[inneroptics]

Kati Horna.[Woman with Mask], Mexico, 1963

[keepmyselfamused-othersconfused]

Grief

Somewhere in the Sargasso Sea

the water disappears into itself,

hauling an ocean in.

Vortex, how you repeat

a single gesture,

come round to find only

yourself, a cup full of questions,

perhaps some curl of wisdom,

a bit of flung salt.

You hold an absence

at your center,

as if it were a life.

- Richard Brostoff

[takahiroshimatsu]

さびしい

2026/05/05

[shedsvelvet]

Turning and turning in the widening gyre    The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere    The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it    Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.    The darkness drops again; but now I know    That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W. B. Yeats - The Second Coming

[from-a-spiders-web]

Henri Rousseau - Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!) (1891)

[paoxee]

Viens sur mon coeur, âme cruelle et sourde, Tigre adoré, monstre aux airs indolents; Je veux longtemps plonger mes doigts tremblants Dans l'épaisseur de ta crinière lourde;

Dans tes jupons remplis de ton parfum Ensevelir ma tête endolorie, Et respirer comme une fleur flétrie, Le doux relent de mon amour défunt.

Je veux dormir! dormir plutôt que vivre! Dans un sommeil aussi doux que la mort, J'étalerai mes baisers sans remord Sur ton beau corps poli comme le cuivre.

Pour engloutir mes sanglots apaisés, Rien ne me vaut l'abîme de ta couche; L'oubli puissant habite sur ta bouche, Et le Léthé coule dans tes baisers.

A mon destin, désormais mon délice, J'obéirai comme un prédestiné; Martyr docile, innocent condamné, Dont la ferveur attise le supplice,

Je sucerai, pour noyer ma rancoeur, Le nepenrhès et la bonne ciguë Aux bouts charmants de cette gorge aiguë Qui n'a jamais emprisonné de coeur.

Le Léthé, Charles Baudelaire

[ars-historia-est]

“All of antiquity extolled Dionysus as the god who gave man wine. However, he was known also as the raving god whose presence makes man mad and incites him to savagery and even to lust for blood. He was the confidant and companion of the spirits of the dead. Mysterious dedications called him the Lord of Souls. T0 his worship belonged the drama-which has enriched the world with a miracle of the spirit. The flowers of spring bore witness to him, too. The ivy, the pine, the fig tree were dear to him. Yet far above all of these blessings in the natural world of vegetation stood the gift of the vine, which has been blessed a thousandfold. Dionysus was the god of the most blessed ecstasy and the most enraptured love. But he was also the persecuted god, the suffering and dying god, and all whom he loved, all who attended him, had to share his tragic fate.”

— Walter F. Otto - Dionysus: Myth and Cult (via forbidden-sorcery)

[babu-s]

Our share of night - Mariana Enriquez

[dijeh]

The Baby of Mâcon (1993)

[babu-s]

Must there be a voice in every darkness, words in every void?

Our share of night - Mariana Enriquez

[dearpoetry-blog]

Now we, returning from the vaulted domes Of our colossal sleep, come home to find A tall metropolis of catacombs Erected down the gangways of our mind.

Green alleys where we reveled have become The infernal haunt of demon dangers; Both seraph song and violins are dumb; Each clock tick consecrates the death of strangers

Backward we traveled to reclaim the day Before we fell, like Icarus, undone; All we find are altars in decay And profane words scrawled black across the sun.

Still, stubbornly we try to crack the nut In which the riddle of our race is shut.

sylvia plath

[a-book-of-creatures]

Creatures from Chilean Mapuche folklore - the pihuicheñ, chonchoñ, colocolo, ngúrúvilu, trelquehuecufe (cuero), and huaillepeñ.

From Guevara (1908) Psicolojia del Pueblo Araucano.

[dijeh]

The Book of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges, Margarita Guerrero

trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni

[history-of-fashion]

ab. 1800 William Owen - Reverend William Heathcote

(National Museum Cardiff)

[whisperthatruns]

[…] Étienne Bonnot de Condillac imagined a marble statue shaped like a man’s body and animated by a soul that has never perceived, never thought. Condillac begins by endowing the statue with a single sense—smell, perhaps the least complex of the five senses. The fragrance of jasmine is the beginning of the statue’s biography; for one instant, there shall be nothing in all the universe but that odor. More precisely, that odor shall be the universe, which a second later will be the fragrance of a rose, and then a carnation. Let there be a single odor in the consciousness of the statue, and we have attention; let a fragrance last beyond the moment when the stimulus has passed, and we have memory; let one impression in the present and one from the past occupy the statue’s attention, and we have comparison; let the statue perceive analogies and differences, and we have judgment; let comparison and judgment occur again, and we have reflection; let a pleasant memory be more vivid than an unpleasant one, and we have imagination. When the faculties of the Understanding have been engendered, the faculties of the Will must follow—love and hate (attraction and aversion), hope and fear. The awareness of having passed through many states will give the statue an abstract notion of number; the awareness of being the odor of carnation yet of having been the odor of jasmine will endow it with the idea of Self.

Condillac would then grant his hypothetical man hearing, taste, sight, and, lastly, touch. This last sense reveals to the creature the fact that space exists and that within space, he himself is within a body; sounds, fragrances, and colors will have seemed to him, before that moment, simple variations or modifications of his consciousness.

Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, from “Two Metaphysical Animals,” trans. Andrew Hurley, The Book of Imaginary Beings (Penguin Books, 2005; orig. pub. as El libro de los seres imaginarios in 1967)

[lesbianboyfriend]

How many times had he thought, "I want to be just like him"? The way he'd told Gaspar while they rode in the car, you have to always be respectful with girls, even if you're not interested in them. The way, after he got mad about something and raised his voice and shouted, he always gave in to a joke and laughed and shook his head. The twins were going to forget him, they would miss out: the permission to do their homework on the patio, the races down the dirt road, the grilled fish at the beach, the What you wrote is really good, that teacher must be kind of dumb, she doesn't have to understand everything but it's a shame she didn't understand this, because it's so well written, and long! And the words you use! They were going to miss out on having him always accept them even when they messed up, even if they had ridiculous mental emotional psychiatric problems, they'd miss out on knowing there was someone who would never abandon them, would never back down, they could beat their heads against the wall until they broke their heads and the wall, and he would be right behind them, arms crossed, saying, Well then, shall we start by fixing your skull, your anger, or the bricks? You choose.

Our Share of Night, Mariana Enriquez

[dijeh]

A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities, Anthony Kaldellis