I was on the train yesterday afternoon, looked over, and found a poem! You never know what you’ll find when you look up and around you. It was actually a line in a book the brainiac standing next to me was reading, a prose work on Lacan’s Theory (I have put the excerpt that jumped out at me in “poem form,” or “poemized” it):

“As long as you live like this
and weave a tapestry of falsehoods
the truth of your selfishness
will thrive in your heart.”

Ouch. Is Lacan trying to tell me something? No, I don’t think this has to do with me, personally. But I thought it was sound advice anyway, and wanted to pass it on. It would be great for a fortune cookie, too. I mean, wouldn’t that make you think. Maybe give you indigestion after your mu shu pork. Lacan is great for this sort of thing, actually. Here’s another found poem from him that actually rhymes (!):

“By a reversal that is not simply a negation of the negation,
The power of pure loss emerges from the residue of obliteration.”

Perfect for a Valentine’s Day card message, don’t you think? It’s from Lacan’s 1958 essay, “The signification of the phallus”. The passage continues, without the snappy rhythm and rhyme:

“For the unconditional element of demand, desire substitutes the absolute condition: this condition unties the knot of that element in the proof of love that is resistant to the satisfaction of a need. Thus desire is neither appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the phenomenon of their splitting.”

I’d like to see that in PowerPoint, actually. I hardly understood a word of it. When I read the essay a couple years ago I thought it would be bawdy and fun, but it turns out the phallus isn’t all that fun in the final analysis. It is, in fact, “the signifier intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signified, in that the signifier conditions them by its presence as a signifier.” Mmm, very sexy.

The phallus is also “the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire.” Oh, OK. Well, that explains it.

“It might also be said that, by virtue of its turgidity, it is the image of the vital flow as it is transmitted in generation.” Oh, please stop, Dr. Lacan, you’re turning me on! “I shall also be using the phallus as an algorithm.” Doctor! I bet you say that to all the girls!

No, I guess his point is that the phallus is the signifier of the desire of the Other. Is this anything like Sartre’s “double reciprocal incarnation”? Another found poem, from Being and Nothingness:

“I make
myself
flesh in order
to impel the Other
to realize for herself
and for me
her own flesh,
and my caresses
cause my flesh
to be born
for me
in so far as it is
for the Other
flesh causing her
to be born
as flesh”

Yikes. Let’s fuck already, eh?

Meanwhile, back at Lacan’s phallus. Woman “finds the signifier of her own desire in the body of him to whom she addresses her demand for love.” In other words, if the dude’s got a woody, she’s happy.

For the man the signifier of the phallus “consitutes [woman] as giving in love what she does not have… his own desire for the phallus will make its signifier emerge in its persistent divergence towards ‘another woman’”—in other words, if the dude’s got a woody, he’s happy, too.

So everybody’s happy as long as the dude’s got a woody.

As for the rest of us: “male homosexuality, in accordance with the phallic mark that constitutes desire, is constituted on the side of desire, while female homosexuality, on the other hand, as observation shows, is oriented on a disappointment that reinforces the side of the demand for love.”

I only wish Lacan’s essays were illustrated.

Probably the best poem I’ve ever personally found is from a book called Eros Unveiled by Catherine Osborne. The book is just a little too something. But I thought this bit of prose, which I have poemized, was well worth the trouble of reading the first thirty pages:

“Of course it might seem harder to love,
Or to go on loving,
What ceases to be beautiful and good;
But that need not mean that the love
For what was once beautiful and lovely
Was selfish
Or motivated by acquisitive desire,
Or grasping
Or ungenerous,
Or less love than the love for the less lovely.”

Some words of wisdom I think we can all use this Saint Valentine’s season.