Deep Gore

Devoration is a destructive consumption. To look is to devour. / Yless / he.him / +20

[necrophilologist]

So There's This Open Wound At The Heart Of The Text

[blackskintrillmask]

“The American dream, then, is realized through black suffering. It is the humiliated, incarcerated, mutilated, and terrorized black body that serves as the vestibule for the Democracy that is to come. In fact, it almost becomes impossible to think the Political without black suffering. According to this logic, corporeal fracture engenders ontological coherence, in a political arithmetic saturated with violence. Thus, nonviolence is a misnomer, or somewhat of a ruse. Black-sacrifice is necessary to achieve the American dream and its promise of coherence, progress, and equality.”

— Calvin L. Warren, “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope” 

[luthienne]

Natasha Trethewey, from Thrall: Poems; "Mythology"

[conradandfaulkner]

“One mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly forever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance.”

— Precarious Life

[grub-s]

joanna bourke, “the story of pain”

[winawinadajcie]

“To know a place fully means both to understand it in an abstract way and to know it as one person knows another. At a high theoretical level, places are points in a spatial system. At the opposite extreme, they are strong visceral feelings. Places are seldom known at either extreme: the one is too remote from sensory experience to be real, and the other presupposes rootedness in a locality and an emotional commitment to it that are increasingly rare.”

— Yi-Fu Tuan, “An Experiential Perspective.” Geographical Review 65/2, 1975.

[chantssecrets]

Furious Embrace, Hervé and the Wolf, painting by Clive Hicks Jenkins.

[openingadoor]

Shoes in Vogue (1981) by Arthur Elgort

[literarymiscellany]

“To know is to live flayed and ambition means turning the flesh repeatedly back–toward the whip, not away, I can still hear myself saying that believing it– now it all sounds wrong …”

— Carl Phillips, “Now In Our Most Ordinary Voices.”

[dearorpheus]

♡ from Élisabeth Roudinesco's Our Dark Side

[heartofstanding]

But whereas in actual torture, according to Elaine Scarry, the prisoner’s body is split from the self and made a weapon against him or her, in medieval hagiography the martyr repudiates torture’s dualistic disposition by valorizing bodily suffering as a source of agency and power. The pained body becomes a weapon to be directed against the pagan regime. In this way, the martyr assumes the subversive potentiality of the masochist: he inhabits a world where pain results in ‘pleasure’ and torment in ‘joy’. Pain, experienced as delight by the saints, is not a symbol of the fleshliness that they wish to disavow so much as a symbol of their willingness to embrace the flesh as a source of power and subjectivity. Sebastian boasts: ‘My joys and all my delights are to endure pain and suffering for the love of my creator.’ Nor does pain generate fear: Sebastian declares earlier that he is not afraid of any pagan ‘threats’. This seems to confirm recent arguments that sadism, contrary to popular belief, is incompatible with masochism: the martyr, far from inflating the sadistic tyrant’s ego, causes its undoing. Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher who has written eloquently on this topic, asserts: ‘The concurrence of sadism and masochism is fundamentally one of analogy only; their processes and their formations are entirely different’; Anita Phillips, following Deleuze, calls the phrase sado-masochism a ‘misnomer’: ‘There is sadism, there is masochism, and the two don’t get on well together.’ This helps to explain why, when he is subjected miraculously to punishments himself, the emperor in the Sebastian play announces: ‘All you devils, come here! Consume my body and my soul’. Unlike the saint, the emperor’s sufferings do not produce experiences of joy or transcendence but ones of corporeal annihilation.

Robert Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (Reaktion Books 2005)

[wearebeguiler]

“No figure in literature, oral or written, baffles us quite as much as trickster. He is positively identified with creative powers, often bringing such defining features of culture as fire or basic food, and yet he constantly behaves in the most antisocial manner we can imagine. Although we laugh at him for his troubles and his foolishness and are embarrassed by his promiscuity, his creative cleverness amazes us and keeps alive the possibility of transcending the social restrictions we regularly encounter.”

— Barbara Babcock-Abrahams,  A Tolerated Margin of Mess: The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered

[tongueofgod]

The Body is a Map by Easterine Kire

[girldrivers]

everything in sports is about sex. except sex. which is about winning

[dwellordream]

Fred Botting, Gothic

[venusimleder]

Enfants Riches Deprimes, 2024.

[notesinexile]

It is claimed that in this war against an uncivilized opponent, the use of increasingly sophisticated information technology has allowed the military to identify its targets more accurately and thus to minimize collateral damage. What is certain is that by fighting the enemy at a distance, it has been able to minimize its own casualties. Unchallengeable air supremacy and precision weaponry make virtual impunity of the pilot possible. Furthermore, domestic public opinion in liberal democracies is critical of excessive war casualties in its armies. This humanitarian concern means that soldiers need no longer go to war expecting to die but only to kill. In itself, this destabilizes the conventional understanding of war as an activity in which human dying and killing are exchanged. The psychological effect of this unequal killing is mitigated by the fact that there is a long-standing tradition of fighting against militarily and ethnically inferior peoples in which it is proper that the latter die in much larger numbers. Since they do not value human life as the civilized do, they will expose themselves to greater risks, even undertake suicidal operations, and therefore suffer more casualties.