eaten hashish nor eternity too long-lasting. And in the background of these immense dimensions of the inner adventure, of absolute duration and the immeasurable spatial realm, a wonderful, blessed humor now lingers all the more agreeably with the contingencies of the spatio-temporal world. I am endlessly aware of this humor when I find out that the kitchen at Basso's and the entire upstairs have just closed the very moment I've sat down to tuck in eternity. All the same, the feeling afterwards that all this indeed remains forever, constant, lit up, well-patronized and full of life.

And when I recall this state, I'd like to think that hashish, in relation to nature, possesses the force and power of persuasion to allow us to recapture the great squandering of one's own existence, which we savor when we're in love. For when we are in love for the first time and our existence slips like gold coins through nature's fingers, which cannot hold on to them and must lavishly spend them in order to obtain the new being, the new-born, then, without hoping or expecting a thing, she flings us with both hands full toward existence.

The path of the departed person is the soul of the conversation they led.

The subject urgently insists that the window be closed, no doubt because he feels disturbed by the noise coming from outside. I shut the window, which elicits the most appreciative thanks. Within this context there follows a speculation about the 'good deed'. "When someone has done something good, then perhaps it turns into the eye of a bird."

-walter benjamin   1931