collectivize your body

all quotes by griselidis real from the little black book of griselidis real: days and night of an anarchist whore (translated by ariana reines)

"the only love left to you is a silent hyena devouring your guts. yes, that's what writing is. to empty yourself down to the marrow, to live another life, to be caught in a text, dragged into it alive. to laugh, cry, burn on words, get flayed on them. scream for mercy and go back to get stabbed in the neck. doubt yourself at every word, at every sentence. to give throat to the silence. to know that nothing is ever finished, never established. that you must start over every time, risk your skin at its most intimate every day, lose everything, win everything back.

the book that's even more severe than a lover, you love it, you submit to it, you hate it. you strangle it in secret, adorn it and paint it in brilliant colors like some insane idol, day by day you poison yourself with it. and afterwards, when the torture is complete, when you think you're finally free, there's already another roaring in the wings. . .

to write is to kill, it's to roll naked in ash, it's to escape into suicide and madness. you spit in its face, second by second you tear from it its living secrets from rot and you die of it. i write to vomit myself as i was made, i write to perpetuate myself the way i was loved and wounded, caressed and resuscitated. no act is reasonable if it is not kindled, at the root of ourselves, by our hidden desires."


"i don't want to let myself get taken over, not by this usury of my organs, or by age, or exhaustion, or morale, i mean, not by any weaknesses, i want to resist, keep on resisting. so my youth means renewing myself every day, every day saying fuck you to everything that goes wrong. before i didn't need to bother, but now i'm extremely conscious that i have to say fuck you to everything."

"they were sublime letters. and they were totally sincere. and i think he still loves me this way. he wants to make me pay for everything he ever lacked, he wants me to pay for the lack of love from his mother, the bullshit cops in tunisia, he wants to make me pay for all the injustices he suffered in europe. but in the meantime i think he loves me truly. but it's a very dramatic love. it's a difficult love, because, no matter what you give it'll never be what he needs."

"jean said to me, all i ask is that someone have the kindness to do a tiny bit of cinema for me, nothing more."

"if you don't feel that you're bringing someone total happiness, it's better to stay away. because it would only be little pieces and disillusions. but in my opinion, there has to be an ideal in common, because if a man only asks maternal and sexual security of you, well that's nice, but it's not enough. so in my opinion you have to see much further than that. you'd have to marry a nut, a surrealist poet, you'd have to love someone who's beyond the norm. because love is not restrictive. if you get the impression that it's going to amputate you while restraining the other, it's not worth it."

"well yeah, but marie-france, who does the fancy neighborhood, she didn't get any work at all saturday night. she called me, it was two thirty in the morning. i had just gotten into bed to sleep, she said, i didn't get any work, not one single client! well, i did seventeen!. . . it practically breaks the skin by the end. no, but i realized something extraordinary. by the seventeenth, i had absolutely no strength left, and then i said to myself, well, fundamentally, where am i? am i still myself? or have i stopped existing? do i exist differently? and then i saw that something kind of marvelous had happened to me, you can collectivize your body. . . i mean, you stay yourself, but at the same time, you belong to others. i was myself all the bodies of the other people who'd come here. . . i became totally multiple. it's wonderful. you're like a piece of algae tangled up in other algae. it's an ocean. all the nuances are mixed together. it's absolute splendor. . .  it was exhausting, killing, but killing and marvelous. i mean, by the seventeenth you're completely drugged. you're in this state, a human being crushed under a steamroller. you're totally drained. how can i explain it? you're totally emptied of all aggression. . . i made another fantastic discovery, the sweeter you are, the more spineless you are, without nerves, without reactions, the better it goes. because fundamentally what they want isn't to hurt you, or to kill you, or bore you, what they want is for you to be nice, that's all. so since you're totally amorphous, practically emptied of your substance, emptied of your strength, of what gets on your nerves, well, you're so malleable, so sweet, so agreeable that that's how it goes the best. there weren't any snags. because when i get annoyed the men get annoyed too. we end up coming to insults and even to blows, and that's just the beginning. you see, the man tenses up, and after that it goes much worse. but when you're sweet, humane, superhumanly sweet, well, they're so sweet and happy, confident. that's it, total confidence, so it's very important to have discovered this."

"i think love is something invisible, untouchable, undefinable, it's spiritual magnetism, you know? it's like electricity. you don't see it coming or going, something surges through you and ignites you, leaves you breathless or completely spellbound, and then you can't really withhold or possess, it's really something extraordinary, it's completely mysterious."