Secret Interference

Forgotten dialects, desires fearfully pursued.

[larmoyante]

Being alone is better than sitting next to a lover and feeling lonely.

Richard Linklater   (via thatkindofwoman)

[shutthefuckupshesarmed]

[secretinterference]

Certainly, each individual cannot reinvent all of History. But I think that each individual, woman or man, can and must reinvent their individual and collective histories. For this task the respect of bodies and perceptions of each person is indispensable. Each must stay aware of their obligations, consider their decisions. Nobody should believe. This psychic and sociological phenomenon generates dangerous and artificial powers. Belief is the destroyer of identity and of responsibility; it works against attention and fidelity to actual experience. It often appears as a distracting power-play to shortcomings or historical gaps, which exercise themselves in economies of discourse or in their accompanying systems of images.

Luce Irigaray, from 'Je, tu, nous'

[secretinterference]

Montreal was what I can only call a naive city. It had a naïveté of tone, an earnestness of spirit, that I still recognize in things from there - Cirque du Soleil to Hugue Dufour’s cooking. What they share is that they have not soured on the simpler kinds of pleasure. It was a sweet place, and even those of us who dreamed of a larger horizon and more varied flavours sensed how sweet it was to live there.

Adam Gopnik in The Walrus, October 2014

[fucktheory]

Three Regimes of Desire

[secretinterference]

Otâvio had sought, from the moment he met her, not to miss any of her details, telling himself: may no feeling of tenderness crystallize in me; I need to see her properly. However, as if she had sensed she was being examined, Joana turned to him at that precise moment, smiling, cold, not very passive. And foolishly he acted, spoke, confused and in a hurry to obey her. Instead of making her reveal herself and thus destroy herself in his power. And despite that air of one who was oblivious to the most ordinary things, like the very first time they had met she had flung him into himself! She had cast him into his own intimacy, coldly forgetting the comfortable little formulas that sustained him and make it easier for him to communicate with people.

Clarice Lispector, from Near to the Wild Heart

[stoicremains-deactivated2017102]

It is not the healthy, the confident, the proud, the joyous, the happy, that one must love - they have no need of one’s love! Arrogant and indifferent, they accept love only as homage that is theirs to command, as their due. The devotion of another is to them a mere embellishment, an ornament for the hair, a bracelet on the arm, not the whole meaning and bliss of their lives. Only those with whom life has dealt hardly, the wretched, the slighted, the uncertain, the unlovely, the humiliated, could really be helped by love. He who devotes his life to them atones to them for what life has taken from them. They alone know how to love and be loved as one should love - gratefully and humbly.

Stefan Zweig, Dangerous Pity (via whyallcaps)

[secretinterference]

How long have ghosts ever haunted anyone? Ghosts haunt historically for relatively short amounts of time. People complained about the Holocaust memorial in Berlin exactly because you don’t want the ghosts of the Holocaust dead in the middle of the city. I think the ghosts of the Holocaust have survived for longer in Germany than ghosts of previous injustices have survived anywhere else. The colonial issue is another one. The unjustly dead of the British have not survived. That’s an interesting question, and I think it has to do with an idea of colonial power. You can kill the ghosts—that’s the imperialist fantasy. The Roman idea that you could actually kill everyone in Jerusalem or Carthage and that would be the end of them. They would not come back. That is the fantasy of colonial power, and it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.

Thomas Laqueur interviewed in The New Inquiry

[laurajwellner]

Loss, 7/27/2014

[nottheabsenceofviolence]

Tonight you’re thinking of cities under crowns of snow and I stare at you like I’m looking through a window, counting birds. You wanted happiness, I can’t blame you for that, and maybe a mouth sounds idiotic when it blathers on about joy but tell me you love this, tell me you’re not miserable.

Richard Siken, Seaside Improvisation (via nottheabsenceofviolence)

[stoicremains-deactivated2017102]

I change too quickly: my today refutes my yesterday. When I ascend I often jump over steps, and no step forgives me that.

Friedrich Nietzsche,Thus Spoke Zarathustra  (via sisyphean-revolt)

[bookaddictiion]

I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublimed tears in their silences.

Virginia Woolf, The diary of Virginia Woolf, volume III (via bookaddictiion)

[adokal]

Layla and Majnun, ca. 1770, by Muhammad Zaman III. Zand Iran.

source

[adokal]

Portrait of a dancing girl, 1778, by Muhammad Baqir. Late Zand Iran.

source

[heteroglossia]

"The poet’s prime responsibility is to esteem nothing unworthy of notice, nothing too small or too large, too subtle or too obvious, to talk about.

To learn how to say everything and to keep silent.

Silence is the life of poetry. Not the silence of the uncommitted, but Vimalakirti’s silence that...

[theparisreview]

“The hardest thing in the world is simplicity.” —James Baldwin, born on this day in 1924.

[visaal-deactivated20161020]

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living, I want to know what you ache for. It doesn’t interest me how old you are, I want to know if you are willing to risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive. I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine. It doesn’t interest me where you live or how rich you are, I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and be sweet to the ones you love. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and truly like the company you keep in the empty moments of your life.

Jon Blais  (via thatkindofwoman)