“And when it comes to your history, I confess to utter skepticism. I can recall vivid encounters, and even whole ecstatic afternoons, that I’ve spent in your company, because they make up the warp of my own days… but as I watched you through my window, crossing into the park and vanishing among the beech trees, you ceased to breathe, you disintegrated… hastily reconstructing yourself, from a random shower of atoms, only seconds before we met, as design would have it, in the Museum, in front of Delvaux’s painting The Echo. The same thing happened to me.”

Hollis Frampton, Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity

I don’t know what idiotic mother fucker said “absence makes the heart grow fonder,” but if by fonder he meant a slow metamorphic rot, we might be reconciled (though I hardly will secede to this notion). The hour starts and a heart may pang at a construction of a lover’s face, but when the weeks accumulate into an indeterminate conglomerate of time, the face is unimportant. I’m left with that disgusting stain on my carpet from the time you puked up the nothingness of your stomach, for you never were quite the connoisseur. So the pangs turn to wretches and I’ve grown an abscess of insecurities and loathing (for both you and myself). 

Nor dread nor hope attend

A dying animal;

A man awaits his end

Dreading and hoping all;

Many times he died,

Many times rose again.

A great man in his pride

Confronting murderous men

Casts derision upon

Supression of breath;

He knows death to the bone—

Man has created death.

William Butler Yeats