(from Heart, Image and Mapping: the old verities of the heart project)
Photography Sayaka Murayama (c) 2010 - all rights reserved
Live model/ performer Angela Costa (c) 2010 - all rights reserved
Text from "A Lovers Discourse Fragments by Roland Barthes)
All rights reserved (c) - Image copy, post, diffusion or exhibiting is entirely prohibited.
(inner landscapes)
The lover is always resumed to the heart
It engulfs on its own desire, willingly, readily
It appoints a heroic mask to its own madness,
It defines its passion by waiting
It begins but does not ends,
It offers, unwisely, generously the gift of the heart …
1 – To be engulfed - the gentleness of the abyss …
(Disreality)
“ …outburst of self destruction which affects the lover in despair or fulfilment…”
“ …I am dissolved, not dismembered: I fall, I flow, I melt. Such thoughts – grazed, touched, tested - can recur. Nothing solemn about them.
That is exactly what gentleness is ...”
2 – The movement of Desire …
(the heart)
“ … this word (heart) refers to all kinds of movements and desires …”
“… the heart is the organ of desire ( the heart swells, weakens ,etc., like the sexual organs) …”
“.. . what will the other do with my desire? … that is the anxiety in which are gathered all the heart’s movements, all the heart’s problems”
3 – To hide …
(an appointed mask)
“ …to impose upon my passion the mask of discretion (of impassivity) …”
“ … to hide the excess of passion totally is inconceivable: because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you… I want you to know that I don’t want to show my feelings …”
“ … I set a mask upon my passion, but with a discreet ( and wily) finger I designate this mask … Every passion, ultimately, has its spectator …”
4 – I know I love, because I wait …
(waiting)
“ … Am I in love? – Yes, since I am waiting. The other never waits…”
“ … I am waiting for an arrival, a return, a promised sign …”
“ … waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move…”
“ … waiting is a delirium…”
“ … the lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits…”
“ … I wait for you where you do not want to go: I love you where you do not exist …”
5 - The ghost ship …
(innocence)
“ … How does a love end? – Then it does end? ….”
“ … a kind of innocence conceals the end of this thing (love) conceived, asserted, lived according to eternity …”
“ … the love which is over and done wich passes into another world like a ship into space, lights no longer winking …”
“ … the lover itself cannot construct the love story to the end: I am its poet only for the beginning; the end, like my own death, belongs to the other …”
6 – The gift - object of the heart …
(truth)
“ … the heart is always constituted into a gift-object - whether it is ignored or rejected…”
“ … I am not interested in my mind; you are not interested in my heart …”
“ … only the child and the lover have a heavy heart …”
