d i sq u ie t

akanksha, she/they, 30, singapore "distorted realities have always been my cup of tea." (v. woolf) ask / about / me / #silence / #art / last.fm

[huariqueje]

A Little Light Reading  -  Roxana Halls

British,b.1974  -

Oil on canvas,31 x 55 in.

[elegantzombielite]

"Literature encourages tolerance — bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them also as possibilities."

Northrop Frye, writer and critic (14th July 1912-1991)

[bobbole]

Mahmoud Khalil

[la-femme-toujours-la-femme]

Guillaume Seignac (France, 1870-1924) - "Nude Asleep with Black Cat"

[funeral]

The horror of individuation becomes one's negative call to spiritual awakening, a call to greatness which is actually the paradoxical call for self-dissolution. Hence the horror with which one is plagued, that contemplative horror which prescribes the death of the self as individuation's own auto-fulfilling rite of passage, is the same and the earnest horror that actually brings one closer to accessing the absolute via their own negation. In this way, one can only think the absolute through the impossible conduit of horror itself: individuation is the perplexing instrument with which horror operationalizes and through which one becomes oneself. The horror of individuation, the horror of becoming oneself by leaving one's self, then, suggests a revelatory or epiphanic nature via its own doubleness. For the real horror is always reserved for those who remain ignorant of this mystical horror, who stay themselves without ever experiencing the intensity and corollary contentment of not being, or unknowing, themselves.

Brad Baumgartner, Weird Mysticism: Philosophical Horror and the Mystical Text

[quotespile]

“We mistake each other. Our whole social arrangement a series of mistakes and compromises. Shorthand for a mystery too large to be seen.”

— Zadie Smith, The Fraud

[petaltexturedskies]

Poems do not endure as objects but as presences. When you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit. I read poems to hear that voice. And I write to speak to those I have heard.

Louise Glück, from “Death and Absence” in Proofs and Theories

[weltenwellen]

Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, published in Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters

[mournfulroses]

Clarice Lispector, from a letter in translation to Tania Kauffman, featured in All Letters of Clarice Lispector

[poem-today]

A poem by Dorianne Laux

Moon in the Window

I wish I could say I was the kind of child who watched the moon from her window, would turn toward it and wonder. I never wondered. I read. Dark signs that crawled toward the edge of the page. It took me years to grow a heart from paper and glue. All I had was a flashlight, bright as the moon, a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

Dorianne Laux

More poems by Dorianne Laux are available through her website.

[quotespile]

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

[poem-today]

A poem by Alicia Ostriker

Wrinkly Lady Dancer

Going to be an old wrinkly lady Going to be one of those frail rag people Going to have withered hands and be Puzzled to tears crossing the street

Hobble cautiously onto buses Like a withery fruit And quite silently sitting in this lurching bus The avenues coming by

Some other passengers gaze at me Clutching my cane and my newspaper Seemingly protectively, but I will really be       thinking about The afternoon I danced naked with you The afternoon I danced naked with you The afternoon! I danced! Naked with you!

Alicia Ostriker

Image: © Sam Kanter

[apoemaday]

The Real Work

by Wendell Berry

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

[existential-celestial]

Mary Oliver, from “Reckless Poem,” in New And Selected Poems: Volume Two

[the-apology-girl]

"I’m not for everyone. I really like my little world. It’s full of surprises, scattered words, and mixed colors. Sometimes there’s a blue sky, other times, a storm. Inside, there’s room for dreams of all sizes. But not for many people. Everyone who is in it is not there by chance. They are necessary."

— ABREU, Caio Fernando. From "Cartas"

[theoptia]

Clarice Lispector, from A Breath of Life

[weltenwellen]

Agoraphobia Katie Grierson