Image: J.M.W. Turner, The Storm, 1840-45.
(a working note for flight)
The moment the heart is made rational, it is imprisoned by limits. With the kind of singular purpose that compels the stars to consume themselves from within, without concern that they extinguish with the passing of eternities, with the fading of all witness. Without this purpose, determined by a fateful gematria, the unmoored self is bewitched into a weightless existence. So, substitution of intimacy with purpose. The minor notes of brutality. The absent gentleness that lifts and lands again, humidly soft on a body that is acclimated to the razor assault on the nerves. Stalemate. Water that is still, losing its nature.
Is there a kind of fear that marks the edges of the human, that disintegrates so fully when the possibility of reaching you is made less a possibility, but emerges into a world that clangs with the real edges of glasses, of tables, of broken screens — this loud and empty world? But here I’ve gone from the moment again. I turned from superstition, collaborating with logic. My reason deceived me.
. . . . .
Bracha Ettinger again: her proposal of ‘carriance’, or the relationship and trajectory of trusting-caring: “I am, thence I was carried. I am, therefore I will carry.”; and as Ettinger cites Celan: “The world is gone. I must carry you.”
Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations (253): “Another person can’t have my pains.” — My pains — what pains are they? What counts as a criterion of identity here? Consider what makes it possible in the case of physical objects to speak of “two exactly the same”: for example, to say, “This chair is not the one you saw here yesterday, but is exactly the same as it.”
In so far as it makes sense to say that my pain is the same as his, it is also possible for us both to have the same pain. (And it would also be conceivable that two people feel pain in the same — not just the corresponding — place. […] )
I have seen a person in a discussion on this subject strike himself on the breast and say: “But surely another person can’t have THIS pain!” — The answer to this is that one does not define a criterion of identity by emphatically enunciating the word “this”. Rather, the emphasis merely creates the illusion of a case in which we are conversant with such a criterion of identity, but have to be reminded of it.”
For which, Nick Drake:
“A troubled cure
For a troubled mind
[…]
There’s really no way
Of ending your troubles
With things you can say”
And Oscar Wilde: “Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. […] Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain.”
Lital Khaikin 
[…] The psyche of a city is the reflection of its facets turned upon one another, refracting light and shadow in ways that bend, contort and consume, trapping inwardly and unable to flow. Cities that abandon and are abandoned, from within, become incubators of fracture even under the illusion of connection, where one shatters against another in a repetition of seeking and entrapment within intentionless anxiety, growing the inner desert outward and taking in the strange sands of others. […]