if i had my wilderness, nature could be my lover

[gacougnol]

Nathan Lerner

Girl With Two Faces 1932

[luthienne]

“She is a profoundly gentle person… But this must be one reason for her terribly self-destructive history. She’s rarely known how to defend herself, except by withdrawal (tuning out, running away). How come she never developed even a normal capacity for hostility? … Too much insecurity to allow anger. But if there’s no anger experienced, one feels so vulnerable—”

— Susan Sontag, from As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980

[grupaok]

Peter Hujar, Susan Sontag, 1975

[juliabirkins]

Romy Schneider in L'Enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot (1964, unfinished)

[ecrituria]

“If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life.”

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

[heteroglossia]

“I know peace only when my ambitions sleep. Once they waken, anxiety repossesses me. Life is a state of ambition. The mole digging his tunnels is ambitious. Ambition is in effect everywhere, and we see its traces on the faces of the dead themselves.”

— E.M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

[grandpasessions]

Self-knowledge—the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?

EM Cioran

The Trouble With Being Born

[xshayarsha]

“You have had you cerebral winter – your mental fevers. You weren’t happy. You rose to supreme heights of wisdom, of vision, but you were nervous and unhappy.”

— Anaïs Nin, from a letter to Henry Miller dated July 27, 1933; from A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller: 1932-1953.

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

La ragazza che sapeva troppo (a.k.a. The Girl Who Knew Too Much) (Mario Bava, 1963)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

“A winter sky, a soft warmish December sky whose tender ash grey makes of the rose with its rotting shades a transparent flower of amber.”

— Jean Lorrain, from Selected Poems; “Dropping Petals,”  written c. 1889

[garadinervi]

«Visible Language» – The Journal for Research on the Visual Media of Language Expression, Volume 6, Number 1, Winter 1972, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH

[iosonorockmaballoiltango]

Rodney Smith Photography

[mollypg]

[anlatfiruze]

[a-ltrove]

“…to be loved / and found magical, / like a secret…”

— Anne Sexton, from The Complete Poems; “The Fury of Flowers and Worms” 

[antigonick]

“Brittle, not from solitude but from mistrust, the aftermath of violence.”

— Louise Glück, excerpt of “The Garment”, in Vita Nova

[poeticque]

“Perhaps you are obsessed by figments of your imagination, figures of your desire, stimulating enough to be exhausting, gloomy enough to be depressing.”

— Julia Kristeva, in In the Beginning was Love.