– 60

We found the dancers in a big, rolling dimple of sand.  They were already in trance; sometimes a dangerous state.  When the Brothers took me by the hand I became a Link: I found it pleasurable enough to indulge myself all night.  Here, no one knew who I was and, very soon, neither did I.

– 48

One’s bond with the dead…may invest trauma with value and make its reliving a painful but necessary commemoration or memorial to which one remains dedicated or at least bound. This situation may create a more or less unconscious desire to remain within trauma. It certainly invalidates any form of conceptual or narrative closure…
One’s relation to every other … endlessly melancholic, impossible mourning [instead of]:
proximity and distance
solidarity and criticism
trust and wariness
presence and absence
representation and real

– 15

Thus the critical task is not simple; it necessarily implies the superposition of two questions. To know the work, we must move outside it. Then, in the second moment, we question the work in it alleged plenitude; not from a different point of view, a different side – by translating it into a different language, or by applying a different standard – but not entirely from within, from what it says and asserts that it says. Conjecturally, the work has its margins, an area of incompleteness from which we can observe its birth and its production.
[…]
First question: the work originates in a secret to be explained.
Second question: the work is realised in the revelation of its secret. The simultaneity of the two questions defines a minute rupture, minutely distinct from a continuity. It is this rupture which must be studied.

# 42

Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.

# 43

Ah, looky looky yonder
Looky looky yonder
Looky looky yonder
Where the sun done gone