[h3rmitian]

[h3rmitian]

[h3rmitian]

[h3rmitian]

[h3rmitian]

the drawn bow of eros symbolises the dramatic wakefulness of erotic desire, the vigilant tension, the perpetual readiness of lovers to surrender to the sweet seduction that calls to them even as they still resist and prevail. the taut string governs the arrow, holds it back in anguish at its ultimate point (a painful nowhere), and does not allow it to be released impetuously toward its end (a vast void). the lovers, transcending themselves, arrive where they cannot go, at the powerful impossible. in conceiving the image of the drawn bow, one can discern the highest summit of the elegies, and one must dare to call this image majestic. inevitably, i recall fragment 48 of heraclitus with its famous equation of life and death (βίος = βιός).

[catilinas]

Deepest and most extensive whale graveyard discovered in Indian Ocean

Some remains found in Diamantina fracture zone date back more than 5m years and reveal species and ecosystems unknown to science

“Finding a ‘whale necropolis’ where there are nearly 800 skeletons per square kilometre is a surprise, and the mix of whale types is a puzzle,” Copley said, noting that it included some shallow-diving filter-feeding species such as Minke whales as well as many bones and fossils of beaked whales, which are very deep-diving hunters.

[proustian-dream]

Baudelaire was a lover of depth, understood in the strictly spatial sense. He waited, like some marvel always ready to flare into being, for certain moments in which space eluded its customary flatness and began to reveal itself in a potentially inexhaustible succession of stage wings. Then things – every single negligible object – suddenly took on an unexpected significance. In those moments, he wrote, ‘the exterior world offers itself with a powerful emphasis, a clearness of outline, a wealth of exquisite colors.’ As if to say that thought was possible only when the world presented itself in this way. These were also ‘the moments of existence in which time and extension are more profound, and the sentiment of existence has grown enormously.’ So, in Western terms, Baudelaire was getting close to describing what for Vedic seers, and later for Buddha, was bodhi, the ‘awakening.’ And in an equally literal Western spirit, he made this coincide with physiological awakening, with the moment in which ‘the eyelids have just been unburdened of the sleep that sealed them.’ This is what drugs are for: opium makes space deep (‘Space is deepened by opium’), while hashish ‘spreads over the whole of life like a magic varnish’ (perhaps similar to Vauvenargues’s comment ‘clarity is the vernis des maîtres’?). Yet Baudelaire also pointed out that drugs are only a surrogate for physiology, since ‘every man carries within himself the right dose of natural opium, which he unceasingly secretes and renews.’

Roberto Calasso, 'The Natural Obscurity of Things', La Folie Baudelaire

[h3rmitian]

Briseis taken away from Achilles, Fourth Style of Pompeian wall painting, from the atrium of the House of the Tragic Poet

[d-0-g-39]

FACT : GOD IS A COMPUTER

[user7038634357]

[funeral]

Tristan Garcia, Form and Object: A Treatise on Things

[theoptia]

Clarice Lispector, from The Passion According to G.H.

[h3rmitian]

jesus said ἐγώ εἰμί ἡ ἄμπελος and you expect me not to compare him to dionysus ?? and im not even bringing up orpheuss baccicos.

[a-quiet-green-agreement]

Paler indeed than the moon ailing in some slow eclipse was the light of it now, wavering and blowing like a noisome exhalation of decay, a corpse-light, a light that illuminated nothing.

– J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

[outofeverythingthisnamewasleft]

Kansas, 1946 - Mark Kauffman

[h3rmitian]

let me give you THE camilla macaulay fancast:

anti-fascist activist and writer annemarie schwarzenbach

[funeral]

If what we are is a "project towards the world", then the Cartesian cogito ("I think") becomes I act; my existence as a self is not that of a single continuing "consciousness", or a series of such consciousnesses, but a single "experience" in which I, as an embodied human being, engage with the world. My body is not, as objectivists might have it, an instrument loosely attached to me that I can use, but is me myself as involved with the world and as expressing myself in its movements. If I am an embodied subject, then the thoughts, feelings, intentions, wishes and so on that I have necessarily find expression in my body, not only in my actions and the objects I manipulate in them or the environment that I change by them, but even in the very characteristics of the body itself. Conversely, my body for me, or what Merleau-Ponty calls le corps propre, is not some kind of mechanistic system loosely attached to me, but is my mode of expression of my thoughts, feelings, intentions, and so on. A person's body can become what Merleau-Ponty beautifully describes as "the eloquent relic of an existence."

Eric Matthews, The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty