i come without feeling
i see without seeing
i espouse without believing
i am without being
i come without feeling
i see without seeing
i espouse without believing
i am without being
warsan shire
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough
the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
******s with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here
@Starfall
nsfw?
“The first time he calls you holy,
you laugh it back so hard your sides hurt.
The second time,
you moan gospel around his fingers
between your teeth.
He has always surprised
you into surprising yourself.
Because he’s an angel hiding his halo
behind his back and
nothing has ever felt so filthy
as plucking the wings from his shoulders—
undressing his softness
one feather at a time.
God, if you’re out there,
if you’re listening,
he fucks like a seraphim,
and there’s no part of scripture
that ever prepared you for his hands.
Hands that map a communion
in the cradle of your hips.
Hands that kiss hymns up your sides.
He confesses how long he’s looked
for a place to worship and,
oh,
you put him on his knees.
When he sinks to the floor and moans
like he can’t help himself,
you wonder if the other angels
fell so sweet.
He says his prayers between your thighs
and you dig your heels into the base of his spine
until he blushes the color of your filthy tongue.
You will ruin him and he will thank you;
he will say please.
No damnation ever looked as cozy as this,
but you fit over his hips like they
were made for you.
You fit, you fit, you fit.
On top of him, you are an ancient god
that only he remembers and he
offers up his skin.
And you take it.
Who knew sacrifice was so profane?
And once you’ve taught him how to hold
your throat in one hand
and your heart in the other,
you will have forgotten every other word,
except his name.”
— PROFANE, BY ASHE VERNON
I went outside after my beer and looked down into the ocean and saw a stingray flapping in the water, a jagged C torn into his body and ribbons of blood running out, same color as mine, as anything’s, and I knew that stingray had been chewed by something because that is all the ocean is—a big hole full of things chewing each other—and it’s odd that people go to the beach and stare at the waving water and feel relaxed because what they are looking at is just the blue curtain over a wild violence, lives eating lives, the unstoppable chew, and I wondered if any of those vacationing people feel all the blood rushing under the surface, and I wondered if the fleshy, dying underside of the ocean is what they’re really after as they stare—that ferocious pulse under all things placid.
—
From “Nobody Is Ever Missing” by Catherine Lacey.
So I loved him and called him beautiful.
He has a song inside me now, and air like feathers,
this time the birds instead of the butterflies,
wings fluttering and my chest detonating every time
they take flight. This goes on for the longest time.
Until my heart is a metaphor for something wild,
maybe foxes, maybe fire, everything I love is painted
and burned, my hands red and exhaling desire.
The body is a poem that speaks what the poem can’t
and the body wants everything. What’s alive and
breathing and made out of bones. Only yesterday did
he show up on my tongue like lost taste, only yesterday
did I swallow in haste. It’s so hard to talk about brown
eyes or long fingers now. The memories are too big
for a poem like this to hold them. We all want things to
survive. And we all want lovers to stay. So it’s the
anthem of every heart, the heart lonely and writing a poem
about itself. It turns out the chest is something loud.
Even more feline. The throat is open. There’s a noise
it makes. It’s more like a growl but I can’t be sure.
So here’s my mouth with blood in it. The cage for when
I get delirious and savage. Yes, I loved him from the start.
It turns out that things fall apart and I’m not the girl
who’s okay with that. It turns out we’re all wolves
and we’re all in love, the people we want dying or going,
not coming back. The night is wide and hushed.
I go into the woods, make a house of God and stretch
my body across the table and say a prayer.
Blessed are the hearts that love without fangs.
And blessed are the hands that let go without their claws.
—-Wolfish, Karese Burrows
After you’ve been to bed together for the first time,
without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance,
the other party very often says to you,
Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you,
what’s your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do
sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up
a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you
lying together in completely relaxed positions
like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed.
You tell them your story, or as much of your story
as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say,
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, until the oh
is just an audible breath, and then of course
there’s some interruption. Slow room service comes up
with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee
and gaze at himself with mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror.
