It's like a mycelium, though to use more "thick" consonants I'd call it a tar or a muck instead, it's this symbolic matrix or trace of my mother, this expectation or image of what she is, but it's not substantial, it's not based on sense-perception, it's not grounded in experience or the past. It's what happens when you came from someone and just know. Trust me when I say I know this feeling of wanting to pull it from my mind, but that would involve disrupting the cortex, the connectivity of what we perceive to be the mind as a complex but physical apparatus.

Pulling the mother out of me, I wonder about the lonesome and lost, Clare-like figure of my father, and how impossible it would be for me to embody him. My radical lack means I will always be seeking that thing I don't have, that thing I described to my analyst as "magical" in his manner of drawing, his way with the pen, in the way he ripped small dactylic pieces of paper out of the margins of the Blue Octavo Notebooks as a manner of keeping place, of annotating his anguish. What he likes, however, is prosaic in its morbidity, as I come to find. Is this disappointing, or simply profound in its resistance to analysis?

One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: “This man is not to be locked up again. He is to come to me.”

(Kafka, The Blue Octavo notebooks, p. 21)
(should photograph the rip which accompanies this.)

I am essentially unsure if there is anything profound or radical in my parents, if my father could see the beauty in Kafka or if the beauty he sees in it is in fact ridden with clichés, if he could have picked any other similarly depressing media to read in his state of anguish.

Evil is the starry sky of the Good.

December 7.

Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, though both the indestructible element and the trust may remain permanently hidden from him. One of the ways in which this hiddenness can express itself is through faith in a personal god.

Heaven is dumb, echoing only to the dumb.

The mediation by the serpent was necessary: Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.

December 8. Bed, constipation, pain in back, irritable evening, cat in the room, dissension.

I am more interested in the surrounding passages. Did he mean to highlight these, too, with his rippings? Why do I enjoy these disquisitions on evil so much? What is it about Kafka?

[...]

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.

It conforms with my belief in some link between evil and what is fleeting, and therefore, a connection is made between evil and sparks, glimmers, rapid change, manipulation, artifice, originality, poesis, sexual tension, creation, fantasy.

One can disintegrate the world by means of very strong light. For weak eyes the world becomes solid, for still weaker eyes it seems to develop fists, for eyes weaker still it becomes shamefaced and smashes anyone who dares to gaze upon it. Everything is deception: seeking the minimum of illusion, keeping within the ordinary limitations, seeking the maximum. In the first case one cheats the Good, by trying to make it too easy for oneself to get it, and the Evil by imposing all too unfavorable conditions of warfare on it. In the second case one cheats the Good by not striving for it even in earthly terms. In the third case one cheats the Good by keeping as aloof from it as possible, and the Evil by hoping to make it powerless through intensifying it to the utmost. What would therefore seem to be preferable is the second case, for the Good is always cheated, and in this case, or at least to judge by appearances, the Evil is not cheated.

I need to list them out again:

For weak eyes, the world becomes solid,
for still weaker eyes it seems to develop fists,
for eyes weaker still it becomes shamefaced and smashes anyone who dares to gaze upon it.

How is it that the weaker eyes imagine the world as more animate!

[...]

If I say to the child: “Wipe your mouth, then you shall have the cake,” that does not mean that the cake is earned by means of wiping the mouth, for wiping one’s mouth and the value of the cake are not comparable, nor does it make wiping the mouth a precondition for eating of the cake, for apart from the triviality of such a condition the child would get the cake in any case, since it is a necessary part of his lunch—hence the remark does not signify that the transition is made more difficult, but that it is made easier, wiping one’s mouth is a tiny benefit that precedes the great benefit of eating cake.

(ibid. 29-30)

What is gayer than believing in a household god?

There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it!

Theoretically there is a perfect possibility of happiness: believing in the indestructible element in oneself and not striving towards it.

(Kafka 33)
There are two rips on this page.

In amazement we beheld the great horse. It broke through the roof of our room. The cloudy sky was drifting faintly along its mighty outline, and its mane flew, rustling, in the wind.

[...]

Dawn, January 25.

The suicide is the prisoner who sees a gallows being erected in the prison yard, mistakenly thinks it is the one intended for him, breaks out of his cell in the night, and goes down and hangs himself.

[...]

There were three possible ways of punishing man for the Fall: the mildest was the way actually used, expulsion from Paradise; the second was destruction of Paradise; the third—and this would have been the most terrible punishment of all—was the cutting off of life everlasting and leaving everything else as it was.

[...]

Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.
Towards the avoidance of a piece of verbal confusion: What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped; what crumbles away crumbles away, but cannot be destroyed.

