give me words

sideblog for books and quotes

[myfairynuffstuff]

Ton van Steenbergen (b.1962) - Books and Starling. Egg tempera on panel.

[pollen]

Czeslaw Milosz, from "Ars Poetica?"

[homoerotisch]

why has anyone bothered to write a kissing scene after annie proulx wrote this in 1997

[rotgospels]

Anonymous love letter between two twelfth-century nuns, Translated by Peter Dronke in Medieval Latin and the rise of European Love-Lyric, II.  

[funeral]

This is not unlike how we continually create and consume images of violence and horror, whether in writing or films. Much like the vampire—monster incarnate, death itself—creating more death by feeding on the living, we as human beings, have an unbearable need to witness the suffering of others as a way of affirming our very existence. To put it another way, we feed on images of death and suffering in order to feel alive. Looking deeper, we can differentiate between two distinct ways in which fear directly affects action. If we know why we're scared we can subsequently articulate that fear to others . . . In this sense, fear drives us to seek company. Other times, however, fear exists as nothing more than vague dread or anxiety. The threat isn't so much perceived as it is lurking in the periphery. This sort of fear is isolating and drives us deeper within the self.

David Peak, The Spectacle of the Void

[random-brushstrokes]

Albert André - Woman Reading Before Window (1903)

[funeral]

A cultural system of significance seeks to avoid events that are disruptive for a given system of significance or seeks to downplay or explain away the phenomena that are unavoidably disruptive . . . If we accept this general distinction, then we might explicate the exact nature of the “confusion” that induces horror in the following way. The backrooms start being terrifying not just when I find myself surrounded by the cultural cavities, i.e. by the disorder and decay of meaningfulness. It occurs when I obtain a first unclear feeling that here cavities are not anomalies but the constitutive principles of organization of this situation. A horror-situation, i.e. a setting where horror can meaningfully appear, is characterized by an inversed setting where something like a cultural cavity takes the position of cultural height and cultural heights are moved to the status of an anomaly that themselves call for an explanation and rearrangement; in backrooms, I myself become an anomaly.

Daniil Koloskov, “Beyond the Reach: Horror and Phenomenal Life”

[quotespile]

“He had grown more animated while he spoke, and his desperate, wild-eyed demeanour had softened into the genial mask of the raconteur. I had the impression that these were stories he had told before and liked to tell, as though he had discovered the power and pleasure of reliving events with their sting removed. The skill, I saw, lay in skirting close enough to what appeared to be the truth without allowing what you actually felt about it to regain its power over you.”

— Rachel Cusk, Kudos

[readingwonderer]

What, then, was the knowledge that God wanted to keep from Adam and Eve in the Garden? Theologians will debate this question without end, but it seems to me the most important answer is hidden in plain sight. The content of the knowledge Adam and Eve could gain by tasting of the fruit does not matter nearly as much as its form—that is, the very fact that there was spiritual knowledge of any kind to be had from a tree: from nature. The new faith sought to break the human bond with magic nature, to disenchant the world of plants and animals by directing our attention to a single God in the sky. Yet Jehovah couldn’t very well pretend the tree of knowledge didn’t exist, not when generations of plant-worshiping pagans knew better. So the pagan tree is allowed to grow even in Eden, though ringed around now with a strong taboo. Yes, there is spiritual knowledge in nature, the new God is acknowledging, and its temptations are fierce, but I am fiercer still. Yield to it, and you will be punished.

The Botany of Desire by Micael Pollan.

[readingwonderer]

Paracelsus’s grand project, which arguably is still going on today, represents one of the many ways the Judeo-Christian tradition has deployed its genius to absorb, or co-opt, the power of the pagan faith it set out to uproot. In much the same way that the new monotheism folded into its rituals the people’s traditional pagan holidays and spectacles, it desperately needed to do something about their ancient devotion to magic plants. Indeed, the story of the forbidden fruit in Genesis suggests that nothing was more important. The challenge these plants posed to monotheism was profound, for they threatened to divert people’s gaze from the sky, where the new God resided, down to the natural world all around them. The magic plants were, and remain, a gravitational force pulling us back to Earth, to matter, away from the there and then of Christian salvation and back to the here and now. Indeed, what these plants do to time is perhaps the most dangerous thing about them—dangerous, that is, from the perspective of a civilization organized on the lines of Christianity and, more recently, capitalism. Christianity and capitalism are both probably right to detest a plant like cannabis. Both faiths bid us to set our sights on the future; both reject the pleasures of the moment and the senses in favor of the expectation of a fulfillment yet to come—whether by earning salvation or by getting and spending. More even than most plant drugs, cannabis, by immersing us in the present and offering something like fulfillment here and now, short-circuits the metaphysics of desire on which Christianity and capitalism (and so much else in our civilization) depend.

The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan.

[random-brushstrokes]

Bertha Wegmann - Resignation (1890)

[bluewillowmoon]

“The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.”

— Mikko Harvey, from “For M,” Foundry (no. 9, September 2018)

[triflingthing]

Boston’s Brattle Book Shop

[theoptia]

Hélène Cixous, from Stigmata: Escaping Texts

[petaltexturedskies]

his mind was indeed my library, and whenever it was opened to me, I entered bliss. Intellectually imperfect as I was, I could read little; there were few bound and printed volumes that did not weary me — whose perusal did not fag and blind — but his tomes of thought were collyrium to the spirit's eyes; over their contents, inward sight grew clear and strong. I used to think what a delight it would be for one who loved him better than he loved himself, to gather and store up those handfuls of gold-dust, so recklessly flung to heaven's reckless winds.

Charlotte Brontë, Villette

[funeral]

Many places have a "forest that shouldn't be entered." Even people who are used to working in the mountains feel there is something there. They are suddenly overcome with fear and it becomes the custom to avoid certain places. These places exist. I don't know what is there, but I think they are real . . . The world is more than we can fathom with our five senses. The world doesn't exist just for humans. So I think it is all right to have such things. This is why I think it's a mistake to think about nature from the idea of efficiency, that forests should be preserved because they are essential for human beings . . . I am concerned, because for me the deep forest is connected in some way to the darkness deep in my heart. I feel that if it is erased, then the darkness inside my heart would also disappear, and my existence would grow shallow.

Hayao Miyazaki, “Totoro Was Not Made as a Nostalgia Piece” in Starting Point: 1979-1996

[fer1972]

Portrait of a small boy reading by Gluyas Williams