Levon Shant (1869-1951) was an Armenian poet, playwright, and novelist. This is my translation of “An Arrow” from Armenian to English.
Your stare is an arrow forged by lightning
with which you pierce into the blackness of my eyes
like a fiery ray from the sun
penetrating the darkness of the deep cave.
And your playful body boils in my arms
when it touches my excited chest,
when my lips, with the flame of longing,
write my love on your cheeks.
Here I am revisiting Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Here I am looking for death again — Thanatos, my old friend.
Does this mean that I will go back to reading books like Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, etc.?
Does this mean that I will go back to saying that life is driven by death?
We shall see.
Maybe I’ll say, We are nothing but instances of self-conscious Death.
Later.
For now, I’ll be saving the quotes I like in a blog post and call it a day.
Outside, the birds are singing, and that’s where I need to be.
It must be pointed out, however, that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or to lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Most of the unpleasure we experience is perceptual unpleasure.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
“Anxiety” describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one. “Fear” requires a definite object of which to be afraid. “Fright”, however, is the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it; it emphasizes the factor of surprise.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
We shall find courage to assume that there really does exist in the mind a compulsion to repeat which overrides the pleasure principle.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
The pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Another hangover on a sunny Sunday.
I wake up dead
and crawl out of bed, crawl
to the nearest water source,
a fountain of life,
and drink like a man who was just saved
from hell.
In hell, there’s no water,
but there are fountains you can drink from,
fountains of spirits that do not quench your thirst,
but dehydrate you instead
and dry up every stream of thought that once flowed
in your head.
Bored Absurdist 