[sandibullock]

UNDER THE BRIDGE 1.05 | When the Heat Comes Down

[nostalgicfuturity]

I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.

Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Left-Handed Commencement Address” (Mills College, 1983)

this passage planted itself in my consciousness when i was 24, and 10 years later, it informs so much of my approach to living, thinking, creating.

(via quantumcorean)

[4page-letter]

[arabellesicardi]

it is my birthday

i am 25! I am surprised I made it this far. Genuinely surprised. I have planned my death in varying ways since I was 12 years old - I don’t know if I ever told you guys about it, but the same time I discovered I loved writing was around the same time I wrote my first plans down. It’s funny to me that writing keeps me alive. I’m very grateful. 

Last year was the worst of my life. But today I am sitting in a beautiful apartment alone with a bottle of wine with the chapter structure of my book laid out in front of me, and I have tens of thousands of words behind me. It is absolutely in no way close to finish and I will tell you approximately zero percent of what it is, but I am really……grateful, to have been given these ideas by the way the world has shaped me, by the people who have loved me and even the people who have done me harm. I stopped mourning my other possible lives some time ago - not a long time ago mind you, but still. So much of my life has been about just surviving. Just proving that I could, that I would, and that I would find love on top of it. I think I did - I am sitting in the chair of someone I love, waiting for them to come home, while I work on the thing that matters the most to me, that I have been working on - thinking about - for years. I have traveled the world for this thing. It can all fit into a box. A thing that has been the only thing I have stayed alive for most of the time - it fits into a box! It’s so small, this thing. That’s okay. I’m small too. But the thing in the box, it can outlive me, and it is my present to myself, all the different versions of me. I’m nowhere near done with it, and I am sure it will undo me plenty of more times until it is done, but it’s still a gift I’m giving to myself. I am trying to write it like it’s the only thing that I have ever written that has ever mattered, but also consoling myself with the fact I have value outside of it, that even if I fail at doing the perfect thing, because I will, that it will still have been worth it. This is….extremely hard. But it’s also like: well, of course. The things you love require work and great care to keep alive. They are breathing too. 

I think a part of love is being undone by the things you love, being able to stay curious and open and letting things fill you up in ways you didn’t know you could be filled before. and having faith in the deviations as much as your belief the end result will be worth the bother. I have a pattern of travel I have tended to stick to - around the holidays, around my birthday, also, I’m never at home. I try to be traveling for work research, for the thing in the box. I want to be undone by the thing I love at the time I was born, like a return to my originator. Saying hello to my own personal god. There’s that Simone Weil quote about the beauty of the world being the mouth of a labyrinth. I’ll let you look it up. 

Anyway. I don’t have much to say about what I’ve learned so far. I’m just surprised I get to say anything at all. I’m glad I get to. I’m glad I sat through it all. It keeps breaking me, and filling me up, and I am very grateful. But I am also grateful I am learning to put it down. To get this far I have bargained with myself as a stalling mechanism - do this by this time and you get to fuck off. Do that by then and you’re all good. I actually have done lots of the stuff I promised to my depressed former selves. But having done so, I don’t want to hold up the end of the bargain where I fuck off. I just want to bargain harder. I know how this all ends anyway. I don’t have to rush it. It is pretty arrogant to think I know the only good ending, or that I really have control over it at all. I want to see how far I can go. I don’t have any answers, just a kinder way to travel to find them now. 

Anyway. I’m 25. Surprise. And thank you, I guess, for sticking around. You, reading this, were no small part in keeping me around. It is so silly - maybe embarrassing! - but I just want to share so much with you, because I think we’ll both surprise ourselves with what we learn what to do while we get to stick around. 

