Spirited away

[artquiem]

I like to think(it has to be!)

Of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors

And joined back to nature,

Returned to out mammals

Brothers and sisters, and all watched over

By machines of loving grace

- Richard Brautigan

[punkrock-bottom]

Guys I’m starting to think this darkness festering within me is maybe not a sex thing

[artquiem]

Her main fear was lest she should fall ill of the disease, the apathetic malady, of Oblomovka. Yet, for all her efforts to slough these phases of torpor and of spiritual coma, a dream of happiness other than the present used to steal upon her, and wrap her in a haze of inertia, and cause her whole being to halt, as for a rest from the exertions of life. Again, to this mood there would succeed a phase of torture and weariness and apprehension- a phase of dull sorrowfulness which kept asking itself dim, indefinite questions and ceaselessly pondering upon them. And as she listened to those questions she would examine herself, yet never discover what it was she yearned for, nor why, at times, she seemed to tire of her comfortable existence, to demand of it new and unfamiliar impressions, and to be gazing ahead in search of something.

Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov

[artquiem]

On the one edge, death, on the other, life. Here despair, there, hope….

To die as much as necessary, without overstepping the bounds. To grow again from a salvaged remnants.

We, too, know how to split ourselves but only into the flesh and a broken whisper….

Here a heavy heart, there non omnis moriar , three little words only, like three little plumes ascending….

Autonomy, 1983, translated by Czeslaw Milosz

[artquiem]

A greek author conceals so infinitely much in his crude naïveté when he says: ‘pantos gar oudeis Erota epfugen i feuksetai mechri an kallos i kai ofthalmoi Bleposin’ (for certainty no one has yet altogether escaped love, and none shall so long as there is beauty and eyes to see)

Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard

[artquiem]

Shall I believe I am nothing? Shall I believe I am god?

Pensees, Blaise Pascal

[artquiem]

“Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women—and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.”

[artquiem]

[goreprofonde]

"We want to smell intoxicating, and truly intoxicating things are often a little bit nasty — they have an edge that cuts deeper than simple sensory pleasure. And despite how it may seem, encounters with the beautiful are rarely entirely enjoyable."

- Katy Kelleher, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Perfume.

[artquiem]

“There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart’s impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another’s unhappiness ...; and the other, the only kind that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.”

Excerpt From

Beware of Pity

Stefan Zweig

[artquiem]

Man is in love and love what vanishes, what more is there to say?

- William Butler Yeats

[artquiem]

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self transcendence; in vain. By its very nature, every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand,incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

-Aldous Huxley, “the doors of perception”

[artquiem]

Our lives are not miserable enough for us to have to be miserable the way that Stoics are!

[artquiem]

[mmleepmlorp]

This blog is my adult version of cutting pictures out of magazines and glueing them on to paper

[artquiem]

“I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.

I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “Two English Poems”

[artquiem]

“We know how to speak many false things as though they were true;

but we also know how to tell the truth when we wish.”

(Theogony, lines 27–28)