Heartbreak Diet

heartbreak diet

4:41 minute vocal recording over found mix tape*



pollen is the trace that “dirties” the petals of the flower, it is a stain that is “both original cause and remedy,” and flowers are seductive because they are so stained (1).

not being loved by him, would be completely overwhelming. so she represses this pain. this does not mean that her unfulfilled love need disappears, however. it continues throughout her day exerting its force; its sensations leaking through the heart’s veins to an area where greater control or relief can be solicited.

once her needs have been suppressed by the conscious mind, she is free to pursue substitute gratification, a coping strategy: symbolic behavior in defense against excessive psychobiologic pain that is self-perpetuating; symbolic satisfactions cannot fulfill real needs.

although his absence hurt her, she loved how neither of them could escape their animal nature; that intimacy would cause each their own flight – his to and hers from reason. she thinking, “you are my 1 and only” and he “2 and 2 makes 4.” capitalism provides her with symbolic substitutions, an opportunity for neurotic sublimation, “[he] will write her a symphony, just to say how much [she] means to [him].” she presses repeat, that seamless wave of sound is the fantasy she identifies with to escape her desire (to escape is to control it). when these symbolic satisfactions fail to fulfill real needs, the neurosis self-perpetuates. neurosis being the pathology of feeling - in order for real needs to be satisfied, they must be felt and experienced. once her needs are met, she will experience her body and her environment. as long as the state of desire for him persists in the unconscious, she is temporarily more unreal than real, and at this critical point we may judge her to be neurotic.

anxiety may be discharged through a physical Action. she performs this ritual rapidly, over consuming the object fulfilling her false need and purging it rapidly (in ears →out throat). despite their submission to the laws of efficiency produced by homogenous society, her actions yield an excretion society cannot digest, a stain (her recorded scream); residue that builds up as heterogeneous threat on the public surface she will enter and scar.

she loses her head, because in her there is an inherent need for loss, for dépense; for unproductive expenditures. so she spills like that, unto a used tape whose status as an anachronism has left its surface unguarded and unsealed. she lays her excrement over what was already there as if sound were mattress, time’s corporeal pressure singing dissonantly with her voice.

and it is this vocal waste that suggests her resolute value: dirty, loud, base. there will always be things coming out of her mouth she cannot control. yet it is this waste (crescendo→ decrescendo), the stain of her delayed satisfaction, that is also siren, both cause and remedy of her unfulfilled need. eventually this sound would find the ears of him, her need, and demonstrate its seductive qualities as lure.


*Copies of this work may be obtained by contacting the artist. This piece was reproduced in August of 2009 on LeRoy Steven's limited edition LP "Favorite Recorded Scream" on Small World


1. Themes in this text are taken from two works by Bataille, Georges: “Language of Flowers” 1927-1939 and Dépense (Theory of Loss).