Fariha’s Reviews > The Passion According to G.H. > Status Update

—as for myself, I always kept a quotation mark to my left and another to my right. Somehow "as if it wasn't me" was broader than if it were—an inexistent life possessed me entirely and kept me busy like an invention.Only in photography, when the negative was developed, was something else revealed that, uncaught by me,was caught by the snapshot:when the negative was developed my presence as ectoplasm was revealed too.

The witty elegance of my house comes from everything here being in quotes. Out of honest respect for true authorship, I quote the world, I quoted it, since it was neither me nor mine. Was beauty, as for everyone, was a certain beauty my goal? did I live in beauty?

The copy is always pretty. My semi-artistic and artistic milieu should, however, make me disdain copies: but I always seemed to prefer the parody, it was useful to me. Imitating a life probably gave me or still does? how much has the harmony of my past been ruptured?—, imitating a life probably gave me assurance precisely because that life wasn't my own: it wasn't a responsibility of mine.

The apartment reflects me. It's on the top floor, which is considered an elegance. People of my milieu try to live in the so-called "penthouse." It's much more than an elegance. It's a real pleasure: from there you dominate a city. When this elegance gets too common, will I, without even knowing why, move onto another elegance?

A step from climax, a step before revolution, a step before what's called love. A step before my life— how to transform that latent step into a real one. From the pleasure in a harmonious cohesion, from my greedy and permanently promising pleasure in having but not spending—I didn't need the climax or the revolution or anything more than the pre-love, which is so much happier than love.

My question, if there was one, was not: "Who am I," but "Who is around me." My cycle was complete: what I lived in the present was already getting ready so I could later understand myself. An eye watched over my life. This eye was probably what I would probably now call truth, now morality, now human law, now God, now me. I lived mostly inside a mirror. Two minutes after my birth I had already lost my origins.

What others get from me is then reflected back onto me, and forms the atmosphere called: "I." And the other-the unknown and anonymous-, that other existence of mine that was merely deep, was probably what gave me the assurance of a person who always has in the kitchen a kettle on a low flame: whatever happened, I would always have boiling water.

...but I need to have the field clear of myself in order to keep going. If I go. I think I need to look without bothering about the color of my eyes, I need to be exempt from myself in order to see.

I ended up being my name. All you have to do is see the initials G. H. in the leather of my suitcases, and there I am. Neither did I require of others more than the primary covering of their initials. Besides which "psychology" never interested me. The psychological viewpoint made me impatient and still does, it's an instrument that merely trespasses. I think I'd left the psychological stage in adolescence.

Before I lived in the humanized world, but did something purely alive collapse the morality I had?