A. could neither live congenially with G. nor get [a divorce], hence he shot himself, believing in this way he could reconcile what was irreconcilable, in other words “go into the arbor” with himself.

“If ——, thou shalt die” means: knowledge of Good and Evil is both a step leading up to eternal life and an obstacle in the way. If you want to attain eternal life after having gained knowledge—and you will not be able to do otherwise than want it, for knowledge of Good and Evil is this will—you will have to destroy yourself, the obstacle, in order to build the step, which is the destruction. Expulsion from Paradise was thus not an act but a happening.

(ibid. 39-40)
There is a dead gnat pressed into the bottom of this page.

I’m willing to believe that their [the Cathars'] morals were of an exceptional purity, since they had basically to desist from any act that might in any way favor the perpetuation of the world, considered as execrable and bad in its essence. The practice of perfection thus consisted essentially in seeking to achieve death in the most advanced state of detachment, which was a sign of reintegration into an Edenic world characterized by purity and light, the true world of the original good Creator, whose creation had been sullied by the intervention of the bad Creator or Demiurge. The latter had introduced that horrible element, generation, as well as corruption, which is to say transformation.

It is from the Aristotelian perspective of the transformation of matter into another matter, which engenders itself, that the perpetuity of matter became the site of evil.

[...]

Evil is in matter. But evil can be elsewhere as well. The question remains open. And it is no doubt an indispensable key if one is to understand what happened historically to moral thought on the topic of evil. Evil may be not only in works, not only in execrable matter - from which the whole subsequent ascetic task will consist in turning away, without, however, entering the world we call mystic, and which might just as well be called mythic or indeed illusory - evil may be in the Thing.

JOUISSANCE as EVIL

if we continue to follow Freud in a text such as Civilization and Its Discontents, we cannot avoid the formula that jouissance is evil. Freud leads us by the hand to this point: it is suffering because it involves suffering for my neighbor.

This may shock you, upset certain habits, cause consternation among the happy souls. But it can’t be helped; that’s what Freud says. And he says it at the point of origin of our experience. He wrote Civilization and Its Discontents to tell us this. That’s what was increasingly announced, promulgated, publicized, as analytical experience progressed. It has a name; it’s what is known as beyond the pleasure principle.

Those who like fairy stories turn a deaf ear to talk of man’s innate tendencies to “evil, aggression, destruction, and thus also to cruelty.” And Freud’s text goes on: “Man tries to satisfy his need for aggression at the expense of his neighbor, to exploit his work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to appropriate his goods, to humiliate him, to inflict suffering on him, to torture and kill him. (184-185)

Perhaps the meaning of the love of one’s neighbor that could give me the true direction is to be found here. To that end, however, one would have to know how to confront the fact that my neighbor’s jouissance, his harmful, malignant jouissance, is that which poses a problem for my love. (Lacan, “XIV - Love of one’s neighbor,” Seminar VII, 187)

He doesn’t go much further with this. I instinctively agree. There’s something evil about jouissance, if I think of jouissance in relation to the weeping of orgasms or the revelations associated with reading and writing. And of course loop back to the allusion to The Piano and you know what I mean. Or to any D.H. Lawrence novel, with all the shattered men and the self-assured women. Do I go on, compiling a bibliography on evil? Can I make this more than an amalgamation of examples? Reproduce my parents?

Man in search of the mother. Woman beyond the false mother. But why does woman seek out man? Search of the father a screen for a search for a mother who doesn’t exist. What if I’m not in search of a father, as a model child? Every woman in search of a model child?

Or woman expulsed from the mother?

(Expulsion means we can remember that place.)

The fall of man was the fall of woman from the mother?

When I make a baby, I will be committing a great act of aggression against the neighbor who furnished the seed. The trick lies in getting him to commit acts of cruelty in return, always switching. Hence the agility of evil? Or the agility of the one who recognizes in herself the evil that makes new life? The problem lies in the denial of such evil. And therefore in a certain atrophy of the imagination. This seems to afflict men more than women.

“What a devil!” he exclaimed. But it was as if he had had knowledge of her in the long red rent of her forearm, so silken and soft. He did not want to touch her. He would have to make himself touch her, deliberately. The long, shallow red rip seemed torn across his own brain, tearing the surface of his ultimate consciousness, letting through the forever unconscious, unthinkable red ether of the beyond, the obscene beyond.

[...]

And suddenly the rabbit, which had been crouching as if it were a flower, so still and soft, suddenly burst into life. Round and round the court it went, as if shot from a gun, round and round like a furry meteorite, in a tense hard circle that seemed to bind their brains.

(D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, "Rabbit," 242-243)