opossum, my possum

this is just an archive of things that make me feel better (or worse! but in a good way?) at this point

[weltenwellen]

Catherine Gildiner, Good Morning, Monster: Five Heroic Journeys to Emotional Recovery

[hyrude]

We were together. I forget the rest.

source: annalaura_art

[goreprofonde]

I’m listening to Gregory Orr telling how he translated the day he inadvertently shot his brother in the head when deer-hunting with his father into the story of Cain and Abel and I can’t articulate how I feel…

[dearorpheus]

any sorrow can be borne if it can be made into a story, or a story can be told about it

[sunsounds]

[text ID: Suddenly, all the meaning was taken out of my life by this inexplicable experience, which was also something I was at the center of, but there was a story: Cain kills Abel. There you go. So there’s the consolation of story. I knew who I was, even as I entered a world where I understood nothing and seemed powerless.

But Isak Dinesen, the Danish writer, has a wonderful saying that I think is true. She said any sorrow can be borne if it can be made into a story, or a story can be told about it. I’ll go to the consolation first, and then I’ll go to the despair.

The consolation was, OK, Cain lives. He begs God to kill him, and God says, no, that would be too easy. That wouldn’t do the lesson. You’re going to live. And you’re going to live in shame and isolation and at the fringes of all human worlds. And I thought, well, that’s it. That’s what I’ll do — because I didn’t want to die, not at that point. I wanted to live, but you can’t live in a world without meaning. To be Cain is, obviously, also grandiose, but children are grandiose, aren’t they. They do think they’re at the center of some story, even if it’s a bad one. end ID]

[oldshrewsburyian]

“I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.”

— James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

[geryone]

Civil Service, Claire Schwartz

[luthienne]

Anne Carson, from H of H Playbook

[Text ID: Hello dusk! // Why is light emotional?]

[luthienne]

Alex Dimitrov, from Love and Other Poems; "Summer Solstice"

[luthienne]

Franz Wright, from Earlier Poems; “Poem in Three Parts: 2. The Wound”

[Text ID: The wound that never healed but learned to sing.]

[luthienne]

James Baldwin, from Go Tell It on the Mountain

[Text ID: It was no doubt this, Florence's age and kindness, that led Elizabeth, with no premeditation to take Florence into her confidence. Looking back, she found it hard to believe that she could have been so desperate, or so childish; though, again, on looking back, she was able to see clearly what she then so incoherently felt: how much she needed another human being, somewhere, who knew the truth about her.]

[luthienne]

Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

[Text ID: Maybe certain kinds of pain, at certain formative stages in life, just impress themselves into a person's sense of self permanently.]

[luthienne]

Kaveh Akbar, from Calling a Wolf a Wolf; "Soot"

(transcription below cut)

Sometimes God comes to earth disguised as rust, / chewing away a chain link fence or mariner’s knife. / From up so close we must seem / clumsy and gloomless, like new lovers // undressing in front of each other / for the first time. Regarding loss, I’m afraid / to keep it in the story, / worried what I might bring back to life, // like the marble angel who woke to find / his innards scattered around his feet.

[luthienne]

Franz Wright, from God's Silence; "Four Poems of Youth”

[Text ID: Do you know this terror—not to remember?]

[hours]

“[V]iolence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action.”

— Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (translated by Alphonso Lingis)

[luthienne]

Elena Ferrante, from Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein)

[Text ID: She couldn’t bear herself, she couldn’t bear anything.]

[soracities]

Jeremy Radin, from “Eating Disorder Recovery Center of Los Angeles”, pub. in Hunger Mountain

[Text ID: “learning so much is what got me here, I’m exhausted, I need the knowing siphoned out of me, to start over”]

[firstfullmoon]

“What do we do with knowledge that we cannot bear to live with? What do we do with the things we do not want to know?”

— Deborah Levy, “Things I Don’t Want to Know: On Writing” (Bloomsbury USA June 10, 2014)

[luthienne]

Rita Dove, from Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems; "Ghettoland: Exeunt"

[Text ID: You stop to gaze at the softening sky / because there is nowhere else to look / without remembering pity and contempt, / without harboring rage.]