from tragic farce I plucked ivy of my own

It is easy to love fragments that have been on the way a long time. Inscriptions on church bells and proverbs written across saints and many-thousand-year-old seeds. Tomas Tranströmer, tr. Robin Fulton --- lit blog @whisperthatruns

[weepingwidar]

John Jacobsmeyer (American, 1964) - Clubhouse (2008)

[faith-maccaullay]

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE 2.06 "Like the Light by Which God Made the World Before He Made Light"

[bruzum]

[chthonic-cassandra]

Over and over in the first few acts we encounter lines like this: "Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean"; "My only love sprung from my only hate"; "These violent delights have violent ends"; "Tempering extremity with extreme sweet." These are the building blocks of Petrarchism: antithesis and paradox, once powerfully original, but by the time of the writing of Shakespeare's play already subsiding into the territory of cliché. Love and hate. Delight and violence. Extremity and extreme sweet. Once again, as with the Chorus' opening sonnet, the poetry is pretending that it can control contradiction and disorder. Throughout Romeo and Juliet artificiality in language will be a sign of lack of self-knowledge, failure to acknowledge what is wrong in Verona - all the way to County Paris' final and futile rhyming speech at Juliet's tone. This kind of balanced line - "My only love sprung from my only hate" - will also disappear as the play turns the corner toward tragedy, with the fateful death of Mercutio in the third act, the middle of the play and its fulcrum.

Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

[chthonic-cassandra]

Night is the interior world - in this case not spatial but temporal - of Romeo and Juliet, a middle world of transformation and dream sharply contrasted to the harsh daylight world of law, civil war, and banishment. Night will be the setting for all the play's crucial private moments, moments of tragedy and love: the masque at Capulet's feast; the balcony scene in the orchard; the aubade scene, after the lovers have spent the night together; and the final night, the final darkness of Romeo's visit to Juliet's tomb, his fight with the County Paris, and his death. This is all the more striking when we recall that plays written for the public theater, like Romeo and Juliet [...] were performed in full daylight, in the middle of the afternoon. The sense of foreboding night and pervasive blackness is conjured up entirely by and through language, with the assistance of a few well-placed props and costumes: a lantern, a candle, a nightdress. Night, that is to say, is a state of theater and a state of mind.

Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

[ellewantsrevenge]

aadam jacobs's archive

[knittykitty86]

@gothiccharmschool

[idionkisson]

local woman discovers ALL THE ADULTS IN ROMEO AND JULIET SUCK SO BAD

[do-not-u-dare]

“On social media you only see people’s highs and not their lows so you get the impression that everybody else only experiences highs which can lower your self esteem” idk what social media you’re on but it isn’t like that for me

[arminreindl]

I promise I'm working on more longer posts on crocs in the back (Enalioetes, Quinkana and Mekosuchinae as a whole) Until then, have some videos/images of various crocodilians scratching themselves.

Saltwater crocodile (sadly I do not know the source)

False Gharial (LA Zoo)

American Alligator (Florida's Wildest)

and finally another saltie as a still image (The Cairns Post)

[chthonic-cassandra]

@inziladun

[idionkisson]

it turns out, actually, if you are experiencing complicated negative emotions, you ARE allowed to share them with your loved ones, and you are NOT required to show no trace of distress and shove the offending emotions far enough down so as not to Bother Anybody. also it turns out your loved ones APPRECIATE it when you share said emotions, like their response ISN'T "how dare you make me feel something i didn't like :(", it's love and care for you, and genuine appreciation that you are sharing the most important pieces of yourself with them? and then you can hold those pieces together, and it actually feels a lot less scary when you do? it is NOT necessary to cut yourself off from all of humankind, especially those who love you the most, whenever you experience one (1) emotion, actually. fucked up if true

[femme-foucault]

Gentiles/non-Jews of Tumblr, how well did you do in the quiz on Judaism 101 linked below?

0

1-4

5-9

10-14

15-20

21-25

26-31

32 :)

I’m Jewish/show results

Voting ended onMay 20

This is the quiz and I did not come up with it, credit goes to @iswearbyalltheflowers on this post.

Absolutely no judgment, I’m genuinely really curious and I figured more people would answer anonymously here than on the original post.

[anasabdin]

Disappearance [ 7 colors ]

[blignick]

[rauko]

Cross Section Photography of Smoothly Polished Agate Minerals

[alvallah]

One of my favorite things about loving someone or developing a closeness or fondness towards someone is also loving and developing a fondness for the things they care about. When you learn to see the world in a new way, or you learn to appreciate the things you’ve previously overlooked, or they become your excuse to get into an interest you always thought was cool but thought you didn’t have time for. When a connection makes your world bigger and warmer and fuller and more beautiful.

[sea-changed]

"The myth of the trauma hero is compelling: it claims to speak to deep psychological truths, makes a kind of intuitive sense, and, perhaps most importantly, makes the American veteran a sympathetic victim, rather than a perpetrator, of violence. It is a myth that harmonizes with a Romantic valorization of embodied, subjective truth, since it frames war as a personal aesthetic experience rather than as a sociopolitical event, and portrays the experience of war as an experience of transcendental revelation achieved through physical proximity to death."

Roy Scranton, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature (2019)

[chthonic-cassandra]

For me, the other place is a neighboring country. As in fantasy literature, it's a world that touches ours, is superimposed onto it, a kind of fourth dimension. Once you're cast into it, you can never get out; just one looming shadow and you're dragged back there, it's beyond you to resist. [...] We can learn how to live with the knowledge that that world is always there, that it will always be there, just out of sight. It is a world in which victim and abuser are reunited. I think they are the same, or almost the same shadows. It's a world where it's impossible to be ignorant of evil. It's everywhere, altering the color and flavor of everything. Ignoring or forgetting it is not an option, for the more you run from it, the quicker it catches you up. But it is possible to stand back from the brink. That is the challenge: how to remain on the threshold of this world, how to keep going like tightrope walkers along the wire, facing the future. Wavering, unsteady, but not falling. Not falling. Not falling.

Neige Sinno, Sad Tiger (trans. Natasha Lehrer)