Cite your feelings

person struggling with hopes and dreams

[citeyourfeelings]

Days she staggered; but nights she swam free, through the cool waters of her imagination.

Sylvia Brownrigg, Pages for You (Picador, 2017) [2011], p. 14.

[citeyourfeelings]

As I swam, I dissolved in the water, and something came to me from the depths of my memory.

Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), p. 114.

[citeyourfeelings]

When time is old and hath forgot itself, When waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy, And blind oblivion swallow'd cities up, And mighty states characterless are grated To dusty nothing

William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, III. 2. 158-62.

[historyisinthemaking]

But a gay man seeks his history in mythic fragments, random as blocks of stone in the ruins covered in Greek characters. We have the poems of Sappho because the one rolled linen copy stoppered a wine jug in a cave, and the blanks are the words the acid of the wine has eaten away. Fragments are all you get. You jigsaw the rest with your heart.

Paul Monette, Borrowed Time

[boykeats]

Danez Smith, from "acknowledgements," published in Poetry (2018)

["& before we were messy flesh, i'm sure we were the same dust"]

[citeyourfeelings]

We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust. That's all we ask of you. Make more than dust.

David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing (London: Electric Monkey, 2014), p. 239 [end of novel].

[citeyourfeelings]

We did not have the Internet, but we had a network. We did not have websites, but we had sites where we wove our web. You could see it most in the cities.

David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing (London: Electric Monkey, 2014), p. 7.

[citeyourfeelings]

If you are a teenager now, it is unlikely that you knew us well. [...] We are characters in a Tony Kushner play, or names on a quilt that rarely gets taken out anymore. We are the ghosts of the remaining older generation.

David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing (London: Electric Monkey, 2014), p. 3.

[citeyourfeelings]

We sewed ourselves, a thread's width, into your history.

David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing (London: Electric Monkey, 2014), p. 1.

[citeyourfeelings]

Dedication in Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Routledge, 1993).

[citeyourfeelings]

everyone is a whole world of representations, which are buried in the night of the "i"

Hegel, quoted in Riley, ibid., p. 9.

[citeyourfeelings]

Denise Riley, ‘Introduction’, in The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 1.

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Dacia Maraini, tr. by Tim Vode, from “Dreams of Clytemnestra,” wr. c. 1994

[soracities]

Antonio Porchia, Voices (trans. W.S. Merwin)

[captain-foulenough]

Alone in that vastness, lit by the feeble beam of our lamps, we were seized by a strange feeling. Everything was so beautiful, so fresh, almost too much so. Time was abolished, as if the tens of thousands of years that separated us from the producers of those paintings no longer existed. It seemed as if they had just created these masterpieces. Suddenly we felt like intruders. Deeply impressed, we were weighed down by that feeling that we were not alone; the artists’ souls and spirits surrounded us. We thought we could feel their presence; we were disturbing them.

- Jean-Marie Chauvet, talking about the discovery of the Chauvet Cave paintings

[citeyourfeelings]

An article in the New York Times this 11 November 2018, text and images by Sergey Ponomorev, reveals the Russian town of Shoyna swallowed by sand. Mismanagement of the local fishing ecosystem has washed sand dunes over the coastal town, after over-fishing removed the silt which was anchoring the seabed. The ecological disaster is reminiscent of that which afflicted sharecroppers across the midwest of the United States in the depression years 1934, 1936, and 1939-40. Similarly caused by the removal of plants which had been windbreakers in favour of agricultural crops, the Dust Bowl engulfed towns and their economies.

Sergey Ponomorev, ‘In Russian Village Swallowed by Sand, Life’s a Beach. Just Not in a Good Way.’, New York Times, 11 November 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/11/world/europe/russia-white-sea-shoyna.html> [accessed 18 November 2018].

All other images of the Dust Bowl, from top: Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans.

[citeyourfeelings]

“Two bodies, he noted, floated in the pool, barely distinguishable from the other debris, the kitchen garbage and pieces of furniture.”

– J. G. Ballard, High-Rise (London: Fourth Estate, 2014), p. 227.