chimeric chronicles

I searched for Parmenides and found nothing—only the embalmed corpses of commercial literature, perfumed for the masses. An age that cannot bear the silence of Being must fill its libraries with noise. Mediocrity has conquered; even emptiness sells.

To change is necessary; yet every direction is a deception, every beginning a threat. I remain suspended between the exhaustion of what I am and the terror of becoming something else, condemned to desire an escape without possessing even the courage of a first step.

Kōbō Abe — *The Woman in the Dunes* — is among the rare novels whose passage to cinema loses little of its strange, suffocating power. The film stands almost level with the book, its sands no less inescapable. I returned to it today, as one returns to a dream that has not quite released its hold.

Y's opinion "Humanity’s greatest misfortune is its worship of systems, its submission to politicians, and its envy of the wealthy. It dreams of a world without masters, yet kneels before abstractions called Justice, Society, and Equality. Let each abolish his ghosts and become his own."

I rose, though my body remained buried in bed. The kitchen offered neither coffee nor cigarettes—only the poverty of things. Outside, the day embraced me with a mother’s tenderness for a child she never wanted. Nothing changes. Sunday again: the same defeat, dressed as a beginning.

We are endlessly urged to adapt to the digital age, as though humanity were born to serve its machines. How touching: our inventions have become our masters, and we call this progress. Soon, even our extinction will require a software update.

In photography, tones and contrasts of light shape how we perceive a subject, creating depth, emotion, and atmosphere. Robin Bernsteins approach reminds us that light is more than illumination; it reveals textures, emphasizes details, and transforms ordinary scenes into meaningful visual experiences

Someone said the greatest virtue of Rousseau’s CONFESSIONS is that he finished them. I tried too, heroically, but my guts staged a revolt. Rousseau is unbearable: a sentimental windbag dissecting his own soul as though the world were dying to inspect its entrails. Mine refused the autopsy.

Whistler’s Three Figures: Pink and Grey feels like a quiet meditation on beauty and distance. The figures seem suspended between presence and absence, while delicate colours dissolve individuality into atmosphere. Nothing demands attention; everything invites us to linger in silence.

www.e-flux.com/notes/678347... In Rabelais’s world, the body mocks the grave, and laughter dethrones every solemnity. Bakhtin sees in this carnival a promise of renewal; Cioran might see only the desperate gaiety of creatures who laugh because decay is their final truth.

Insomnia granted me a revelation: I witnessed the dawn in all its mysterious splendor, and, bewitched by its magic, I embraced my sleeplessness as others embrace a new religion. Some conversions require no faith, only a night without sleep.

I want to change my name, my tongue, my bloodline; kneel to another God before another altar. But rebellion, too, is a phantom. The body keeps its little archives: scars, habits, poisons. You do not begin again. You merely inherit another ruin, and baptize it with a different name.

www.e-flux.com/notes/678351... Zupančič challenges the idea that crisis is merely a temporary interruption of normality. Perhaps the interregnum is the regnum itself: instability is not an exception but the very logic of contemporary political life.

First, I read 'La mort difficile' by René Crevel. Then, quite by chance, I came upon an article by René Char about him. A quiet happiness took hold of me, as though literature had returned something I had lost. And so I began to read again, almost as one returns to an unfinished dream.

I grew up, for a time, beside a river. And nothing has remained with me so faithfully as its solitude at dusk, that quiet, almost eternal indifference with which it let the day disappear, as though it had long since ceased to expect anything from the world.

Bruegel’s The Blind Leading the Blind feels painfully human: we follow others, hoping they know the way, while they are just as lost as we are. Perhaps the real tragedy is not blindness, but our need to trust someone who cannot see.

Žižek reads Lacan as if the soul were a badly lit theatre where desire rehearses its own disappearance. We call it freedom, this elegant obedience to lack. And when the curtain falls, we discover: the void was never behind us, but sitting quietly in our place.

Monday dawns with the enthusiasm of a convict who has mistaken his executioner for a savior. I rise, gather my illusions, and call it a beginning. How touching, this weekly resurrection of hope, when experience has taught me that even despair eventually becomes routine.

Last night, with Y., fourteen films at the Cineplex: an orgy of images for an age that has lost the art of seeing. We returned home to watch The Woman in the Dunes by Teshigahara Hiroshi. Once, cinema awakened dreams; now, it embalms the void in special effects and sells imbecility as spectacle.

For Žižek, God emerges from the wound of reality itself; for Meillassoux, God remains a possibility born from radical contingency. Neither offers the comfort of a completed divine order. Instead, both imagine a universe whose ultimate meaning is unsettled, where even God may be an event yet to come

The rain drags the day into an interminable funeral. Obligations pile up, yet nothing stirs within me. I have not the strength to live, nor the courage to renounce life; only the lucid misery of watching existence rot in the paralysis of its own futility.

Macabrescu’s photography inhabits a strange threshold where reality seems to reveal a hidden interior. The mystical does not escape the real; it emerges from it—through silence, decay, bodies, shadows, and fragile gestures. Her images make the familiar uncanny, as if reality itself were dreaming.

