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@idleobservation
I do not love my country. Its abstract lustre is beyond my grasp. But (although it sounds bad) I would give my life for ten places in it, for certain people, seaports, pinewoods, fortresses, a run-down city, gray, grotesque, various figures from its history, mountains (and three or four rivers).
José Emilio Pacheco, High Treason, trans. Alistair Reid
Sometimes I think you don’t like me very much, she said. Like? he said. Is that all you want to be? Liked? Wouldn't you rather be passionately and voraciously desired? Yes, she said, but not every night.
Margaret Atwood, from Bodily Harm
Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read. Fought against it for a minute. Then looked out the window at the rain. And gave over. Put myself entirely in the keep of this rainy morning. Would I live my life over again? Make the same unforgiveable mistakes? Yes, given half a chance. Yes.
Raymond Carver, “Rain”
Because it is possible to create…one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Creating, actualizing one’s possibilities…always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself. Progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself.
Søren Kierkegaard
We tend to think about self-acceptance as this giant breakthrough, like you’ll turn some corner and or have an amazing epiphany and you’ll finally be capable of self-love. But most self-acceptance comes from cultivation over the course of many years. We have to slowly and somewhat tediously remind ourselves that we’re doing great, even with all of our flaws, until that feeling becomes less effortful.
Happiness is 60 percent good habits, 30 percent deep understanding of yourself, and 10 percent blind faith. You have to wake up in the morning and instead of thinking, “I don’t want to get out of bed. I hate my life,” you think, “I’m going to get out of bed and make some tea and think some good thoughts, goddamn it.” You have to get on the train and instead of thinking, “Don’t touch me, you angry thoughtless sexist racist blind fucks,” you think, “Look how hard we all try, to be good enough, to be loved, to feel at home.” You sit down at your desk and instead of thinking, “Oh fuck, I can’t do this today,” you think, “I am going to try and reach for the sublime, and the spirits of the dead are going to rally to my side and help me realize my full potential. Today, I am going to shine.”
The more gentle and kind you are to yourself, the more gentle and kind the world is to you. The more passionately you believe in yourself, the more passionately other people will believe in you. People say this shit all the time and it’s easy to think, “Whatever, dude. HOW DO I GET THERE?” You get there by crawling. You crawl and even though you’re very low and very slow, you say to yourself, “I am moving forward. I am making progress. Every day.” You say, “Look how hard I try, to be good enough, to be loved, to feel at home.” And even if you can’t love yourself for anything else, you love yourself for that.
- Ask Polly: How Do I Stop Hating Myself?
A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another […] One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (via nogreatillusion)
The Orange
At lunchtime I bought a huge orange The size of it made us all laugh. I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave— They got quarters and I had a half.
And that orange it made me so happy, As ordinary things often do Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park This is peace and contentment. It’s new.
The rest of the day was quite easy. I did all my jobs on my list And enjoyed them and had some time over. I love you. I’m glad I exist.
Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. The landlady and our delicatessen man are our only mourners, and we leave nothing behind but a frockcoat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever it was we used to get our living by. All we managed to do is pay rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay to get a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.
Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in Paradise Lost, the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote 10,000 words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer. By which I mean not a ‘good’ writer or a ‘bad’ writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (via clairefoley)
When Achilles’ arms grew weary from the killing he plucked out of the river ten young men alive as blood payment for the killing of Patroklos, Menoetius’ son. He led them up onto dry land like stupefied fawns, tied their hands behind them using belts they wore around their woven tunics and gave them to his men to lead back to the ships. Then he jumped in again, eager to keep killing.
Iliad XXI.32-46, trans. Ian Johnston
Like fawns running over a field Suddenly give up and stand Puzzled in their heavy coats.
Memorial, Alice Oswald
I know the eyes are the windows to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me. Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected. I felt brave, and in a state of wonder. Part of that wonder was at my own vulnerability and part was the weird kind of wonder you get from saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning and becomes what it actually is: an assemblage of sounds.
