i am the seafolding you in

A.N., MY.

[peachdrug]

"Imaginary Conversation" by Linda Pastan

You tell me to live each day as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen where before coffee I complain of the day ahead - that obstacle race of minutes and hours, grocery stores and doctors.

But why the last? I ask. Why not live each day as if it were the first - all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing her eyes awake that first morning, the sun coming up like an ingenue in the east?

You grind the coffee with the small roar of a mind trying to clear itself. I set the table, glance out the window where dew has baptized every living surface. (From Insomnia: Poems, 2015)

[1eos]

astrology don’t even work on cishet men…………….they’re Evil. sun in stupid. moon in evil. rising in aggravating 

[peachdrug]

When my son was born, language left. This was the way it felt, during the hours of hard labour, when I went inward, away from the world outside. I stopped thinking in sentences, then lost phrases, then words. Eventually, it was like being at the bottom of a deep, dark well, hearing voices drift down, but being unable, or perhaps unmoved, to respond. It wasn’t frightening. I was simply elsewhere, and too profoundly busy to bother with all that far-off noise. I remember, at one point, being distinctly aware of my mind – the conscious everyday mind that talks to itself and to other people, the self where language is loud – floating like pond scum on top of the vast, rich dark where I now laboured, a wordless inner world of sensation and drive to which I had never before had access. I was two selves at once. A double consciousness. If I had to, I knew I could still speak to the people around me, but it seemed so silly and small up there. I let it go.

Meehan Crist’s Is It OK to Have a Child?

[peachdrug]

I can’t hide from myself. In poetry, the latent, existential ineffable can be transformed via my imagination. Since coming to this realization, I try to call myself out when I’m exhibiting avoidant behavior, or trying to obscure something. I write to confront myself on the page; this might not be how it is for others, but it continues to be true for me.

Poet Diana Khoi Nguyen on Family and Writing a Radical Eulogy for Her Brother

[tarbluesnegro]

I have long despised artists’ chatter about muses, voices that speak to them and enable a vision; the source of which they could not otherwise name. I thought of muses as inventions to protect one’s insight, to avoid questions like, ‘where do your ideas come from?’ or to escape inquiry, into the fuzzy area between autobiography and fiction. I regarded the mystery of creativity as a shield, erected by artists to avoid articulating, analyzing, or even knowing the details of their creative process, for fear it would fade away.

Toni Morrison’s interlude on writing Song of Solomon

[peachdrug]

The last time I have blogged or put together a string of paragraphs together was years ago. It was not peppered by distractions, disjointed twitter thread cuts, and the exaltation of boredom. It was not in the depths of stan twitter, but also not tied to any exponential growth outside of my old bedroom. I now no longer type from the same house. That bungalow, which was on the brink of falling apart, has already been torn away from the family lineage. I am now a different person than I was before, in a sense that I now have lived in a different country, is earning a monthly income, paying for a car loan, and back hunched scrutinizing my bills. It is a dream already achieved, a practical dream, a dream to show that I finally belonged to my age group, that I am in some ways functional and not incomplete. In between the free time, when I was trying to gather my personal space among the crowd bustling in the LRT trains, my fingers tied to scrolling through twitter. I walked into another cave. 

Currently my bookmark rests after the surah Al-Kahfi, the cave. My bookmark requests this: “choose a medium that does not consume you. No check-ins, no tweets, no ads, no updates, no comment.” I have owned it for a decade, and yet the language is still similar, if not more pervasive now. We have seen how technology, or social media, has moved beyond our own grasps in the past few years, but we run around in the same system and in limited verbs. My inability to really communicate how I have felt in the past few years was due to the entanglement with the expectation of hard selling my identity. Can this sentence do its job? Can this sentence truly reach my target? Can this sentence, for once, not tied to a monetary gain but to personify the clot that I carry within my being? Again, I am circling the darkness of the cave.  I am trying to understand where my resistance and the drought came from. They echo this: no one told you that depression would lead to memory loss. No one told you that depression would lead to muscle memory loss. No one told you that depression would erode you and your capability to build. Again, there is a need to reach a target. I admit that now that I have landed a job (and hit the one year mark! A milestone!), I have cried less. I could move through the day without truly losing it. But there are pockets of time where it crept up, such as now, when I wonder if I have done enough to really satisfy everyone in question. With every meeting, and now enhanced by the loss of body language, I find that my sentences never end, like pebbles sinking in the water after they realised that the ocean is too large for them to explore. And in this sinking I begin to ask myself if I am true, if I am alive, if I do have the power to truly carry this sentence I am about to ask. This is also my fear with my poetry (which is something I will talk about later). Again, I am afraid of the cave, and yet I am living in it.  But I want to learn to live in the cave. Or even leave a mark, provide it light, give its rocks and crevices a new meaning. I want to befriend the cave. Yes, it has consumed me the moment that I was born, but I can chisel it to the shape I desired. The darkness of the cave should never carry only one meaning, which is fear - but the darkness should also carry the meaning of beginning, becoming, or even comfort. Again, I am questioning the cave, but I also want to transform it into a womb, a breathing warmth, a meaning that tells me I am worthy of rest, if not happiness. 

