fer

she wants to be a good citizen

[antilogosweapon]

I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries / Leonard Cohen

I have not lingered in European monasteries and discovered among the tall grasses tombs of knights who fell as beautifully as their ballads tell; I have not parted the grasses or purposefully left them thatched. I have not released my mind to wander and wait in those great distances between the snowy mountains and the fishermen, like a moon, or a shell beneath the moving water. I have not held my breath so that I might hear the breathing of God, or tamed my heartbeat with an exercise, or starved for visions. Although I have watched him often I have not become the heron, leaving my body on the shore, and I have not become the luminous trout, leaving my body in the air. I have not worshipped wounds and relics, or combs of iron, or bodies wrapped and burnt in scrolls. I have not been unhappy for ten thousand years. During the day I laugh and during the night I sleep. My favourite cooks prepare my meals, my body cleans and repairs itself, and all my work goes well.

[antilogosweapon]

After Life (1998). Directed by Hirokazu Koreeda.

[camelia-in-bloom]

"He could reduce it, in the solitude of his chamber, into almost impalpable ashes, and then swallow them."

- Cousin Henry, Anthony Trollope

[unicouniuni]

Uni.

[derangedrhythms]

Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova; Uncollected Poems and Fragments 1957-1966, tr. Judith Hemschemeyer

[thingsworthsaving]

Archetypes by C.K. Williams

Often before have our fingers touched in sleep or half-sleep and enlaced, often I’ve been comforted through a dream by that gently sensitive pressure, but this morning, when I woke your hand lay across mine in an awkward, unfamiliar position so that it seemed strangely external to me, removed, an object whose precise weight, volume and form I’d never remarked: its taut, resistant skin, dense muscle-pads, the subtle, complex structure, with delicately elegant chords of bone aligned like columns in a  temple.

Your fingers began to move then, in brief, irregular tensions and releasings; it felt like your hand was trying to hold some feathery, fleeting creature, then you suddenly, fiercely, jerked it away, rose to your hands and  knees, and stayed there, palms flat on the bed, hair tangled down over your face, until with a coarse sigh almost like a snarl you abruptly let yourself fall and lay still, your hands drawn tightly to your chest, your head turned away, forbidden to me, I thought, by whatever had raised you to that defiant crouch.

I waited, hoping you’d wake, turn, embrace me, but you stayed in yourself, and I felt again how separate we all are from one another, how even our passions, which seem to embody unities outside of time, heal only the most benign divisions, that for our more abiding, ancient terrors we each have to find our own valor. You breathed more softly now, though; I took heart, touched against you, and, as though nothing had happened, you opened your eyes, smiled at me, and murmured–how almost startling to hear you in your real voice–”Sleep, love.”

[peelsofpoetry]

Beneath My Hands by Leonard Cohen Beneath my hands your small breasts are the upturned bellies of breathing fallen sparrows. Wherever you move I hear the sounds of closing wings of falling wings. I am speechless because you have fallen beside me because your eyelashes are the spines of tiny fragile animals. I dread the time when your mouth begins to call me hunter. When you call me close to tell me your body is not beautiful I want to summon the eyes and hidden mouths of stone and light and water to testify against you. I want them to surrender before you the trembling rhyme of your face from their deep caskets. When you call me close to tell me your body is not beautiful I want my body and my hands to be pools for your looking and laughing.

[ezrasarm]

“Avoid the flourish. Do not be afraid to be weak. Do not be ashamed to be tired. You look good when you're tired. You look like you could go on forever. Now come into my arms. You are the image of my beauty.”

— Excerpt from “How To Speak Poetry” in Death Of A Lady’s Man by Leonard Cohen

[antilogosweapon]

[violetteangelx]

[the-most-sublime-fool]

He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

[antilogosweapon]

patience (after sebald) screening

[antilogosweapon]

wide sargasso sea by jean rhys

I had a complicated time reading this book. Rhys describes a West Indian landscape so lacking in warmth that my mind could not reconcile memories of a land brimming with intrinsic joy with that gloomy, opressive place imagined by Rhys. I grew up in Caracas, surrounded by macaws and orchids and the biggest, nastiest tropical bugs I've ever seen. Sloths hung casually from the trees in my open-brick elementary school. Year-round, I felt the warmth of the sun on my skin. Reading Wide Sargasso Sea was a challenge to my perception of my hometown—one badly dented aftrer a decade-long absence from it. 

Rhys was able to describe the West Indies, a place she knew intimately, by its very opposite. Is this how a foreigner might perceive our home? As alien, as cold? Most jarringly, would I, if I returned today?

In these respects, the book has been difficult for me to read. While it took me less than a week to get through Jane Eyre, it took me more than three to finish Sargasso. It was easier to read Jane Eyre, which is a piece of fiction so comparatively abstracted from my own reality. I could not read Sargasso in the same dispassionate way, and instead felt enraged at the Masons and the Rochesters for refusing to engage with the West Indies in good faith.  

[antilogosweapon]

'Now,' said Henchard between gasps, 'Your life is in my hands.'"

Robert Barnes / Plate 17 / April 1886

From Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge 

[gnossienne]

W.G. Sebald, “The Sky at Night” from Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001