To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This - Mandy Len Catron
therapy in sephora
what are things you do to feel pretty what are things you do to feel safe what are things you do to feel powerful what are the relationships between these things are they all the same things or are they the opposite can you tell me about the sacrifices you have made to feel one and not the other can you tell me about the first experience of shame you felt about a pretty experience can you tell me how a failure of prettymaking gave you shame or maybe pride can you tell me about who taught you what pretty is can you tell me about your most important ugly can you tell me about your ideal form can you tell me about your nightmares can you tell me if they are twins can you tell me if you are ready to have them meet for lunch and maybe make out what is more important to you the method or the result can you imagine doing things exactly the opposite way and are you prepared to see the results of perverting your pretty are you ashamed what are you ashamed of how do you feel when you take off a thing or put a thing on can you be ashamed and proud at the same time all the time forever isn’t it exhausting why
“It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others ... Being closely observed by a companion can also inhibit our observation of others; then, too, we may become caught up in adjusting ourselves to the companion's questions and remarks, or feel the need to make ourselves seem more normal than is good for our curiosity.
Ithaca
The beloved doesn’t need to live. The beloved lives in the head. The loom is for the suitors, strung up like a harp with white shroud-thread.
He was two people. He was the body and the voice, the easy magnetism of a living man, and then the unfolding dream or image shaped by the woman working the loom, sitting there in a hall filled with literal-minded men.
As you pity the deceived sea that tried to take him away forever and took only the first, the actual husband, you must pity these men: they don’t know what they’re looking at; they don’t know that when one loves this way the shroud becomes a wedding dress.
Traveler, your footprints are the only road, nothing else; traveler, there is no road, you make your own path as you walk. As you walk you make your own road, and when you look back you see the path you will never travel again. Traveler, there is no road, only a ship’s wake in the sea.
leaving is not enough; you must stay gone. train your heart like a dog. change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. you lucky, lucky girl. you have an apartment just your size. a bathtub full of tea. a heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. you had to have him. and you did. and now you pull down the bridge between your houses. you make him call before he visits. you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. don’t lose too much weight. stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. and you are not stupid. you loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. heart like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas. heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.
Marty McConell, Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell (via verkur)
NEW YORK CITY
Let me tell you about New York City.
The sidewalks are sort of like highways. The people are sort of like cars. We all say vroom as we walk. We say it out loud instead of having conversations or thinking. Vroom, we say, vroom. We are busy people.
Let me tell you about New York City.
No one goes to Times Square. No one. Ugh. Times Square is empty, silent. Vines grow from the walls. I don’t know what kind of vines. Like, viney ones. A cloaked figure wanders Times Square, penduluming a censerful of white smoke out over the empty square, and no one sees, because no one is there, because no one goes to Times Square.
And that’s what New York City is like.
In New York, no one looks at celebrities. We pretend they don’t exist. We look through them. They shout “help.” They shout “help please I’m on fire.” (Sometimes the celebrities are on fire.) But we see that they are famous and so we just act like they aren’t there. We move out of the way so we don’t catch on fire too, but other than that we act like they aren’t there. Also homeless people, although they are only metaphorically on fire.
Real New Yorkers never eat at Grimaldi’s. We never eat in Little Italy. We never eat at chain restaurants. We never eat at all. Real New Yorkers consume nothing.
We don’t even have mouths here. Tourists are always walking around with mouths. Fucking tourists.
In order to be a Real New Yorker you have to have been born here, or moved here more than ten years ago, or know the New York password (“Fievel”), or inherit Real New Yorker status from an existing member who passes away.
No matter how you do it, of course we have to remove your mouth. That mouth has got to go. We have smooth, featureless lower faces in New York.
No one in New York calls it “the Big Apple.” We call it N’awlins.
It’s easy to find your way around Manhattan. Just remember: every address and location in Manhattan. Just remember every single possible place you could ever go in Manhattan. Hold the entire island in your head. See, it’s easy.
Let me tell you about New York City.
Every neighborhood has its reputation.
For instance, Midtown is where the Aerial Sects congregate, using the rope systems they’ve installed and the vines that grow in Times Square to swing from building to building because they believe that touching the ground is an insult to god and they are right.
The East Village used to be cool, but now it’s covered under several feet of gravel. No one goes there anymore, because of the gravel.
Williamsburg is, of course, entirely fictional. When tourists ask us Real New Yorkers how to get to Williamsburg, we laugh and laugh and tell them how to get to Neverland instead. Neverland is pretty fun, so the tourists don’t mind.
Staten Island? Staten Island is in Chicago. No, don’t worry. It’s a common mistake.
Let me tell you about New York City. Please let me. I want to tell you about this place I live. Please.
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Give You Advice
