Jean Genet, on the mental life of the jailed prisoner.

Jean Genet, on the mental life of the jailed prisoner.
From Our Lady of the Flowers

We occupy our minds with giving ourselves splendid roles through luxurious lives; we invent so many that we remain enfeebled for a life of action, and if one of them comes, by chance, to be realized, we would be unable to be happy in it, for we have exhausted the dry delights (and many a time recalled the memory of their illusion) of the thousand possibilities of glory and wealth. We are blase. We are forty, fifty, sixty years old; we know only petty, vegetative misery. We are blase.
Your turn Marchetti. Don't invent ways of making a fortune, don't buy knowledge of a sure way of smuggling, don't look for a new trick (they're all used up, more than used up)...

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Move this to 2007 and North America, generations rising to maturity through the television and the movie theatre and say that we're a hundred, two hundred, we're dead, we're past living, we're the ones that are used up, finished, prisoners, our dreams, our myth mined by the cinema and presented back to us as banality, as storylines. Let this be the aim of our actions, not to seize upon and exploit our longings, our daydreams but to enrich and sanctify them as they emerge and tremble...