HESPERIA

I do not exist

[thinkingimages]

Natalya Abramova as Stalker’s wife in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979)

You know, my mother was against it. You’ve probably noticed already that he’s not of this world. All our neighborhood laughed at him. He was such a bungler, he looked so pitiful. My mother used to say: “He’s a stalker, he’s doomed, he’s an eternal prisoner! Don’t you know what kind of children the stalkers have?” And I… I didn’t even argue with her. I knew it all myself, that he was doomed, that he was an eternal prisoner, and about the children. Only what could I do? I was sure I would be happy with him. Of course, I knew I’d have a lot of sorrow, too. But it’s better to have a bitter happiness than a gray, dull life. Perhaps I thought it all up later. But then he approached me and said: “Come with me.” And I did, and never regretted it. Never. We had a lot of sorrow, a lot of fear, and a lot of shame. But I never regretted it, and I never envied anyone. It’s just our fate, our life, that’s how we are. And if we haven’t had our misfortunes, we wouldn’t have been better off. It would have been worse. Because in that case, there wouldn’t have been any happiness. And there wouldn’t have been any hope.

[smillingcartoonist]

Stalker (1979)

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky

[thedankmemes]

[nthfunct-deactivated20231201]

man who opened a parenthesis he forgot to close 4 years ago is tragically unaware everything he's said since has been an aside

[pjackk]

Im to boil my effigy so those curses goes away and i can bust again

[shutinthenutouse]

[vulgarmaw]

Me about any book I've written ever.

[nemfrog]

Lion with bat wings. The man elephant; a book of African fairy tales. 1906.

Internet Archive

[zegalba]

Heiko Hellwig: Silicon Cities (2017)

Colorful Circuit Cities Built From Motherboards, Processors, and Microchips. Hellwig built these cityscapes last year using the guts of old MacBooks, IBMs, and even PlayStations that he scavenged from eBay and friends' basements.

[wolgerrswraith-deactivated20250]

Meanwhile, on the boxed set of Twin Peaks I paid $49.99 for with the worst captioning I've seen in my life

[hesperiaexperience]

the best captioning i think you meant to say

[nicodelenfent]

"But something had occurred to me there; or, rather, something I had already been aware of merely became clearer. I had gone to the Louvre that night to lay down my soul, to find some transcendent pleasure that would obliterate pain and make me utterly forget even myself... Before, all art had held for me the promise of a deeper understanding of the human heart. Now the human heart meant nothing. I did not denigrate it. I simply forgot it."

Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944)

Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire (1976)

AMC's Interview with the Vampire (2022–)

Matthias Grünewald, The Mocking of Christ (Detail, 1505)

[joeinct]

Francis Bacon, Photo by by John Deakin, 1962

[needsmoreexplosions]

I love the phrase "they get along like a house on fire". It's perfect. You and me have perfect chemistry and it's setting off the carbon monoxide detectors. People are calling emergency services to get us to stop being so chummy. Someone died

[hesperiaexperience]

chelovek

[voyaging-too]

Stanislaw Lem writes brilliant female characters the few times he actually bothers to try. I don’t want to insult him on a personal level, but it strikes me that he is so full of sexist preconceptions he actually arrives at writing women as full and complex people the wrong way round, the long way round, exhausting every possible type of sexism to arrive back at: hey, she’s a person. Lem’s short story The Mask functions as a commentary on how the innate aspects of womanhood contrast with the artificial constraints of femininity, and how the ritualised, scripted nature of heterosexual courtship prevents actual communication. It reads stridently, bitterly feminist, like something straight out of Joanna Russ. Both in The Mask and in Solaris, Lem’s remarks on gender, identity, embodiment, artificiality and loss of self are heartbreakingly astute. Which is weird, because their starting point seems to be a male anxiety about the unknowability of woman: what if women have secret thoughts inside their heads, what if women remain opaque to me and I cannot truly possess them, what if the part of them I cannot fully own and know is somehow terrible and lethal and alien. But then he sets out to write about the terrible and lethal and alien creature-thing that is a woman, and being a sci-fi writer, he begins to care about it, and begins to empathize with it, and ponders its relationship with free will and predetermination, and so finds himself writing a species of feminist existential horror, asking the question – how does Eve feel when she realises that her very self was created for Adam’s sake?

[thirdity]

“Must [one] be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox…”

— Stanisław Lem, Solaris

[soracities]

"People thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle. In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who “knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.” But the butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is psyche, the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming."

Rebecca Solnit, from "The Blue of Distance (II)", A Field Guide to 'Getting Lost

[galanon1m]

wdym i exist in other people's minds and someone probably had a conversation about me when i wasn't there and someone probably thought about me at some point wdym