anonymous propositions @afterkafka - Tumblr Blog

We Are Hard on Each Other by Margaret Atwood i We are hard on each other and call it honesty, choosing our jagged truths with care and aiming them across the neutral table. The things we say are true; it is our crooked aims, our choices turn them criminal. ii Of course your lies are more amusing: you make them new each time. Your truths, painful and boring repeat themselves over & over perhaps because you own so few of them iii A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon? iv Does the body lie moving like this, are these touches, hair, wet soft marble my tongue runs over lies you are telling me? Your body is not a word, it does not lie or speak truth either. It is only here or not here.

afterkafka

Oldie but goodie.

#margaret atwood

#euripides

The moment that boredom, or fatigue, the ennui of the passing years, overcomes the specific integrity with which you apply yourself to every problem, then you will be menaced by that over-reliance upon the susceptible positive attributes of system.

#glenn gould

Every time I have felt a substantial magic in this frail human life.

#sonnetxxvii

fishingboatproceeds

Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s Rulin’s from January 1st, 1943. Still relevant.

1. Work More And Better

2. Work By A Schedule

3. Wash Teeth If Any

4. Shave

5. Take Bath

6. Eat Good — Fruit — Vegetables — Milk

7. Drink Very Scant If Any

8. Write A Song A Day

9. Wear Clean Clothes

10. Shine Shoes

11. Change Socks

12 Change Bed Clothes Often

13. Read Lots Good Books

14. Listen To Radio A Lot

15. Learn People Better

16. Keep Rancho Clean

17. Don’t Get Lonesome

18. Stay Glad

19. Keep Hoping Machine Running

20. Dream Good

21. Bank All Extra Money

22. Save Dough

23. Have Company But Don’t Waste Time

24. Send Mary And Kids Money

25. Play And Sing Good

26. Dance Better

27. Help Win War — Beat Fascism

28. Love Mama

29. Love Papa

30. Love Pete

31. Love Everybody

32. Make Up Your Mind

33. Wake Up And Fight

#woody guthrie #to-do

#wenderoth

yearsfield

Duane Michals’s “The Human Condition” (1969)

thesingingknives

“So you can swear you think the one-ness of this one person feels really special right now, and in most hours you would swear to their specialness, but in fact it isn’t even that person and never limited like that. Sometimes it is one, sometimes it is another, sometimes it is a future-oriented longing, sometimes a nostalgic one, sometimes it is a generalized they-ness, sometimes a him-ness or her-ness, the way all the people of past longing combine with those of the present longing. This is like sometimes how you are in the city you now live in and forget and think you are in a city you used to live in or one you have visited a lot. Then sometimes you feel like you are in all cities at once, or that all cities are basically just one, or that it is that you are driving or walking in a city that makes each city the same like the dream city you have the one-person in. So, too, your longing has both an enlarging and flattening effect: now that you have been alive for some time, it’s clear all this longing is a kind of cosmopolitanism. This is the longing that is not in actual relationship but outside of it. That is when it is longing in in the state of the general but not in the specifics of one-on-one bodily negotiation. You hold a face in your eyes a lot and say “I am a citizen of longing for that one person,” but what you really mean is that you are a citizen of longing for the world.”

— Anne Boyer, from “Erotology” (as appears in A Handbook of Disappointed Fate)