And then, the first thing you know, before you’ve had time
to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story,
they’re telling you their life story, exactly as they’d intended to all
along,
and you’re saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming
no more than an audible sigh,
as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left,
draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion
and stops breathing forever. Then?
Well, one of you falls asleep
and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his mouth,
and that’s how people burn to death in hotel rooms.
—Tennessee Williams, from Life Story
“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
donating=loving (c) Maria Popova, INFP
The context - donating to her. Suggestive Se as is.
http://www.brainpickings.org
'I am trying to see things in perspective. My dog wants a bite of my peanut butter chocolate chip bagel. I know she cannot have this, because chocolate makes dogs very sick. My dog does not understand this. She pouts and wraps herself around my leg like a scarf and purrs and tries to convince me to give her just a tiny bit. When I do not give in, she eventually gives up and lays in the corner, under the piano, drooping and sad. I hope the universe has my best interest in mind like I have my dog’s. When I want something with my whole being, and the universe withholds it from me, I hope the universe thinks to herself: ‘Silly girl. She thinks this is what she wants, but she does not understand how it will hurt.’
— Blythe Baird
One of my favorite poems: "The Blue Flag in the Bog," by Edna St. Vincent Millay http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-b...ag-in-the-bog/
I'm not religious, but I have always loved this poem...something about it is so bittersweet, and Millay puts the words and rythm together so well. Always a favorite.
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." - Yogi Berra
Scheherazade
Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
we’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.
Richard Siken (2005)
Outwitted
He drew a circle that shut me out--
Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!
-Edwin Markham
Self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.
— Alan W. Watts
Beautiful things grow out of shit. Nobody ever believes that. Everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head—they somehow appeared there and formed in his head—and all he had to do was write them down and they would be manifest to the world. But what I think is so interesting, and would really be a lesson that everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that’s how things work. If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head but and you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life where you could say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much, start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.
— Brian Eno, Here Is What Is (cf. David Rakoff: “Writing starts off as shit.”)
“Imagine that the world is made out of love. Now imagine that it isn’t. Imagine a story where everything goes wrong, where everyone has their back against the wall, where everyone is in pain and acting selfishly because if they don’t, they’ll die. Imagine a story, not of good against evil, but of need against need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone is to blame.”
— Richard Siken
The Association of Man and Woman
.
Whatever badness there was,
sometimes
was not of us
but between us.
Because there was goodness,
which felt like a sure base.
While badness felt only
like incidents upon it.
The badness was only
the way you and I needed to behave,
sometimes.
Not what we were.
The badness was only
the small,
transient,
insignificant
pain,
like the tiny, instant
pain
from the prick of a rose’s thorn,
taking joy,
for a second,
away from the fragrance of the rose.
by Peggy Freydberg
from Poems from a Pond
Marie Howe, “The Boy”
My older brother is walking down the sidewalk into the suburban
summer night:
white T-shirt, blue jeans— to the field at the end of the street.
Hangers Hideout the boys called it, an undeveloped plot, a pit
overgrown
with weeds, some old furniture thrown down there,
and some metal hangers clinking in the trees like wind chimes.
He’s running away from home because our father wants to cut his hair.
And in two more days our father will convince me to go to him— you know
where he is— and talk to him: No reprisals. He promised. A small parade
of kids
in feet pajamas will accompany me, their voices like the first peepers
in spring.
And my brother will walk ahead of us home, and my father
will shave his head bald, and my brother will not speak to anyone the next
month, not a word, not pass the milk, nothing.
What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk
down a sidewalk without looking back.
I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was,
calling and calling his name.
If you want the life you have, don’t date a mystic woman.
A mystic woman is a wild creature. She spends all her life seeking, for there is nothing else worth doing. She peers and gazes until she falls from the edge of the world, and into the next. Over and over. Each time she returns, she is a little different. What she sees must change her. She dies every moment. She is reborn every day. Can you even begin to fathom the terror and the faith commanded from such a being? Can you even begin to understand what such a life can do?
If you want the life you have, don’t date a mystic woman..
If you are comfortable and cozy, stay away. Whatever you have built around yourself to create comfort: it cannot stand in the blazing fire of a mystical woman. She is no trophy. She is no bodily pleasure-maker. She is the seer of souls. She is the womb that births the divine into the flesh and bone of matter. She doesn’t mean to burn your village to the ground, but she has seen what you are meant to become. You are not a peasant shearing sheep, as you have thought. You are a king dressed in rags who has amnesia.
If you want the life you have, don’t date a mystic woman.
If she touches you, and all the voices on the wind go silent, if you feel you are in a snow globe when you embrace her, she is your destroyer. She will destroy the false idol you see in the mirror. She will smash it open because it is your prison. If you wish to stay there, she will shatter you another way. She will leave.
If you want the life you have, don’t date a mystic woman.
Everybody wants the magic, but nobody wants the Mystery, the schooling: a thing that must be lived in a place where book knowledge has no meaning, for all books are manuals to the world you already know. That means, the well-honed intellect — the masculine theory of reason — will not save you, cannot free you. It is for a world whose time is over. The Mystery, by its very nature, must show you what has never been seen, never been written, never been known, because before you were forged, it was impossible. The arts of women have been called the dark arts for too long, and they are the keys to infinity. Infinite form. Infinite being. Infinite life.
If you want the life you have, don’t date a mystic woman.
If your dreams are not filled with the Mystery, you are better off with a normal life, because she will see things that are invisible to you. She will feel things that you cannot feel beneath the layers of numbness you have wrapped yourself in. She will call upon your true self, your real soul, and she will sing it down into you, into herself and life will open up, for this very moment...
-- Alison Nappi
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
Blanche DuBois: You're married to a madman.
Stella: I wish you'd stop taking it for granted that I'm in something I want to get out of.
Blanche DuBois: What you are talking about is desire - just brutal Desire. The name of that rattle-trap streetcar that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another.
Stella: Haven't you ever ridden on that streetcar?
Blanche DuBois: It brought me here. Where I'm not wanted and where I'm ashamed to be.
Stella: Don't you think your superior attitude is a little out of place?
Blanche DuBois: May I speak plainly?... If you'll forgive me, he's common... He's like an animal. He has an animal's habits. There's even something subhuman about him. Thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is. Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the Stone Age, bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle. And you - you here waiting for him. Maybe he'll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you, that's if kisses have been discovered yet. His poker night you call it. This party of apes.
Blanche DuBois: I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.
Stanley Kowalski: I never met a dame yet that didn't know if she was good-looking or not without being told, and there's some of them that give themselves credit for more than they've got.
Stanley Kowalski: Listen, baby, when we first met - you and me - you thought I was common. Well, how right you was. I was common as dirt. You showed me a snapshot of the place with them columns, and I pulled you down off them columns, and you loved it, having them colored lights goin'. And wasn't we happy together? Wasn't it all okay till she showed here? And wasn't we happy together? Wasn't it all OK? Till she showed here. Hoity-toity, describin' me like a ape.
Stanley Kowalski: Take a look at yourself here in a worn-out Mardi Gras outfit, rented for 50 cents from some rag-picker. And with a crazy crown on. Now what kind of a queen do you think you are? Do you know that I've been on to you from the start, and not once did you pull the wool over this boy's eyes? You come in here and you sprinkle the place with powder and you spray perfume and you stick a paper lantern over the light bulb - and, lo and behold, the place has turned to Egypt and you are the Queen of the Nile, sitting on your throne, swilling down my liquor. And do you know what I say? Ha ha! Do you hear me? Ha ha ha!
Blanche DuBois: Oh look, we have created enchantment.
Blanche DuBois: But some things are not forgivable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable! It is the one unforgivable thing, in my opinion, and the one thing of which I have never, never been guilty.
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
Our bodies are wild. The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments relaxing, staring, reflecting – all universal responses of this mammal body… The body does not require the intercession of some conscious intellect to make it breathe, to keep the heart beating. It is to a great extent self-regulating, it is a life of its own. The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us. There are more things in the mind, in the imagination, than ‘you’ can keep track of – thoughts, memories, images, angers, delights, rise unbidden. The depths of the mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now. I do not mean personal bobcats in personal psyches, but the bobcat that roams from dream to dream. The conscious agenda-planning ego occupies a very tiny territory, a little cubicle somewhere near the gate, keeping track of some of what goes in and out, and the rest takes care of itself. The body is, so to speak, in the mind. They are both wild.
— Gary Snyder
What I told you about saving people isn’t true. You might think it is, because you might want someone else to save you, or you might want to save someone so badly. But no one else can save you, not really. Not from yourself. […] You fall asleep in the foothills, and the wolf comes down from the mountains. And you hope someone will wake you up. Or chase it off. Or shoot it dead. But when you realize that the wolf is inside you, that’s when you know. You can’t run from it. And no one who loves you can kill the wolf, because it’s part of you. They see your face on it. And they won’t fire the shot.
—Ava Dellaira, from Love Letters to the Dead
Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it.
—Maya Angelou
I maintain a repository of anarchism-related quotes. Here are two I added today that I like:
"It is often said that Anarchists live in a world of dreams to come, and do not see the things which happen today. We do see them only too well, and in their true colors, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forest of prejudice that besets us." --Peter Kropotkin
"Liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; for it is not given to every one to break through all limits, or, more expressively: not to every one is that a limit which is a limit for the rest... he who overturns one of his limits may have shown others the way and the means." --Max Stirner
In effect, blaming women for their own suffering is marketed as an innovative yet ancient cosmic insight, the secret to becoming ‘conscious’. Self-blame becomes the spiritual evolution of the Self. Blaming other women is transformed into a generously loving act, an act of wisdom and friendship, a sharing of enlightened consciousness,
This ‘empowering’ cult of victim-blaming cuts women’s political consciousness off at the knees. Feminist consciousness is implicitly framed as declasse, a sign that one is not ‘conscious’ or spiritually evolved, that one belongs to an emotionally inferior class of women that one is not ‘feminine’. In order to evolve one’s consciousness (and succeed in love and work) one must not only distance oneself from feminism, but also secure one’s status within the evolved group by diagnosing the suffering of women as an individual failure to take responsibility for their lives. The goal is a mass cleansing of the female mind of all revolutionary thought, of critical thinking, above all of a feminist consciousness which does not forget, which does not forgive, which seeks collective justice.
—Abigail Bray
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
When people try to dismiss those who ask the big public questions as being emotional, it is a strategy to avoid debate. Why should we be scared of being angry? Why should we be scared of our feelings, if they’re based on facts. The whole framework of reason versus passion is ridiculous, because often passion is based on reason. Passion is not always unreasonable. Anger is based on reason. They’re not two different things. I feel it’s very important to defend that.
—Arundhati Roy, The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy
We are so accustomed to the old opposition of reason versus passion, spirit versus life, that the idea of a passionate thinking, in which thinking and aliveness become one takes us somewhat aback.
—Hannah Arendt, ‘Martin Heidegger at Eighty’
CHORUS OF CELLS
Every morning,
even being very old,
(or perhaps because of it),
I like to make my bed.
In fact, the starting of each day
unhelplessly,
is the biggest thing I ever do.
I smooth away the dreams disclosed by tangled sheets,
I smack the dented pillow’s revelations to oblivion,
I finish with the pattern of the spread exactly centered.
The night is won.
And now the day can open.
All this I like to do,
mastering the making of my bed
with hands that trust beginnings.
All this I need to do,
directed by the silent message
of the luxury of my breathing.
And every night,
I like to fold the covers back,
and get in bed,
and live the dark, wise poetry of the night’s dreaming,
dreading the extent of its improbabilities,
but surrendering to the truth it knows and I do not;
even though its technicolor cruelties,
or the music of its myths,
feels like someone else’s experience,
not mine.
I know that I could no more cease
to want to make my bed each morning,
and fold the covers back at night,
than I could cease
to want to put one foot before the other.
Being very old and so because of it,
all this I am compelled to do,
day after day,
night after night,
directed by the silent message
of the constancy of my breathing,
that bears the news I am alive.
when i heard him scream “fat lazy c*nt”
at the drive-thru with my windows down
& the radio up, i was overcome with the
desire to nail him to a cross in hopes
he would stick around to hear
my slow, thoughtful response.
i would say,
thank you for yr gentleman’s concern.
i’ll tell you why i don’t go in, it’s just too
many times with my eyes on the floor,
cow noises from behind, pig calls,
open stares, bathroom laughter, pitying looks,
the kindly couples with their tales
of stomachs stapled & sudden reductions,
calling me it, and too many skinny girls
who forgot to turn their flash off,
looking guilty & pleased.
but truly he is of no consequence,
& most certainly would not hear or understand.
i would turn to his laughing girlfriend,
her lying below, a modern Magdalene
i would say, sister, why have you
& yours forsaken me? can you tell me?
did your mother teach you to take up
their uniform, unending insignias?
we are in the pitcher plant together
& you are holding me down
to drown in the digestive fluid,
not seeing the flesh on your
own hands is peeling, leaving.
you are cruel because i was not
eaten up in the right way,
the same as you,
no one would laugh at you
at hollister.
why can’t you understand that
i am only fuel for the fire that
burns all femmes alive, you scream
joy at my crackling fat, “
never lifting your eyes
to the machine the
thick smoke is moving.
you laugh because yr scared
& running from the truth,
aware or unaware,
the framework of your self-worth
is so fucking fragile and untrue.
the truth of the lies might
feel like too much to stand.
if i could i would slam
my body against it, send
ad campaigns sprawling
like dominoes, media bleeding.
sister, you try to steal what
shreds of humanity have been
afforded to my body & the ghost inside.
why? how can you not know
that it does not benefit you,
only subtracts from all,
adds back into the pockets
that hold the strings
that whisper that it’s good
to never eat and always hunger.
in the eyes of society
you are forever a sinner,
& my salt or blood spilled
will do nothing to save you.
you don’t want to be guilted
for the way you press shame
over my mouth and nose,
to smother & encourage starving.
you are so simple & selfish.
if i was beautiful,
then what would you be?
what would all the cruelty
& false sympathy
& low blows
& tears shed
& vomit flushed
& meals skipped
& magazines cried over
be for?
it would be pretty stupid,
right?
petty?
cruel?
even pitiable,
in the right lights?
do you know why i nailed
him up so succinctly
but take the time
to spell the gospel out for you?
your heart is surely salvageable,
i am no savior but i know
the valley you walk through.
i have felt the jealousy,
i have felt the hate
and the judgement,
been compelled by the
demons of Longing
& Unhappiness,
seeking to pick apart
every body the way
i can’t help
picking apart mine,
spitting and hissing
and driving further down
the road to hell.
REPENT, o REPENT,
sister, every laughter leads
back to the men who have
told you that you are nothing
but a hole to fuck, but still
held your body in critical regard,
judging you like something
to be devoured,
wanted to cut you open
apart like a piece of meat
until you mimic the videos
they press play on that
women die for and cry in.
i promise you are more
than a dress size
or a hip to bust ratio,
i promise i am
more than that too.
i weep for you even as
you grind me further
into the ground.
for twenty three years
i thought more than
one meal a day was
binge eating, but all
of the famine did nothing for me.
you have done nothing for me.
i have done nothing to you.
i will give you this one chance
and this one chance only,
this scripture stuck sobbing
into your unwilling hands.
i can only keep food down
when i’m vomiting up truth.
-you abide but i survive
It never gets old.
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer…
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil…
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
I have nothing to teach you- no new philosophy, no new system, no new path to reality; there is no path to reality any more than to truth. All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.
- J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
"Say, my soul - poor, deluded soul, what do you think of going and living in Lisbon? It must be warm there, and you would become as lively as a lizard. It is on the waterside; they say that it is built of marble, and that the people have such a hatred of vegetation that they pluck up all the trees. - Ah! there is a landscape to your liking; a landscape made with light and mineral, and a liquid mirror to reflect them!
My soul replies nothing.
Since you love rest so much while contemplating movement, would you like to come and live in Holland, the land that brings happiness? Perhaps you would find amusement in that country, whose picture you have so often admired in museums. What do you say to Rotterdam, you who love forests of masts, and the ships moored alongside the houses?
My soul remains dumb.
Would Batavia smile on you perhaps more sweetly? There we should find the spirit of Europe wedded to the beauty of the tropics.
Not a word. Can my soul be dead?
Are you then come to such a point of enervation that you take pleasure only in your own happiness? If so, let us away to those countries that are the emblem of death. I have it, poor soul, we will pack for Torneo. Let us go father still, to the far end of the Baltic, still farther from life, if it is possible. Let us set up our camp at the Pole! There the Sun strikes the earth obliquely, and the slow alternation of light and night suppresses variety and increases monotony - that better half of nothing. There we may take prolonged baths of shadows, while, to amuse us the Aurora Borealis will send us from time to time its rosy sheaves, like the reflection of the fireworks of Hell.
Then at last my soul broke forth, and wisely did she cry, 'No matter where, no matter where, so long as it is out of the World!'
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
Our personal identities are socially situated. We are where we live, eat, work, and make love. […] Our sense of identity is in large measure conferred on us by others in the ways they treat or mistreat us, recognize or ignore us, praise us or punish us. Some people make us timid and shy; others elicit our sex appeal and dominance. In some groups we are made leaders, while in others we are reduced to being followers. We come to live up to or down to the expectations others have of us. The expectations of others often become self-fulfilling prophecies. Without realizing it, we often behave in ways that confirm the beliefs others have about us. Those subjective beliefs create new realities for us. We often become who other people think we are, in their eyes and in our behavior.
— Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
"History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this. In great pain and terror one begins to assess the history which has placed one where one is, and formed one’s point of view. In great pain and terror because, thereafter, one enters into battle with that historical creation, Oneself, and attempts to re-create oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating: one begins the attempt to achieve a level of personal maturity and freedom which robs history of its tyrannical power, and also changes history."
James Baldwin, “The White Man’s Guilt,” Ebony, August 1965, 47-48.
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
"My application’s not bought,’ I am telling them, calling into the darkness of the red cave that opens out before closed eyes. ‘I am not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I’m complex.’I read,’ I say. ‘I study and read. I bet I’ve read everything you’ve read. Don’t think I haven’t. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.” My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let me, talk and talk. Let’s talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table,’ I say. ‘I’m not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.’
I open my eyes. ‘Please don’t think I don’t care."
You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw - but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of - something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clapclap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it - tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.
C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.
Peter A. Levine, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness
I would give all my metaphors
in return for one word
drawn out of my breast like a rib
for one word
contained within the boundaries
of my skin
Zbigniew Herbert, from ‘I Would Like to Describe,’ Collected Poems 1956-98, trans. Alissa Valles
It is not simply that commodification and monetization have been extended everywhere. Even non-wealth-generating spheres - as learning, dating, exercising, breathing - are now construed in market terms; are submitted to market metrics; are governed with market techniques and practices. People themselves are cast as human capital and must accordingly tend to their own present and future value.
Achille Mbembe, “Decolonizing the University: New Directions” (40).
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