I love my vices more than my virtues. Virtue was the mask I wore for others; vice tore it off. Through their devastating clarity, I learned not what I am, but what I refuse to become. I belong to no ideal—not even my own.

Insomnia: The night that won't forgive us for having survived the day.

Heidegger saw in Van Gogh’s shoes the peasant’s world; I see the ruins of a purpose. They do not reveal Being, but exhaustion: the mute wisdom of things that have served us too long. Perhaps existence is merely this—wearing out a meaning that was never there.

This morning I reread my notes in Obsidian. So many sentences seemed written by a stranger who had stolen my life. Perhaps, when we write, another self—one condemned to the same experiences—leans over us, dictating what we mistake for our own thoughts.

I wrote for tomorrow, correcting the words as they resisted me. Then I discovered the quieter labor: erasing, pruning, leaving only what could withstand the silence. Writing invents the wound; revision keeps its edge. At times, the page knows more about ruin than we do.

Behind me, the sleepless night. Morning seems not to have followed it, only appeared: cold, grey, strangely uninhabited. The streets lie there as if awaiting people who have forgotten them. Even the coffee tastes of a distance that sleep cannot cross.

Beyond the horizon, darkness refuses to become knowledge. We approach it carrying names, maps, and exhausted certainties, yet the night remains intact. Perhaps the world begins precisely where our understanding ends—where the invisible keeps its ancient right to remain incomprehensible.

Monday arrives like a creditor with bad breath: punctual, shameless, already demanding everything. The streets put on their miserable uniforms, and we march toward another week of small disasters, pretending coffee is courage and routine is a reason to live.

Jaak Mošker’s photography feels intimate and quietly unsettling—raw fragments of everyday life shaped by shadow, solitude, and fleeting gestures. His images turn ordinary moments into something dreamlike, melancholic, and deeply human.

Y.’s mauve nightgown lies beside me like an accusation. She has gone out, and I ache for her warmth. Yet the more I desire her, the more guilty I feel—as though longing itself were a betrayal. Even my suffering seems corrupt: a pleasure disguised as pain, another lie I willingly believe.

Last night, Blanchot reading: Le Très-Haut In Le Très-Haut, Blanchot turns authority into an abyss: power outlives its masters and becomes anonymous, impersonal, almost metaphysical. The self fades before its logic, while language trembles between obedience, silence, and revolt, endlessly on.

The morning arrives without light, as if the sky had forgotten its duty. Beneath its dark, indifferent weight, the streets appear abandoned by meaning. One walks through the grey silence and senses that desolation is not a mood, but the truest form of memory.

Day comes without mercy: a pale morning, no coffee, cigarettes forgotten, and the day already demanding to be endured. I remain in bed, postponing existence by minutes. Dawn is not a beginning, but an accusation—another day I have somehow failed to escape.

It is Sunday. The sun shines with the indecency of the innocent. I have no reason to be unhappy, which is precisely why I am. Perhaps life keeps accounts more faithfully than memory: every vanished happiness returns as a debt, and we pay it in darkness.

Reading Ingeborg Bachmann is like entering a room where language has already died, yet its corpse still speaks. Each page leaves a wound too lucid to heal: beauty becomes an accusation, and silence, the only honest refuge. Her sentences do not console; they indict.

A morning like a bruise: thick clouds hanging from a sky gone nearly black. Nature, that shameless mimic, has copied my mood with perfect fidelity. Even the light looks exhausted, as if it too has finally understood there is nothing to celebrate.

Wassily Kandinsky’s “Ruhige Biegung ” captivates with its delicate, harmonious balance of gentle forms and deep colors. The work radiates a meditative stillness in which soft curves seem like a silent melody—a true masterpiece that touches our souls!

" I see nothing liberating in being fully yourself. Look deep into anyone, you or me, and you will see we are all full of shit, dark and obscene desires… We are entering a shameless era. I think the left should rediscover shame and moral restraint.” __ Slavoj Žižek: The Pervert’s Guide to Utopia

Peace, perhaps. I walked the empty park. The city fell away behind the trees, as though it had never been. For a little while I fell away too. No city, no self. Only someone walking, strangely easier to bear than the man I had been. Or so it seemed. Nothing, nothing at.

Paul Celan does not write poems; he tears open the silence and leaves the wound speaking. His words crawl out of the ruins like drunk ghosts, refusing consolation. There is no beauty here, only the obscene persistence of language after God, history, and man have all failed.

My library is a cemetery where the dead refuse silence. The old books return, faithful as regrets. The new ones arrive like dawn—another deception. Between memory and discovery, I hesitate. Perhaps reading is merely learning to perish twice: once in returning, once in leaving.

Only the procedures of habit persist; everything else collapses.

"In our darkness there is no a single place for beauty. All the place is for love.” — René Char, letter to Paul Celan, 1959 Char's sentence is almost an anti-aesthetic manifesto... In genuine darkness, beauty becomes morally insufficient. Beauty can decorate suffering, but love enters it.

Saturday light seeps through the curtains like a failed apology. After a night without sleep, the body refuses its old obedience. I lie between two failures: the one behind me, the other taking shape ahead. Morning enters, but finds nothing alive to greet it.