uncertainty is seed

a commonplace book

[lilapetrichorwinteryrogue]

why would you do this to me

[mavity]

fumbled the interaction

[ghost-bison]

skidaddled

[protectyouropacities]

This is the funniest possible antidote to the trauma of this scene

[glowpart2]

Laura Henriksen

[lazyydaisyyy]

Gina Nutt, Night Rooms

[protectyouropacities]

“Now I will tell how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; farther down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed. This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as passage and as support. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below: rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on strings, dumb-waiters, showers, trapezes and rings for children’s games, cable cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants. Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long.”

— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

[protectyouropacities]

“Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you.” — Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Do not care if  you just arrive in your skeleton. Would love to take a walk with you. Miss you. Would love to make you shrimp saganaki. Like you used to make me when you were alive. Love to feed you. Sit over steaming bowls of pilaf. Little roasted tomatoes covered in pepper and nutmeg. Miss you. Would love to walk to the post office with you. Bring the ghost dog. We’ll walk past the waterfall and you can tell me about the after. Wish you. Wish you would come back for a while. Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know you. I know you will know me even though. I’m bigger now. Grayer. I’ll show you my garden. I’d like to hop in the leaf pile you raked but if you want to jump in? I’ll rake it for you. Miss you standing looking out at the river with your rake in your hand. Miss you in your puffy blue jacket. They’re hip now. I can bring you a new one if you’ll only come by. Know I told you it was okay to go. Know I told you it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me? You always believed me. Wish you would come back so we could talk about truth. Miss you. Wish you would walk through my door. Stare out from the mirror. Come through the pipes.

[namedvesta]

Marguerite Duras, Negative Hands, 1978

[free-parking-blog]

Fayum Mummy Portraits, 1st-3rd century CE, encaustic painting on panel. From John Berger's The Shape of a Pocket:

They are the earliest painted portraits that have survived; they were painted whilst the Gospels of the New Testament were being written.  Why then do they strike us today as being so immediate? Why does their individuality feel like our own? Why is their look more contemporary than any look to be found in the rest of the two millennia of traditional European art which followed them? The Fayum portraits touch us as if they had been painted last month.  Why?

The future has been, for the moment, downsized, and the past is being made redundant. Meanwhile the media surround people with an unprecedented number of images, many of which are faces. The faces harangue ceaselessly by provoking envy, new appetites, ambition… the images of all these faces are processed and selected in order to harangue as noisily as possible, so that one appeal out-pleads and eliminates the next appeal. And people come to depend upon the impersonal noise as a proof of being alive!

Imagine then what happens when somebody comes upon the silence of the Fayum faces and stops short. Images of men and women making no appeal whatsoever, asking for nothing, yet declaring themselves and anybody who is looking at them, alive! They incarnate, frail as they are, a forgotten self-respect. They confirm, despite everything, that life was and is a gift… The painted faces, too, are flawed, and more precious than the living one was, sitting there in the painter’s workshop, where there was a smell of melting beeswax. Flawed because very evidently handmade. More precious because the painted gaze is entirely concentrated on the life it knows it will one day lose.

And so they gaze on us, the Fayum portraits, like the missing of our own century.

[novr-deactivated20190712]

Louise Bourgeois, I Did Everything I Could Every Day of My Life I

Fabric, 25.4 x 69.9 cm

[namedvesta]

Anaïs Nin, Prologue from House of Incest, 𝟣𝟫𝟥𝟨

[weltenwellen]

Joy Sullivan, from "Late Bloomer", Instructions for Traveling West

[mayahart]

THE GOOD PLACE (2016—2020) cr. Michael Schur

[protectyouropacities]

“My love when this is past and you have turned away —or I and we are no longer as we are today I will be more having known your love I will be more and not alone.”

— Stephany

[protectyouropacities]

“In the Silence” — Stephany

In the silence of the city night when the lonely watch the sky in yearning

I at rest beside you lie in peace

I searched a thousand skies before you came

And in the morning when the world is new, the lonely turn away

as I turn to you beside me

And in the quiet of the afternoon when the lonely roam,

I turn inside and you are with me still

I roamed a thousand miles before you came.

[protectyouropacities]

“The Wild Iris” — Louise Glück

At the end of my suffering there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. Then nothing. The weak sun flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being a soul and unable to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth bending a little. And what I took to be birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember passage from the other world I tell you I could speak again: whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice:

from the center of my life came a great fountain, deep blue shadows on azure sea water.

[toadstoolthrone]

The Bear (2022) // Instructions for Traveling West - Joy Sullivan

[recoverynerdheals]