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[linathetiger]

"Females are encouraged by patriarchal thinking to believe we should be loving, but this does not mean we are any more emotionally equipped to do the work of love than our male counterparts. Afraid of love, many of us focus more on finding a partner. The wide success of books like "The Rules:Time-tested Secrets for capturing the Heart of Mr. Right", which encourage women to deceive and manipulate to get a partner, express the cynicism of our times. These books validate the old-fashioned sexist notions of sexual difference and encourage women to believe that no relationship between a man and a woman can be based on mutual respect, openness, and caring. The message that they give women is that relationships are always and only about power, manipulation, and coercion, about getting someone  else to do what you want them to do, even if it is against their will. They teach females how to use feminine wiles to play the game of power but they do not offer guidelines for how to love and be loved

Extract from Bell Hooks' : All About Love - New Visions

[linathetiger]

“A woman’s issues of soul cannot be treated by carving her into a more acceptable form as defined by an unconscious culture, nor can she be bent into a more intellectually acceptable shape by those who claim to be the soul bearers of consciousness”

Clarissa Pinkola Estés - Women Who Run With The Wolves: Contacting The Power Of The Wild Woman

[linathetiger]

The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge

#eroticaspower #audrelorde

[linathetiger]

The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects - born of chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Audre Lorde

[linathetiger]

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticised sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasises sensation without feeling. The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our stronger feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognising its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves

Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Audre Lorde

[durgapolashi]

Amrita Sher-Gil (30 January 1913 – 5 December 1941)

[rippingglitter]

“With every good film I see, I feel reborn.”

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

I don’t know. Sometimes you get a line, a phrase, sometimes you’re crying, or it’s the curve of a chair that hurts you and you don’t know why, or sometimes you just want to write a poem, and you don’t know what it’s about. I will fool around on the typewriter. It might take me ten pages of nothing, of terrible writing, and then I’ll get a line, and I’ll think, “That’s what I mean!” What you’re doing is hunting for what you mean, what you’re trying to say. You don’t know when you start.

Anne Sexton, from No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose; “How Does A Poem Come Into Being”  (via violentwavesofemotion)

[lamignonette]

[linathetiger]

A Couple in Chicago

All my life, I have been stitching together a family, through stories or memories or friends or ideas. Michelle has had a very different background—very stable, two-parent family, mother at home, brother and dog, living in the same house all their lives. We represent two strands of family life in this country—the strand that is very stable and solid, and then the strand that is breaking out of the constraints of traditional families, travelling, separated, mobile. I think there was that strand in me of imagining what it would be like to have a stable, solid, secure family life. Michelle is a tremendously strong person, and has a very strong sense of herself and who she is and where she comes from. But I also think in her eyes you can see a trace of vulnerability that most people don’t know, because when she’s walking through the world she is this tall, beautiful, confident woman. There is a part of her that is vulnerable and young and sometimes frightened, and I think seeing both of those things is what attracted me to her. And then what sustains our relationship is I’m extremely happy with her, and part of it has to do with the fact that she is at once completely familiar to me, so that I can be myself and she knows me very well and I trust her completely, but at the same time she is also a complete mystery to me in some ways. And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.

- Barack Obama (Extract taken from A Couple In Chicago, The New Yorker)

[durgapolashi]

Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.

Alice Walker, LIVING BY THE WORD (via

durgapolashi

)

Again again again again again again

(via durgapolashi)

[aliveandfullofjoy]

Well, I’m deeply frustrated all the time. All my plays usually follow a two-year-period of deep frustration and not-writing and there’s usually an aha moment that surfaces gurgling from the pit of despair I’ve fallen into and unlocks the play for me after I’ve convinced myself that I will never write a play again. But I had an aha moment, I guess in my late 20s, when I stopped thinking about What Kind of Play I Wanted to Write and What Kind of Writer I Wanted to Be. I just gave up. I accepted the fact that I’m a little stupid. That I don’t know exactly what I want to say. That I don’t know what kind of theatre I want to make. That I don’t know how to classify it. I stopped thinking strategically. I stopped trying to prove to people that I was smart through my writing. I stopped trying to write stuff that I thought other people would like. And all that followed a long period of bad writing and deep, deep frustration with the fact that my talent couldn’t live up to my taste. I mean, it still doesn’t.

Annie Baker (via aliveandfullofjoy)

[lamignonette]

[linathetiger]

WILD GEESE

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things. Mary Oliver Wild Geese

[tribeca]

“So much of the history of film has relegated women into roles where they are supporting or reacting to the sequence of events that have been generated or initiated by male protagonists. What I’m interested in, in terms of my feminism in film, is seeing women at the heart of the movie, making choices that impact the sequence of events… That’s a very simple way of looking at it, but I think that’s a simple enough exercise as it is.” — Meera Menon

Read: FIRST-EVER NORA EPHRON PRIZE WINNER MEERA MENON MOVES TO THE CENTER—AND RETURNS TO TRIBECA—WITH EQUITY

[pussy-strut]

The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.

deleuze, negotiations, 129, qtd. in porpentine’s “hot allostatic load” (via pussy-strut)

[bravenewwhatever]

The Rooster Clementine Hunter (1887–1988) oil on board 40.6 x 60.3 cm