10's, Week 5

10 "Verbal Photographs":

• A Chinese couple cozy in a corner booth at Denny's, watching a biography of LeBron James via YouTube on their white Mac, drinking coffee, and sharing the banana split situated in the middle of the table.
  
• A large brown door under yellow lights on Main Street in Toledo whose glass reads: "310 1/2."
  
• A giant green peace sign written over all the other text on a white bathroom stall wall.
  
• Tiny lumps of solid white chocolate, drowning in the surrounding sea of warm, melted white chocolate.
  
• The endless pattern of stacked issues of Rolling Stone against the gray carpet.
  
• A cascading splatter of yellow on a tall, mountainous pile of snow.
  
• The diagonal-lined shadow the spiral staircase manifests on the plain white wall.
  
• The strategic stack of clear glasses and white ceramic bowls in the white plastic dish rack.
  
• Long, lean icicles dripping down the gray siding, coating the wall in bumpy ice.
  
• A brown-haired girl reading a book, nested alone in friends' coats and purses in the stands of the ice skating rink.
  

10 "Treasures":

• "I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique..the other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others). Yet I have loved or will love several times in my life. Does this mean, then, that my desire, quite special as it may be, is linked to a type? Does this mean that my desire is classifiable? Is there, among all the beings I have loved, a common characteristic, just one, however tenuous (a nose, a skin, a look), which allows me to say: that's my type! "Just my type" or "not my type at all"--cruising slogans: then is the lover merely a choosier cruiser, who spends his life looking for "his type"? In which corner of the adverse body must I read my truth?" --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• '"Am I in love? --Yes, since I'm waiting.' The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "Game: there were as many chairs as children, minus one; while the children marched around, a lady pounded on a piano; when she stopped, everyone dashed for a chair and sat down, except the clumsiest, the least brutal, or the unluckiest, who remained standing, stupid, de trop: the lover." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "The power of language: with my language I can do everything: even and especially say nothing. I can do everything with my language, but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice. By my voice, whatever it says, the other will recognize 'that something is wrong with me.' I am a liar (by preterition), not an actor. My body is a stubborn child, my language is a very civilized adult.." --Roland Barthe, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "Love has two affirmations. First of all, when the lover encounters the other, there is an immediate affirmation (psychologically: dazzlement, enthusiasm, exaltation, mad projection of fulfilled future: I am devoured by desire, the impulse to be happy): I say yes to everything (blinding myself). There follows a long tunnel: my first yes is riddled by doubts, love's value is ceaselessly threatened by depreciation: this is the moment of melancholy passion, the rising of resentment and of oblation. Yet I can emerge from this tunnel; I can "surmount," without liquidation; what I have affirmed a first time, I can once again affirm, without repeating it, for then what I affirm is the affirmation, not its contingency: I affirm the first encounter in its difference, I desire its return, not its repetition. I say to the other (old or new): Let us begin again." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "Repression: I want to analyze, to know, to express in another language than mine; I want to represent my delirium to myself, I want to 'look in the face' what is dividing me, cutting me off." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a doubt contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is 'I desire you,' and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "If I acknowledge my dependency, I do because for me it is a means of signifiying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a 'weakness' or an 'absurdity': it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "The lover's discourse is not lacking in calculations: I rationalize, I reason, sometimes I count, either to obtain certain satisfactions, to avoid certain injuries, or to represent inwardly to the other, in a wayward impulse, the wealth of ingenuity I lavish for nothing in his favor (to yield, to conceal, not to hurt, to divert, to convince, etc.). But these calculations are merely impatiences: no thought of a final gain: Expenditure is open, to infinity, strength drifts, without a goal (the loved object is not a goal: the loved object-as-thing, not object-as-term)." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
• "To be jealous is to conform. To reject jealousy ("to be perfect") is therefore to transgress a law." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse