science tumbled: Psychedelics Are Back →

science:

In the scientific limelight, that is. Sort of. In the 1950s and 60s, there was a great deal of optimism about the potential of psychedelic drugs for therapeutic use. Drugs like LSD and psilocybin, the active substance in magic mushrooms, were touted as the cure for everything from depression and…

the night silently

crept into the cracks 
of the city

like madness,

while i blew smoke at the ceiling 
in my own personal philosophy of

futility.

❝Forgetting that beauty and happiness are only ever incarnated in an individual person, we replace them in our minds by a conventional pattern, a sort of average of all the different faces we have ever admired, all the different pleasures we have ever enjoyed, and thus carry about with us abstract images, which are lifeless and uninspiring because they lack the very quality that something new, something different from what is familiar, always possesses, and which is the quality inseparable from real beauty and happiness. So we make our pessimistic pronouncements on life, which we think are valid, in the belief that we have taken account of beauty and happiness, whereas we have actually omitted them from consideration, substituting for them synthetic compounds that contain nothing of them.❞

— Marcel Proust

(Source: madeofglass-)

❝Only people who wear clothes find the naked body beautiful. The overriding value of modesty for sensuality is that it acts as a brake on energy. Artificiality is a way of enjoying naturalness. What I enjoyed about these vast fields I enjoyed because I don’t live here. Someone who has never known constraint can have no concept of freedom. Civilization is an education of nature. The artificial provides an approach to the natural. What we must never do, however, is mistake the artificial for natural. In the harmony between the natural and the artificial lies the essence of the superior human soul.❞

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

(Source: kunfayakunn)

Anonymous:
What if we hadn’t been each other at the same time? Would you tell me all the stories from when you were young and in your prime? Would I rock you to sleep? Would you tell me all the secrets you don’t need to keep? Would I still miss you? Oh, would you then have been mine?... If I were the night sky, here’s my lullaby. Lullaby to leave by, if I were the night.

sing sweetly softly saintly hymns with that
kindness seeping through dim, dusty sibilance of dusk —
your silent eyes sang cosmic secrets.
perhaps the white wicker chair that held such sleep
eluded time, for we have always sang with the night.

ahuntersheart:

"How To Tell A Story" by Shira Erlichman

There is a way of telling stories. A red pen. A teacher to move it.
Instead you have hands, and a Light inside you, and Bones.
Instead you have ideas, which ricochet, and an anger that won't sit still,
and dogs from outside which come to die in the quiet spots inside of you.
And, deliberately, you have noise.
You have rape, and cities, the noise of the dumb, and of the very rape of the
earth, an ache, a strangeness like swallowing feathers, a bitterness, you have.
There is a way of telling stories. They tell you it is not like this.

So you remove your arms, that way no hands can find anything.
You reject the light to please the darkness.
You and I, we become just bones, moving with the stiffness of the dead, caught
in the riot of the rotting, and producing similar sounds.

A page opens before you like a new day
and this is where you find your story.
The earth sings with a thousand ways to tell it.
Lose your tongue.
Don't be confused by shadow, and when you hit water, tread.
Find God, ask questions, don't leave till you've tasted the tea.
You don't need to multiply. Never divide.
Carry the one on your back if you have to.
When you meet the devil, don't spit at him, but don't make love to him either.
When you meet me, take my blooming, bloody palm.
You'll know where to find me, I'll be in every page held by greasy fingers.
I will be the bread that sustains you. If you remember your hunger,

I will remember you.
And when they tell you life is not like this, life is never like this,
life will never be like this, insist that the sun
has always found a time and a place, the moon too knows when and where to enter,
and you too have your stories,
and you too have your place.
❝While Marx and various Marxist movements see a social evolution in humanity towards a utopian society that moves beyond a need for government, postmodernism often rejects this tradition. For this reason, many Marxist critics consider postmodernism to be a symptom of capitalism and the alienation caused by materialism. The postmodern can be a bleak society lorded over by systems and mindless organizational psychology.❞

— Existential Primer

(Source: tameri.com)

❝We too must suffer all the suffering around us. We all have not one body, but we have one way of growing, and this leads us through all anguish, whether in this or in that form. Just as the child develops through all the stages of life right into old age and to death (and fundamentally to the earlier stage the later one seems out of reach, in relation both to desire and to fear), so also do we develop (no less deeply bound up with mankind than with ourselves) through all the sufferings of this world. There is no room for justice in this context, but neither is there any room either for fear of suffering or for the interpretation of suffering as a merit.❞

— Kafka, Aphorisms 

Anonymous:
Dreamt last night I saw you, a single spark explosion, negotiating with the dead. By the bright lights in some ICU, on my chest you put your head, and said "There you are, there you are, there's my heart..."

i can’t write love songs when i’m on these things. i’m affable, responsible, but hard to be around. it’s correctible and they’re right you know. it’s as easy as it sounds, it’s all as easy as it sounds.
❝My argument with so much of psychoanalysis, is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness. When in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know, have come out of people’s suffering. The problem is not to undo suffering, or to wipe it off the face of the earth, but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to “cure” ourselves of it constantly, and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call “happiness”. There’s too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him – of defining him, rather than letting him go! It’s part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad!❞

— Arthur Miller (Adam Curtis’ documentary Century of the Self)

twilight deepens between us,
rushing forward: the bed, the heap of clothes,
the living corpses on the edge of the moment.
you reach down once and instantly,
this mortal singularity waits, suspended.

and for an hour or so,
we cheat death with human longing.
we enchant ourselves out of death;
we enchant death out of ourselves. 

eyes closed in the height of darkness, 
limbs trembling with unspeakable sadness,
death always returns. 

as bodies, we have found nothing. 

❝If poetry is a matrix mechanics of language, how can interpretations of poetry be developed with certainty if a poem’s present state (while creating or experiencing it?) cannot be described without ambiguity?❞

— Amy Catanzano, from “Quantum Poetics: Writing the Speed of Light”

(Source: leproustitute.blogspot.com)