If You Prick Us, Do We Not Bleed? No

Hiroshima Mon Amour, text by Marguerite Duras for the film by Alain Resnais, translated by Richard Seaver; picture editor: Robert Hughes (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 15–18.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright; trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), #125.

Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, introduction by Rosemary Dinnage; translated and edited by Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter (New York: New York Review Books, 2000), 144–145. From the quote, it looks like Schreber, who, according to Dr. Guido Weber’s report of 1899, “thought he was dead” (ibid., 328) and believed that “he is called to redeem the world” (ibid., 333), intuitively attempted to actualize what Antonin Artaud would demand years later: placing man “again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to remake his anatomy.… / Man is sick because he is badly constructed.… / there is nothing more useless than an organ. / When you will have made him a body without organs, / then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions …” (“To Have Done with the Judgment of God,” in Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, edited, and with an introduction, by Susan Sontag; translated from the French by Helen Weaver; notes by Susan Sontag and Don Eric Levine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)), 570–571).

Kathleen Brumm, Matthew Walenski, Frank Haist, Shira L. Robbins, David B. Granet, and Tracy Love, “Functional MRI of a Child with Alice in Wonderland Syndrome During an Episode of Micropsia,” Journal of AAPOS 14, no. 4 (August 2010): 317–322, see →.

“Pratyahara,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online, see →

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, foreword by Maureen Howard (San Diego: Harcourt, 1981), 86–87.

Spinoza, Complete Works, translations by Samuel Shirley; edited, with introduction and notes, by Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), 267 and 373.

Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dōgen, ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi; trans. Robert Aitken (et al.) (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), 136 and 138.

Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, 99.

Ibid., 128. While through its incorporation of noise, chance procedures, and screaming, fine experimental music often liberates inhuman forces and sides of the human listener, it is still addressed to a human audience. Orpheus’ music was not merely human not only because it liberated inhuman forces and sides of the human listener but also and mainly because it was addressed not only to human ears (in whom it produced a hushing of the interior monologue), but also to animal ears (“and it so came to pass that not from fear / or craftiness were they (animals) so quite then / but to be listening” (Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus), and even to objects (“Another (of the female Bacchanals), for a weapon, hurls a stone, / Which, by the sound subdu’d as soon as thrown, / Falls at his feet …” (Ovid’s Metamorphoses)—“to be listening”). Even more impressive than the hushed silence of the objects was that of the voices, which proved sensitive to Orpheus’ music. While Orpheus played his music in the underworld, the undead were relieved of the voices that tormented them.

Ibid., 145.

Ibid., 95.

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, ed. James Grauerholz and Barry Miles (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 208.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, translated with an introduction by R. J. Hollingdale (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1961), 201.

It is still unclear to me why it was that this apprehension of dying of laughter was triggered in this case and not, say, in response to the news that following the massacre on February 25, 1994, by Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish extremist, of tens of praying Palestinians in the Ibrahim Mosque in Hebron (aka, al-Khalīl) in the West Bank, a curfew was imposed on the city’s Palestinian population of 130,000 rather than on the 450 Israeli Jewish settlers in their midst (arguably to guard against potential reprisals by the Palestinians); or on coming across an article in the Baltimore Sun of September 3, 1996, titled, “Saddam Hussein Again Iraq’s machinations: Invasion of Kurdish Zone Must Be Met with U.S. Response,” and a September 28, 1996, article in Slate magazine, “The Kurds,” that starts with: “Early this month, the United States bombed Iraq in retaliation for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of the Kurdish city Irbil” (see →)—as far as I know Erbil was then and still is one of the cities of Iraq.

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, 94.

See Aristotle’s influential definition of man as a rational animal.

“For others too can see, or sleep, / But only human eyes can weep” (Andrew Marvell, “Eyes and Tears”).

Here’s a dialogue from Sylvie and Bruno, a book written by an author who could have answered the seemingly rhetorical question, “Have we not dimensions?” with a No, at least during one of his migraine episodes (“Migraine is a well-known cause of visual hallucinations.… Patients who have migraines may experience every variety of hallucinatory image from simple unformed lines and spots to highly complex, formed scenes. Visual distortions, including macropsia and micropsia, may also occur. Such sensory distortions have been called the ‘Alice-in-Wonderland’ syndrome, after the tale by Lewis Carroll who called on his own migraine experiences to describe Alice’s dramatic changes in size” (Jeffrey L. Cummings and Bruce L. Miller, “Visual Hallucinations: Clinical Occurrence and Use in Differential Diagnosis,” Western Journal of Medicine 146, no. 1 (January 1987): 47–48, see →): “‘What are you doing there, Bruno?’ I said. ‘Spoiling Sylvie’s garden … The nasty cross thing—wouldn’t let me go and play this morning—said I must finish my lessons first … I’ll vex her finely, though!’ ‘Oh, Bruno, you shouldn’t do that!’ I cried. ‘Don’t you know that’s revenge? And revenge is a wicked, cruel, dangerous thing!’ ‘River-edge?’ said Bruno.… ‘No, not river-edge,’ I explained: ‘revenge … Come! Try to pronounce it, Bruno!’ … But Bruno … said he couldn’t; that his mouth wasn’t the right shape for words of that kind.… ‘Well, never mind, my little man! … I’ll teach you quite a splendid kind of revenge! … First, we’ll get up all the weeds in her garden. See, there are a good many at this end—quite hiding the flowers.’ ‘But that won’t vex her!’ said Bruno. ‘After that,’ I said, without noticing the remark, ‘we’ll water this highest bed—up here. You see it’s getting quite dry and dusty.… Then after that … the walks want sweeping a bit; and I think you might cut down that tall nettle—it’s so close to the garden that it’s quite in the way—’ ‘What is oo talking about? … All that won’t vex her a bit!’ ‘Won’t it?’ I said, innocently. ‘Then, after that, suppose we put in some of those coloured pebbles—just to mark the divisions between the different kinds of flowers, you know. That’ll have a very pretty effect.’ Bruno turned round and had another good stare at me. At last there came an odd little twinkle into his eyes, and he said, with quite a new meaning in his voice, ‘That’ll do nicely.…’ ‘… and then—what kind of flowers does Sylvie like best?’ … ‘Violets’ … ‘There’s a beautiful bed of violets down by the brook—’ ‘Oh, let’s fetch ’em!’ …” The Complete Illustrated Lewis Carroll, with an introduction by Alexander Woollcott; illustrations by John Tenniel et al. (Ware, Hertfordshire, England: Wordsworth Editions, 2008), 352–353.

Heeding the chapter’s title, “Bruno’s Revenge,” and the symptomatic “At last there came an odd little twinkle into his eyes, and he said, with quite a new meaning in his voice, ‘That’ll do nicely.…’” in response to his interlocutor’s “my little man! … I’ll teach you quite a splendid kind of revenge! … First, we’ll get up all the weeds in her garden …” should the quote from Sylvie and Bruno be placed here, as an example of a subtler kind of revenge, rather than in the previous footnote as an example of evading or undoing the generalized revengefulness around (the latter interpretation is supported by: “‘Revenge … Come! Try to pronounce it, Bruno!’ … But Bruno … said he couldn’t; that his mouth wasn’t the right shape for words of that kind.…”)?