The Peals of Laughter Heard from Afar

To know the fragility of the unicorn and yet be able to laugh!
Isn't that the secret of life?
Very necessary to know,
difficult though!
And the practice of it, the effort at it
is the whole of life.
And our whole life is a continuous effort.

And I am dancing barefoot
heading for a spin,
some strange music draws me in.

From the heart of darkness
to such light,
timeless behind the veil of Maya,
behind the silence
is the everlasting YES,
the affirmation that
I AM,
a stream of playful consciousness,
the fumes from the Delphic oracle,
all agree that I AM

Thanks, Anna Del Valle Marti for the image

Originally shared by Anna del Valle Martí

"Reverberation"
retentissement / reverberation

1. What echoes in me is what I learn with my body: something sharp and tenuous suddenly wakens this body, which, meanwhile, had languished in the rational knowledge of a general situation: the word, the image, the thought function like a whiplash. My inward body begins vibrating as though shaken by trumpets answering each other, drowning each other out: the incitation leaves its trace, the trace widens and everything is (more or less rapidly) ravaged. In the lover's Image-repertoire, nothing distinguishes the most trivial provocation from an authentically consequent phenomenon; time is jerked forward (catastrophic predictions flood to my mind) and back (I remember certain "precedents" with terror): starting from a negligible trifle, a whole discourse of memory and death rises up and sweeps me away: this is the kingdom of memory, weapon of reverberation—of what Nietzsche called ressentiment.

(Reverberation comes from Diderot's "unforessen incident which...suddenly alters the state of the characters": it is a coup de théâtre, the "favorable moment" of a painting: pathetic scene of the ravaged, prostrated subject.)

Roland Barthes. Fragments d’un discours amoureux, 1977.

Image: Annie Fargue de profil by Robert Doisneau, 1958.

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