[chiqkihyun]

Changkyun was asked to choose the best complimentn speech given to him from his hyungs but at the end he picked all of them and ran around like a tiny baby. How adorable! 

[caliphascheherazade]

“A man found a door and hung it on the wall. What kind of strategy is that? It’s not Socratic; it’s not scientific. I envy it. I strive for it. How should we size the days, where should we put our sadness, how can we find the hallway that isn’t there? Reframe the question, the poem suggests. I love that poem. I love the fact that I can read it in public without crying. It’s about desperation but it doesn’t enact the desperation, which is the kind of poem I usually write. Admitting failure hurts. Admitting desire hurts. Remembering with or without feeling hurts. I like all kinds of poems—emotionally distant or emotionally close—and I’m still amazed that words in a certain order can re-enact an event, but I want to learn how to talk about drowning without drowning. And sometimes I worry: what if I’m only painting the walls of the room I’m locked in? That’s a really uncomfortable question to consider.”

— Richard Siken

[showkis]

he knows monbebe so well ♡

[hyungkyun]

changkyun for tonymoly 💄🐶

[whentherewerebicycles]

“The term ‘feminist killjoys’ is well-earned. Sometimes, in the bid for rightness, feminists and hyperwoke folks can take the joy out of everything. I actually think it’s irresponsible to wreck shop in people’s world without giving them the tools to rebuild. It’s fine to quote Audre Lorde to people and tell them, ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’ The harder work is helping people find better tools to work with. We have to smash the patriarchy, for sure. And we have to dismantle white supremacy, and homophobia, and a whole bunch of other terrible shit that makes life difficult for people. Rage is great at helping us destroy things. That’s why people are so afraid of it.

But part of what I’ve been trying to say is that rage can help build things, too. The clarity that comes from rage should also tell us what kind of world we want to see, not just what kind of things we want to get rid of. I’m not interested in a feminist project that only works to tear down things. Black women know that justice is rarely found in the rubble. If your rage can do anything for you, I hope it can do for you what it has done for me – help us build the world we want to see. […]

Maintaining the capacity for joy is critical to the struggle for justice. Things are still as fucked up at the end of this book as they were at the beginning. But we can’t let the messed-up state of the world steal our joy. It is critical in reinvigorating our capacity for new visions. When we lack joy, we have a diminished capacity for self-love and self-valuing and for empathy. If political struggle is exercise for the soul, joy is the endorphin rush such struggles bring.”

– Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

[mesogeios]

Can you recommend some essays about speech or language?

Here are a few essays and articles about language use (off the top of my head). I hope that you enjoy them as much as I do!

How Words Fail by Cathy Park Hong

Politics and the English Language by George Orwell

Of Strangeness That Wakes Us by Ilya Kaminsky

The Meanings of a Word by Gloria Naylor

Mother Tongue by Yoojin Grace Wuertz

Borrowing a Simile by Walt Whitman

Word Order by Lewis H. Lapham

Four Essays by Mikhail Bakhtin

Nature: Chapter IV Language by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Strange Persistence of First Languages by Julie Sedivy

What Do You Lose When You Lose Your Language? by Joshua Fishman

[shitiunderline]

At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world. Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep - just this one. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don’t do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life’s length to listening, and nothing happens.

Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk (via shitiunderline)

[hoursofreading]

Libraries play an especially important role in promoting democratic culture—and challenging authoritarianism—because of the way they are staffed, managed and programmed. They are radically inclusive. They are governed by professionals who abide by powerful vocational norms: pursuing knowledge with the best tools at our disposal; being non-judgmental; respecting the dignity of all persons; maintaining privacy; treating everyone, regardless of social class, race, ethnicity, age, ability or citizenship status as equals. If, on one side of the battlefield, demagogues and tech titans are pushing us towards a post-truth era, on the other, librarians are pushing back.

Populism can be beaten back by libraries. Really - Open Future (via logicandgrace)

[shownuxhyungwon]

so… precious…

[lifeinpoetry]

So I’ll forever have a mother, I become                a daughter who goes by god. I urn                                                         my ghosts, know each by a name my own.

— K-Ming Chang, from “Closet space,” published in Poem-a-Day

[theweirdwideweb]

From the Wikipedia page about the Fermi Paradox: Given the high scientific probability for alien existence, why can we find no evidence of their existence whatsoever?

[othernotebooksareavailable]

A poem about loneliness