TORMA ! TORMA !! TORMA !!! ("efface the trace of a dreadful past")

I.  My opinon of nature:

        The feet try in vain to tempt the ground;  it is a sated belly, refusing all superfluity.  Who would dare brag of doing as much?

II.  Whiteness is filthy.

III.  Nothing astounds me more than the taste of the commonality for dogs, cats, parrots, etc.  For my part, a creature interests me only when its reactions become totally alien to me.  The leech isn't too bad, the starfish is quite an improvement.  But the slug!  Speak to me of slugs!

IV.  Society is a concert (with its bum-notes, of course.)  But people are disconcerting.  To reassure oneself, one pretends to confound them.  People talk of the "beau-monde," or of  "mixing in high society."  Cosmic -- and comic -- demi-monde.  

V.   Demon is the anagram of monde.

VI.  The unexpected is not all that so.  Fortunately, it would otherwise go unrecognised and pass unnoticed.  Tediously, it is for this very reason that it quickly becomes tedious.


VII.  We are mistaken in not being on guard against certain ill-effects of thought.  I take it as understood that a pleasant event will take place only at the moment when I am giving it the least thought, and because I am giving it the least thought.  The thought kills the event, and from the still-born event there arise mortal emanations.  Action, that is to say, creation, constitutes the exact inverse of conscious thought.  In that second, I kill in myself something a thousand times better than my thought.  Let's think no more, dis-pense with thinking.

VIII.      Forgetting is the most living thing there is in life.  The secret of magical renewal and of virtu, valor, strength.  Reconciliation too is the only solution, the solution of continuity.

               In illness, it is the memory that usurps and invades the living being:  the body is marked and cannot, at least for a while, efface the trace of a dreadful past.  Death is the subversive subversion of all forgetting.  Since cohesion is maintained only by the onward impulse,  total fixation is at the same time decomposition.  And the corpse, when it becomes past, returns to its own past, that is to say,  to the beginning of the cycle, to the original elements.  In the consciousness of the dying man this finds expression in the well-known hypermnesia under which it falls apart.

              Forgetting is thus still the panacaea, the remedy in the absence of a remedy:  the veritable potable gold of alchymical science.  And I lived a golden star by the light of nature.  Forgetting is yellow, as Van Gogh SAW it.  Hence the melancholy of memory and the moralistic-pallbearer mannerism that takes hold of all who live in the past.  

IX.  Not life, but a fit-up between life and death.

X.  Every day they recite their "I-lesson"

XI.   IT'S ALL THE SAME TO ME (I measure myself against it, and reckon myself its equal).

XII.   Nobody has ever given me orders.  If some have reckoned to do so (in the army), I never noticed it.  I have no need to have a world that's in order.

                 I have never given myself an order.

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