mal d'aura

from the postcard to the writer, from the archive to the fever// please intro yourself before you follow

[speciesbarocus]

Cimabue - Maestà (c. 1280). Detail.

[speciesbarocus]

“Only when grace is recognized to be incomprehensible is it grace.”

— Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans.

[xshayarsha]

“But the cup of my heart is still, and cold, and empty. When you come, it brims red and trembling with blood, heart’s blood for your drinking; to fill your mouth with love and the bitter-sweet taste of a soul.”

— Amy Lowell, from Sword Blades and Poppy Seeds; Absence.

[1five1two]

I am not and I endure. An inexorable future stretches forth infinitely for this suppressed being. Hope turns in fear against time which drags it forward. All feelings gush out of themselves and come together, destroyed, abolished, in this feeling which molds me, makes me and unmakes me, causes me to feel, hideously, in a total absence of feeling, my reality in the shape of nothingness.

Maurice Blanchot

[neoyorzapoteca]

Alice Notley, The Descent of Alette

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

an-itinerant-poet:

“And the poem / Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.”

— John Ashbery, from “Paradoxes and Oxymorons,”  Shadow Train (Penguin Books, 1980)

[loumargi]

Simeon Solomon, A Saint from Eastern Church, 1867-68.

[ersatzaura-blog]

John & Alice Coltrane 

[robert-hadley]

Louise Bourgeois New York apartment / studio. Photo - François Halard

[theshatterednotes]

“We find comfort only in another beauty, in others’ music, in the poetry of others. Salvation lies with others, though solitude may taste like opium. Other people aren’t hell if you glimpse them at dawn, when their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.”

— Adam Zagajewski, Another Beauty, trans. Clare Cavanagh (via nemophilies)

[vaninnavaninni]

Bob Dylan lifted by Joan Baez at concert after party, photographed by Daniel Kramer in New York City, 1964

[tordenvejr]

be terrified, but open your arms

[middleeasternpoetry]

[zielenadel]

“A hopeless love […] therefore already relegated to oblivion. Therefore eternal.”

— Marguerite Duras, from Hiroshima Mon Amour, trans. by Richard Seaver (Grove Press, 1994)

[nemophilies-deactivated20190428]

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you. I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body able to respond again, remembering after so long how to open again in the cold light of earliest spring— afraid, yes, but among you again crying yes risk joy in the raw wind of the new world. — Louise Glück, Snowdrops

[xshayarsha]

“I am devoured by desire, the impulse to be happy : I say yes to everything (blinding myself)”

— Roland Barthes, from A Lover’s Discourse.

[xshayarsha]

So it is a lover who speaks and who says: ‘I am engulfed, I succumb…’

Roland Barthes, from A Lover’s Discourse. (via xshayarsha)