February 2012
“How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware...”
– Barry Lopez
“The significance of that ‘absolute commandment’, know thyself —...”
– Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1816)
sataniste:
“About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.”
-Carl Jung
1 tag
as a child, i learned only to believe in the philosophy of touch. i begged my mother as i will beg you: please do not begin to explain to me empiricism, idealism, realism, revelation. there is no need for explanations of the phenomenalism of my body discovering yours, of my fingertips discovering dirt, of your fingertips discovering the decline of my hips, of my hips discovering the decline...
WatchBOARDS OF CANADA - IN A BEAUTIFUL PLACE OUT IN THE COUNTRY (by Neil Krug)
“I quite agree with you,” Ulrich hastened to say. “There is nothing I am less fit...”
– Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Vol. I
1 tag
with only bones, we tossed aside the skin of sanctimonious fruit. stripped to hollow thievery, such hasty hands harboured cold below skin, below bones, below hollow. heart throbbed under layers of clothes, threatened to become the void it perpetuates. clarity became clemency became catastrophe. the peels of the clementines lay scattered placidly on the hardwood floor, the skin untouched and...
“Concepts can at best only serve to negate one another, as one thorn is used to...”
– Ramesh Balsekar
1 tag
with belated, bitter steps, i entered a strange living room, a stranger’s holy solitude. strange, the stranger purred, that you should come at such an hour. treading uneasily into unlifted darkness, my black pea coat still buttoned, my head twisted in the direction of a fevered tick. hour after hour was an ancient god with an animal head, emitting curt breaths in their airless,...
jusbuckingham:
Japandroids - Crazy/Forever
“From the earliest youth stirrings of self-confidence, which are often so...”
– Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities Vol. I
Thanks by W.S. Merwin
journalofanobody:
Thanks by W. S. Merwin
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back...
“It’s like going around a mirrorless world asking everyone you meet to describe...”
– Diane Arbus
“[There still remains the question whether] he who discovers a new world in the...”
– Review of L’Art Chrétien by Alexis-François Rio in the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève. (1842)
1 tag
“Inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what...”
– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1978)
“At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a...”
– Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary
“I apologize to everything that I cannot be everywhere.
I apologize to everyone...”
– Wisława Szymborska, from “Under a Certain Little Star” (trans. by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire)
1 tag
i. the models with their sunken eyes, living in their own universe of spirals and waves and geometric equations. the television static becomes stationary. the day leaned toward two in the afternoon, and the sky seemed to be unaware, clouded in a membrane of grey, a spectral dust like the sleep circles of the unasleep or the asleep, which seemed only to be synonyms of the looming century.
...
3 tags
divine labyrinth of cause and effect: a singular universe, the map of the labyrinth. and love, which lets us see the mystic, the angelic, the empyrean, the labyrinth as a whole. did schopenhauer, who seemed to decipher the universe, ever experience it - love? ancient wonder, the mystery of its colour and those who cannot see it, the eternal twilight. oh, how could anyone experience another wonder...
“—he could feel the outside world closing in on him, demanding his consideration,...”
– Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
“The famous ‘going beyond’ Marxism in an idealistic and humanitarian direction is...”
– Albert Camus, The Self-Deception of the Socialist (via fuckyeahemergence)
1 tag
darling, tonight i held sunset between my fingers, leading sleep inward onto bruised knees, sweetly to bone. and somewhere my tongue, half-locked with language, came lost and guiltily wakeful in the hour of dark, only, at last, to say: my body vanishes under your touch. i am arranging myself under my skin. i am crazed by poetry, and i am smiling in the rage of my verbosity. i speak in some...
“Seemingly there is nothing left but quietism - robbing reality of its terrors by...”
– George Orwell, Inside the Whale
January 2012
1 tag
the seconds reverberated through the Stillness, still as the grief of your palm pressed against my spine. somehow, i savoured the hollow seconds, the way my flesh burned where the point of breaking became palpable.
“When I was in America I for the first time travelled pretty much all the time in...”
– Gertrude Stein, Picasso
1 tag
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…
1 tag
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...”
– Marcel Proust
“Only people who wear clothes find the naked body beautiful. The overriding value...”
– Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Anonymous asked: 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.
1 tag
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...
“While Marx and various Marxist movements see a social evolution in humanity...”
– Existential Primer
“We too must suffer all the suffering around us. We all have not one body, but we...”
– Kafka, Aphorisms
Anonymous asked: 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..."
“My argument with so much of psychoanalysis, is the preconception that suffering...”
– Arthur Miller (Adam Curtis’ documentary Century of the Self)
1 tag
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...
2 tags
“If poetry is a matrix mechanics of language, how can interpretations of poetry...”
– Amy Catanzano, from “Quantum Poetics: Writing the Speed of Light”
1 tag
i. the silence is broken. evening falls, disassembling the day. the telephone wires tremble with nightfulness. your skin smells duskily, i had whispered timidly. i only realize now that it smells as dark as the night’s tremors, as dark as incense, as dark as the sweetly spoken intonations of sadness. ii. we were fools then. we hung dreams off of our arms like sweaters we had shed from our...
“When Dostoevsky met Dickens in 1862 — a meeting that is hard to imagine —...”
“And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom...”
– David Foster Wallace