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Natalie Díaz, from "American Arithmetic", Postcolonial Love Poem

Among our earliest defenses is our ability to go blank or even to become stuporous. The mind tries to anesthetize itself in the face of emotional pain. On a very primitive level, the mind responds to pain by trying to blank out the latter or, if necessary, by emptying itself out entirely. That is, the mind may try to get rid of itself in order to rid itself of pain. In everyday life, such operations are often taken for granted. Most people do not make much of or even notice momentary lapses of mental presence nor do they link such states with hidden sources of pain. Often such states merely reflect the basic waxing and waning of attention. However, the vernacular term spacing out captures something of what is meant here. In psychosis, the mind may speed up or slow down almost to a zero point. It may try either to transcend or nullify itself. Mystics describe a type of zero point as a part of a larger process of renewal. In psychosis, it more often functions as a black hole that sucks in everything in its path.

Michael Eigen, The Psychotic Core

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“who are you performing for?”

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“I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far-off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”

— Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

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Francis Bacon - Sand Dune, 1981

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cant believe im letting people online see into my heart. for free

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“A tragedy is the story of a human growing into his death mask. What has been done is too total to be undone, or even regretted; it defines the doer once and for all and renders the future impossible. (Macbeth is the story of Macbeth growing into his regicide, even as his wife collapses under it; the hesitant hen-pecked man of the first act becomes a monstrous king with burning eyes, master of the deed that mastered him.) The tragic hero attains something like divine completeness, except that for human beings completeness is death. So the ubiquitous counsel of the chorus concerning the hero—look what fortune has done here, she used to be on top of the world, don’t count on happiness, don’t believe anyone happy until he is dead—says more than it seems to. In the last analysis, what can one say of mere mortals? A human is just too partial, too speckled and subject and already-half-gone, for anything to be really true or false of him. Is he happy, is she sad? Maybe, a bit, for a time, but really—who can say, who can even care? That’s how it is for humans, unless and until they are tragic. The tragic hero is complete. You can call him unhappy (miserable, utterly broken) even before he is dead. For an instant he is something like divine. And then he dies, because there’s nothing left to do. The center of every tragedy is the image of a human being who has already died but keeps talking, someone whose face is a mask. Antigone says this explicitly—she is already dead; Oedipus acts it out in gouging out his eyes.”

— Michael Kinnucan, “The Gods Show Up” (via smakkabagms)