late night musings

dancing around black holes and the mermaid milky way 🧜🏾‍♀️💜✨️

[adrasteiax]

“May is a green as no other, May is much sun through small leaves, May is soft earth, And apple-blossoms,”

— Amy Lowell, from Lilacs in “The Complete Poetical Works Of Amy Lowell”

[adrasteiax]

“There were flowers at the edge of the forest, cupping The last of the light in their upturned petals. I followed you in, Under the sighing, restless trees and my whole life vanished. The moon tossed down its shimmering cloth. We undressed, then dressed again in the gowns of the moon. We knelt in the leaves, kissed, kissed; (…)”

— Carol Ann Duffy, from Forest in “Rapture”

[padawan-historian]

“I must become a menace to my enemies.”

~ June Jordan

[soracities]

I like dusk just as much as anyone but I think I’m becoming more keen on sunlight, waking up to the sweet & coffee of the kitchen & all those birds.

Talin Tahajian, from "It's November again", pub. Inferior Planets

[sleepimali]

They're just lil guys 🐇🌿

[soracities]

“At night, the cool September moon gleams red. When it drifts out of the night’s dark clouds it has blood on its lips”

— Stig Dagerman, A Moth to a Flame (Burnt Child), trans. Benjamin Mier-Cruz

[luthienne]

“…and the evening was filled with a faint scent of trees and flowers, as if summer still lingered…”

— J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Fellowship of the Ring

[soracities]

Octavio Paz, ‘Wind From All Compass Points’, A Tale of Two Gardens

[itchycoil]

“(..) psychologists say that shame ruins your capacity for reverie by making cracks in the mind where it is dangerous for thought to wander.”

— Anne Carson, Float; “Shame stack” (via kitduckworth)

[gnostick-deactivated20210607]

I spend a lot of my life looking at books with left-hand-page Greek or Latin, and right-hand-page English, and you get used to it, you get used to thinking in the little channel in between the two languages where the perfect language exists.

Anne Carson, interviewed for Brick

Translation happens in the space between, in what is passed over and what is held up to the light.

Meghan Purvis, On Translating Beowulf

[icarusgf]

“You still crave lemonade, but the taste doesn’t satisfy you as much as it used to. You still crave summer, but sometimes you mean summer, five years ago.”

— Alida Nugent

[dearestvita-deactivated20221122]

“Behind my romanticism lies a primitive woman with primitive hungers.”

— Anaïs Nin, from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume IV (1944-1947)

[tristealven]

“There is an emptiness so huge we can’t tell if we are in it, or it in us.”

— Richard Jackson, from “Elaine, Arkansas, 1919,” The Heart as Framed: New and Selected Poems (Press 53, 2022)

[bananapeppers]

On a more individual level, when a person attempts to rid themselves of all vindictive feelings, [Jeffrie G.] Murphy (2000) points out that they may also be letting go of self-respect, self-defense, and allegiance to a moral order. He argues that the passion for revenge is not necessarily a human evil. Forgiveness theorists have not properly addressed that point.

To take this point a bit further, forgiveness theorists have been unwilling to seriously consider the positive effects of negative emotions. They begin from a standpoint that emotions such as resentment, vengefulness, and anger are bad because they make people feel bad. While forgiveness therapy as outlined by Enright and Fitzgibbons (2000) is specifically designed to “treat anger,” we are not so sure why anger must be treated and why it is bad for a person. Carol Tavris (1982) has splendidly pointed out that anger often seems wrong to us when a person in an inferior position feels the emotion and right when a superior expresses it.

Sharon Lamb, introduction to Before Forgiving: Cautionary Views of Forgiveness in Psychotherapy, edited by Lamb and Murphy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 8.

bolding mine. @auntbutch relatedly to the passages you just posted.

[bananapeppers]

Arguments for forgiveness that aim at a release from anger are aimed also at a kind of conformity over what “mental health” in women has been defined as. Psychological research has long showed us that women who are angry and resentful are viewed by the mental health profession as unhealthy (Becker, 1997; Burstow, 1992). Gender conformity then is “met” when a woman forgives her wrongdoer and lets go of resentment, even at the cost of self-respect.

With these role expectations, can we tell the difference between pseudoforgiveness and the sincere forgiveness that arises from self-respect and acceptance of anger as a part of who we are? I would argue that the letting go of anger and resentment that is a part of so many definitions of forgiveness is in and of itself unhealthy for women. Forgiveness professionals play into stereotypes of the “good” woman when they help her to experience her anger and then move beyond it. Instead, the integration of anger and aggression with their identity, even as a compassionate, caring person, is ideal for women who have been brought up in this culture.

Also, it is clear that forgiveness advocates make some moral judgment about those who “refuse” to forgive. A female victim’s character may be impugned because of her response to a wrongdoing, when the victim herself did not do wrong. There is more of an obligation for women in this culture to forgive because it supports their role in society. Those who deviate from role expectations are generally judged harshly.

Lamb. “Women, Abuse, and Forgiveness: A Special Case”. in Before Forgiving, 164.

[soracities]

“The sea, the most unintelligible of non-human existences. And here is the woman, standing on the beach, the most unintelligible of living beings […] She and the sea.”

— Clarice Lispector, from “The Waters of the World”, Complete Stories (trans. Katarina Dodson)

[adrasteiax]

“morning dawn mist-covered day dreaming triumph and victory”

— Bell Hooks, from #28 in “Appalachian Elegy: Poetry And Place”

[et-iterum]

“Americans are paranoiac on the question of homosexuality. I’ve loved a few men and a few women. Love comes in very strange packages. The trick is to say yes to life.”

— James Baldwin, in James Baldwin from Another Place (1973), directed by Sedat Pakay