bees @beedance - Tumblr Blog

begavet

visual-poetry

“je ne dois pas écrire sur le métro”

“i must not write on the subway”

c86

Photography by Joel Sternfeld, c. 1979-83

venassinfurs

lesyper-sound

neoyorzapoteca

Years earlier, I had been a girl who felt lost, this was true. All the hopes of youth seemed to have been destroyed, I seemed to be falling backward toward my mother, my grandmother, the chain of mute or angry women I came from. Missed opportunities. Ambition was still burning, fed by a young body, by an imagination full of plans, but I felt that my creative passion was cut off more and more thoroughly by the reality of dealings with the universities and the need to exploit opportunities for a possible career. I seemed to be imprisoned in my own head, without the chance to test myself, and I was frustrated.

Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter (via neoyorzapoteca)

hotelsongs

My friend tugged her husband’s arm with both hands. She used all her strength, and I who knew her thoroughly felt that if she could she would have wrenched it from his body, crossed the room holding it high above her head, blood dripping in her train, and she would have used it as a club or a donkey’s jawbone to crush Marcello’s face with a solid blow. Ah yes, she would have done it, and at the idea my heart pounded furiously, my throat became dry. Then she would have dug out the eyes of both men, she would have torn the flesh from the bones of their faces, she would have bitten them. Yes, yes, I felt that I wanted that, I wanted it to happen. An end of love and of that intolerable celebration, no embraces in a bed in Amalfi. Immediately shatter everything and every person in the neighborhood, tear them to pieces, Lila and I, go and live far away, lightheartedly descending together all the steps of humiliation, alone, in unknown cities. It seemed to me the just conclusion to that day. If nothing could save us, not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately.

The Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante (via hotelsongs)

Elisa Schappell:The subject of abandonment appears in a lot of your work. What is it about abandonment that strikes such a chord with you?

Elena Ferrante: Abandonment is an invisible wound that does not heal easily. As a storyteller, I am attracted by it because it synthesizes the general precariousness of all we consider constant, the deconstruction of everything that seemed “normal.” Abandonment corrodes those certainties within which we believed we lived safely. Not only have we been abandoned, but we may not hold up when faced with the loss; we abandon ourselves, we lose the consistency that we have gained via the sweet habit of entrusting ourselves to others. So, to get through it, you must find a new equilibrium while at the same time acknowledging a new fact—namely, that everything you have can be taken from you, and with it your will to live.

heartshrines

I’m afraid of all human beings when they become violent: I’m afraid of them when they shout, when they insult, when they wield words of contempt, clubs, chains, weapons that slash or shoot, atomic bombs. And yet, as a child, whenever it was necessary to appear fearless, I appeared fearless. I soon got used to being less afraid of dangers, whether real or imaginary, and began to fear more, much more, the moment when others reacted, because I hadn’t known how to react. Popular opinion has it that people who react as stubbornly as I’ve trained myself to have real courage, which consists precisely in overcoming fear. But I don’t agree. We fearful-belligerents place at the top of all our fears the fear of losing self-respect. We value ourselves very highly, and in order not to have to face our own humiliation, we are capable of anything. In other words, we drive away our fears not out of altruism but out of egotism. And so, I have to admit, I’m afraid of myself. I’ve known for a long time now that I can get carried away, so I’m trying to soften the aggressive reactions I’ve forced myself to have ever since I was a child. I’m learning, like a character in Conrad, to accept fear, even to exhibit it with self-mockery. What perhaps should be feared most is the fury of frightened people.

Elena Ferrante (via heartshrines)

doctornerdington

Maybe the first step in a real break with the past should be … a female story that, while its subject is sex, isn’t aphrodisiac. It’s possible that our true erotic self, to begin to express itself, has need of this beginning.

Elena Ferrante (via doctornerdington)

ginocchie

“I discovered everywhere female automatons created by men. There was nothing of ourselves, and the little there was that rose up in protest immediately became material for their manufacturing.” - Elena Ferrante

Frieze: What images keep you company in the space when you work?

Ferrante: A reproduction of a Henri Matisse painting (an open window, a woman reading at a table with a child); a print by the illustrator Mara Cerri; a small, round pebble that perfectly recalls an owl; an early-nineteenth-century painted fan folded up in an antique case, a faded red metal bottle cap that I picked up off the street when I was twelve years old and that I have managed to hold on to for my whole life.

unangeapasse

“I know what it means to break apart. I observed it in my mother, in myself, in many women. The process of fragmentation in a woman’s body interests me very much from the narrative point of view. It means telling the story of a present-day female I that suddenly perceives itself disintegrating, it loses the sense of time, it’s no longer in order, it feels like a vortex of debris, a whirlwind of thoughts-words. It stops abruptly and starts again from a new equilibrium, which–note–isn’t necessarily more advanced than the preceding or even more stable. It serves only to say: now I’m here and I feel like this.”

- Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey

Now I’m here, and I feel like this.

watchoutforintellect

I was not the woman who breaks into pieces under the blows of abandonment and absence, who goes mad, who dies. Only a few fragments had splintered off, for the rest I was well. I was whole, whole I would remain. To those who hurt me, I react giving back in kind. I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.

Elena Ferrante, from Days of Abandonment (Translated by Ann Goldstein)