LIBRARIES BURN

[luxe-pauvre]

All of us should strive — as Sartre advises — to engage with the books of our own time. At the very least, albeit sometimes wearyingly so, they remind us of how much in our world needs fixing. After all, it’s hard to fault Marx’s activist observation that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Yet the books of the past, besides adding to our understanding, offer something we also need: repose, refreshment and renewal. They help us keep going through dark times, they lift our spirits, they comfort us. Which means that I also strongly agree with the poet John Ashbery, who once wrote, “I am aware of the pejorative associations of the word ‘escapist,’ but I insist that we need all the escapism we can get and even that isn’t going to be enough.”

Michael Dirda, Why read old books? A case for the classic, the unusual, the neglected.

[unconditionalstudio]

[petaltexturedskies]

And I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Live it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.

Mary Oliver, from "Staying Alive" in Upstream: Selected Essays

[tordenvejr]

art will save you, being unreasonably passionate about something niche will save you, letting past sources of joy show you the way back to yourself will save you, earnestness over composure will save you, the natural world will save you, caring for something bigger than yourself will save you, daring to be seen will save you, kindness not as a whim but a principle will save you, appreciation as a practice will save you, daring to try something new will save you, grounding will save you, love will save you, one good nights sleep will save you

[dead-molchun]

Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572) Portrait of Lucrezia de’ Medici, 1560.  

[terrorignitis]

In the course of the eighteenth century, alchemy perished in its own obscurity. Its method of explanation “obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius” (the obscure by the more obscure, the unknown by the more unknown) was incompatible with the spirit of enlightenment and particularly with the dawning science of chemistry towards the end of the century. But these two new intellectual forces only gave the coup de grace to alchemy. Its inner decay had begun at least a century earlier, at the time of Jakob Böhme, when many alchemists deserted their alembics and melting-pots and devoted themselves entirely to (Hermetic) philosophy. It was then that the chemist and the Hermetic philosopher parted company. Chemistry became natural science, whereas Hermetic philosophy lost the empirical ground from under its feet and aspired to bombastic allegories and inane speculations which were kept alive only by memories of a better time. This was a time when the mind of the alchemist was still grappling with the problems of matter, when the exploring consciousness was confronted by the dark void of the unknown, in which figures and laws were dimly perceived and attributed to matter although they really belonged to the psyche. Everything unknown and empty is filled with psychological projection; it is as if the investigator’s own psychic background were mirrored in the darkness. What he sees in matter, or thinks he can see, is chiefly the data of his own unconscious which he is projecting into it. In other words, he encounters in matter, as apparently belonging to it, certain qualities and potential meanings of whose psychic nature he is entirely unconscious.

Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

[luxe-pauvre]

There are several images that come to mind when I think of women brushing their hair. Most of the time it is a solitary woman in front of her mirror — where a woman regards herself in a private moment. The French Impressionist Edgar Degas was fascinated with this kind of scene. Women in the midst of preparing themselves feature heavily in Degas’s work, second to his ballerinas. Often called a variation of “Femme a sa Toilette,” these women brush their hair, lean over a wash basin, and dry themselves off. Though the subjects are nude, the paintings do not give a sexual air. They capture the gentle intimacy of tending to yourself, when the door is closed. Degas wrote of these works, “It is the human animal preoccupied with itself, like a cat licking itself […] My women are simple creatures and honest too, and are concerned with nothing except their physical occupation.” To those who have never tried their hand at femininity, it may seem defined by its final product. That women often sit at a table called a “vanity” speaks to how pejoratively we regard the process. Though society prefers us to forget, an integral part of femininity is the ritual of its making. As Diana Vreeland writes, “The girls keep looking in the mirror…which is all right by me. I loathe narcissism, but I approve of vanity.”

Marlowe Granados, The World’s Most Beautiful Brush

[petaltexturedskies]

I was never a well-behaved girl. After all, I never had a vocation for shy joy, for passion without hot kisses or for badly resolved love without hiccups. I want from life what is raw and beautiful. I'm not here for people to like me. I'm here to learn to like every detail I have. And to seduce only what adds me. I am dramatic, intense, transient and have a joy in me that sometimes tires me. So don't give me more or less or anything. Come to me with body, soul, greed and shortness of breath.

Clarice Lispector

[pairs-studio]

[petaltexturedskies]

I also felt that she was holding herself together with a safety pin, was forcing herself to be clear, articulate, active—to keep moving, one step ahead of the sledgehammer of grief.

James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen

[funeral]

In a world made hyperreal, saturated with versions of itself, saturated with meaning, nihilism’s simplicity and emptiness return from forgotten thinkers like some ancient remedy long mistaken for a symptom: an earlier curative to a later malaise, a medicament in search of a condition that has laid patiently in wait only to arrive now, most likely too late. For what amounts to an atavistic chemotherapy for hypermodernity’s new cancer comes at a time when sickness is no longer permitted; and while nihilism is . . . a sickness that cures, it comes with no anti-emetic, so that the only way out of nihilism is to go further inside it.

Gary J. Shipley, Stratagem of the Corpse

[diana-andraste]

Damage to The Rokeby Venus by suffragette "Slasher" Mary Richardson, 1914. Most interesting article with more information and pictures here.

The Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus), Diego Velázquez, 1647. See the original painting here.

[soracities]

when e.e. cummings said “i’ll live my life if it kills me”

[softspringsolace]

when andrea gibson said “i suppose i love this life, in spite of my clenched fist.” & when ellen bass said “to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it”

[typewriter-worries]

when james baldwin said, “this is why one must say yes to life and embrace it wherever it is found-and it is found in terrible places; nevertheless, there it is;”

[queerpontmercy]

when Mary Oliver said “it is a serious thing / just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world”

[anaxerneas]

55. Wie alles Metaphysische ist die Harmonie zwischen Gedanken und Wirklichkeit in der Grammatik der Sprache aufzufinden.

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel tr. G.E.M. Anscombe

[proustiansleep]

When I say “I love you,” it means that I want to be near the feeling of ambivalence our relation induces and hope that what’s negative, aggressive, or just hard about it doesn’t defeat what’s great about it really—or in my fantasies of it, anyway.

Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People

[flaubertian]

The Row Peggy clutch

[soracities]

“Fairy tales — the proper kind, those original Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen tales I recall from my Eastern European childhood, unsanitized by censorship and unsweetened by American retellings — affirm what children intuitively know to be true but are gradually taught to forget, then to dread: that the terrible and the terrific spring from the same source, and that what grants life its beauty and magic is not the absence of terror and tumult but the grace and elegance with which we navigate the gauntlet.”

— Maria Popova, “The Importance of Being Scared: Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska on Fairy Tales and the Necessity of Fear”