rough draft

Rain is only rain in mid-air.

[dk-thrive]

The thing is to stalk your calling…. I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.

— Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (Harper & Row, 1982)

[dk-thrive]

What are the signs of love?

“If someone asked me “What are the signs of love?” I would have said without hesitation, It’s the familiarity and the removal of cost, And to find yourself not having to lie, and the embarrassment removed between you two, and see yourself acting in your nature without trying to be something else so she likes you, And that you two keep silent and the silence gets delicious, And that one of you two talk and listening gets delicious.”

— Mustafa Mahmoud, "Understanding The Qur’an: A Contemporary Approach (Amana Pubns, September 1, 2004) (via Alive on All Channels)

[slobbering]

Eternal Pain - The Severed Head of Medusa.   1913.

Paul Darde. 1888-1963. gypsum

[ohevoyev]

hektor knew he was already dead and andromache knew it too. but still she drew him a bath.. hope really is an open wound on the souls of mankind. and what a wound to tend to

[soracities]

Paul Monette, from “The Wedding Letter”

[Text ID: “Why is a witch, if she is open-mouthed, omnivorous and rich, all skin and bones? Because what she eats eats her up.”]

[soracities]

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (trans. Richard Howard)

[Text ID: “(X once told me that love had protected him against worldliness: coteries, ambitions, advancements, interferences, alliances, secessions, roles, powers: love had made him into a social catastrophe, to his delight.)”]

[aridante]

“All my heroes were evil once. But at least they returned in time for dinner. Imagine that. All it takes to be a good man is to come back.”

— Dave Harris, from Patricide

[soracities]

Czesław Miłosz, from “I Sleep A Lot” (tr. Czesław Miłosz ), New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001

[Text ID: “I have read many books but I do not believe them. When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers.”]

[weltenwellen]

Alejandra Pizarnik, tr. by Yvette Siegert, from “Extracting the Stone of Madness”, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972

[aridante]

the hungers of hadewijch and eckhart, donald f. duclow // stigmata: escaping texts, hélène cixous // you are in a hotel room, joan tierney // the notebooks of malte laurids brigge, rainer maria rilke // great expectations, kathy acker // hot-hand fallacy, jasmine gibson // erotism: death and sensuality, georges bataille // cain, josé saramago // love in the time of monsters, emily palermo // a curious night for a double eclipse, j. karl bogartte.

[0thello]

The Birth of Venus (painting), 1860

by Adolf-Hiremy Hirschl.

[antigonick]

“Speak to me. Talk To me. Break the black silence. Speak of a tree full of leaves, Of a flying bird, the new Moon in the sunset, a poem, A book, a person—all the Casual healing speech Of your resonant, quiet voice.”

— Kenneth Rexroth, excerpt of “Loneliness”, in Sacramental Acts

[megairea]

“I may without fail Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.”

— Dylan Thomas, from Love in the Asylum; The Collected Poems (ed. by John Goodby)

[megairea]

“There is no time like Spring that passes by, Now newly born, and now Hastening to die.”

— Christina Rossetti, from Spring

[antigonick]

“We don’t know what life is, who makes it, the reality is thick with longing. We put it up to our lips and drink.”

— Ilya Kaminsky, excerpt of “Praise”, in Dancing in Odessa

[bookmania]

“Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your own presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.”

— Alice Koller

[lattva]

Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Carl Jung.