Paradise

Arthur Rimbaud at l7 (photo: Etienne Carjat)

There is a kind of force that's hard to resist. Once you're caught in its throes, you're stuck. Certain kinds of pleasure which you might rather defer are that way. You try to talk yourself out of the gratification which you know could become addictive, but you've  crossed an invisible line and there's no turning back. Negative projection works in a similar manner. You have figured everything out and the blackness seems inevitable. You almost like it and even begin to gloat. If things can’t be really good then certainly they can be superlatively bad. You would rather excel at something and it might as well be failure. Why not just give up? Sulk about how the world is an evil place. Didn’t Baudelaire and Rimbaud write Les Fleurs du mal and Une saison en enfer? Misery was good enough for them, but then all of a sudden, and in defiance of the laws of gravity, you find yourself turning in the other direction. The tide of negation is strong, but not powerful enough to drown you in its waters. You do one thing  and then the next. A gratuitous piece of unselfishness provides the making of a new paradigm. At first it seems like a Sisyphean task but soon you've risen from the dead. You're filled with a renewed energy which seems all the more strange due to the fact that it lacks an etiology. It’s like one of the magical cures that the body performs on itself, just at the point when a disease appears to be pernicious and incurable.