FEVER

[barcarole]

I am the artist who loves shapes and all kinds of beauty. Beauty is not a relative thing. Beauty is God. God is beauty with feeling. Beauty is in feeling. I love beauty because I feel it and therefore understand it. Thinking people write nonsense about beauty. Beauty cannot be discussed. Beauty cannot be criticized. I am no criticism. Criticism is an attempt to be clever. I flaunt my beauty. I feel love for beauty.

Vaslav Nijinsky, Diaries (trans. Kyril FitzLyon)

[trulyvincent]

Esther Sarto

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

She was falling asleep inside herself. And, if she had passed through love and its hell, she was now combing her hair before the mirror, for an instant with no world at all in her heart.

Clarice Lispector, from The Complete Stories: Love (via violentwavesofemotion)

[wonders-of-the-cosmos]

Venus, Mars, Spica and a Meteor Caught; The Pleiades, Hyades and Orion.

by: Joseph Brimacombe

[lifeinpoetry]

Maybe I haven’t loved men the way I love women although often in the afternoons and now somewhere in the middle of the country, I want even the bad things to do over. The wheels coming down right before landing. The wheels you can feel but don’t see. And the people, how being with people, has turned out to be, more or less, something like that.

Alex Dimitrov, from “People,” published in The Journal (via lifeinpoetry)

[zoiodlula]

[estorossa]

[nemophilies-deactivated20190428]

I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

Czeslaw Milosz, from Esse (via malignantbloomer)

[20aliens-deactivated20200625]

Carole Bellaiche

[kissedbythevoid]

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

I’ll have to be all by myself, forever. I’ve missed the life that was supposed to be mine. I’ve shut myself off from it.

Margaret Atwood, from Moral Disorder and Other Stories; “The Other Place,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

[nemophilies-deactivated20190428]

Cities are smells: Acre is the smell of iodine and spices. Haifa is the smell of pine and wrinkled sheets. Moscow is the smell of vodka on ice. Cairo is the smell of mango and ginger. Beirut is the smell of the sun, sea, smoke, and lemons. Paris is the smell of fresh bread, cheese, and derivations of enchantment. Damascus is the smell of jasmine and dried fruit. Tunis is the smell of night musk and salt. Rabat is the smell of henna, incense, and honey. A city that cannot be known by its smell is unreliable. Exiles have a shared smell: the smell of longing for something else; a smell that remembers another smell. A panting, nostalgic smell that guides you, like a worn tourist map, to the smell of the original place. A smell is a memory and a setting sun. Sunset, here, is beauty rebuking the stranger. But to love the sunset is not, as they say, one of the attributes of exile. Memory, your personal museum, takes you into the realms of what is lost. A sesame field, a plot of lettuce, mint, a round sun that falls into the sea. What is lost grows in you and in the sunset, which grants what is distant the attributes of paradise and purges it of any defect. Whatever is lost is worshipped.

Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence, trans. Sinan Antoon  (via stoicremains)

[lifeinpoetry]

The most beautiful hearse                 I have ever seen is parked in front of my stoop Perched          hands folded for six to eight weeks twinkling like a siren                           a new idea of love

Trees are planted but don’t exist yet They are leaning non existent             into us A trough of hearts meets me in the anxious sun I could rot here

Something like            the holy spirit pours you over bruised ice There isn’t anything              more to say than holy Beautiful men never looking upon me

I take music self-stirred        and sleep alone           curve into the morning like an almond My shoulders                      lush as romantics You wash up on a barstool smooth heartache                black sand

— Morgan Parker, “Lush Life,” There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce

[antigonies]

Exchange of eyes, finite, at the wrong time: image-constant, lignified the retina-: the sign of eternity.

Paul Celan, “Night” (“Nacht”, Selected poems, translated by Michael Hamburger)

[stoicremains-deactivated2017102]

My simpler thoughts in vain had stemmed The current of this madness free, But that my thinking is condemned To symbol and analogy: I deemed a circle might condense With calm all mystery’s violence.

Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems (via stoicremains)

[lifeinpoetry]

Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power (. . .) that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.

Roland Barthes, from Mourning Diary tr. Richard Howard (via lifeinpoetry)

[scovex]