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (Griffin Dunne, 2017)

[los-ninos-rojos-deactivated2025]

Parque das Garças, by Clara Araújo

[heaven-ly-mind]

If I could live in the ocean for just one day

[set-the]

Holiday feeling

[leakedvii]

Interiors shots in Call Me By Your Name (2017, dir. Luca Guadagnino ) by photographer Giulio Ghirard

[everythingjoandidion]

Joan Didion next to a portrait of her husband John Gregory Dunne by Eugene Richards for The New York Times

[becauseiamawoman-deactivated202]

For many of these women, the reading experience begins from a place of seething rage. Take Sara Marcus’ initial impression of Jack Kerouac: ‘I remember putting On the Road down the first time a woman was mentioned. I was just like: “Fuck. You.” I was probably 15 or 16. And over the coming years I realized that it was this canonical work, so I tried to return to it, but every time I was just like, “Fuck you.”’ Tortorici had a similarly visceral reaction to Charles Bukowski: ‘I will never forget reading Bukowski’s Post Office and feeling so horrible, the way that the narrator describes the thickness of ugly women’s legs. I think it was the first time I felt like a book that I was trying to identify with rejected me. Though I did absorb it, and of course it made me hate my body or whatever.’ Emily Witt turned to masculine texts to access a sexual language that was absent from books about women, but found herself turned off by their take: ‘many of the great classic coming-of-age novels about the female experience don’t openly discuss sex,’ she says in No Regrets. ‘I read the ones by men instead, until I was like, “I cannot read another passage about masturbation. I can’t. It was like a pile of Kleenex.”’ This isn’t just about the books. When young women read the hyper-masculine literary canon—what Emily Gould calls the 'midcentury misogynists,’ staffed with the likes of Roth, Mailer, and Miller—their discomfort is punctuated by the knowledge that their male peers are reading these books, identifying with them, and acting out their perspectives and narratives. These writers are celebrated by the society that we live in, even the one who stabbed his wife. In No Regrets, Elif Bautman talks about reading Henry Miller for the first time because she had a 'serious crush’ on a guy who said his were 'the best books ever,’ and that guy’s real-life recommendation exacerbated her distaste for the fictional. When she read Miller, 'I felt so alienated by the books, and then thinking about this guy, and it was so hot and summertime … I just wanted to kill myself. … He compared women to soup.’

in No Regrets, women writers talk about what it was like to read literature’s “midcentury misogynists.” (via becauseiamawoman)

[louisetakesphotos]

What a view to wake up to - Sapa, Vietnam

www.facebook.com/louisecoghillphotography

www.louisecoghill.com.au

@louisetakesphotos

[humansofnewyork]

“We were pretty poor back in Mexico. My parents were divorced. Mom did the best she could. She was always a hustler. She’d sell jewelry, or food, or anything that she could. But a lot of nights there still wouldn’t be enough to eat. We’d survive on tortillas and salt. I was only eight when we came to America. So I was too young to understand. I think my mom thought she could make some money and bring us home. She thought she’d learn English, and maybe start a business. But it was so much harder than she expected. We moved so much looking for work. She’s fifty and she still cleans houses every day. Every year she gets more worn down. She’s been getting sick a lot lately. But she can’t afford to stop. She never will. Right now I’m in school. I always thought I had to be the best student because I’m undocumented. I thought I’d go to law school, or graduate school. But now I’m not so sure. My mom would literally destroy her body to make that happen for me. How could I allow that to happen? I’m a Dreamer. And everyone loves the Dreamers because we’re a perfect package to sell. But why am I the only one who gets the chance to feel safe? Whenever I hear ‘I stand with Dreamers,’ I always think about my mom. I’m not willing to throw her under the bus. I’m not willing to be a bargaining chip to make her seem like a criminal. Everything people admire about Dreamers is because of our parents.”

[denisvilleneuve]

Solaris (1972) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky

[npr]

Oklahoma City Police Fatally Shoot Deaf Man Despite Yells Of 'He Can't Hear'

The police department's spokesperson said he didn't know whether officers heard witnesses yelling that the man was deaf and couldn't hear the officers' commands.

[thegrandmarsh]

Things to remember about the victim in this shooting:

- he was Hispanic

- he was seen trying to sign at the officers to explain what was going on

- he had no criminal record whatsoever

- neighbors reported that he always carried the “weapon” police felt threatened by, a pipe, because of the stray dogs in the area

- he showed no sign of understanding the officers’ verbal warnings not to get any closer, and it’s likely that he was advancing in order to read their lips

- he is the 712th death in police shootings this year alone

[reproductivejusticeandliberty]

As a lifeguard, I was expected to know basic sign language in case any deaf clients came to us for help. Why the fuck are fucking police not required to have the same training, or at least be expected to entertain the thought that deaf people exist? -V

[myfunkybeachdays]

[fluorescentflowing]

Lina Scheynius Photography