Among the Narcissi.

[seasons-in-hell]

Otto Marseus van Schrieck (1619-1678), Forest Floor with Snakes and Butterflies, 1670

[sisyphean-revolt]

Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books can leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words. Words can be thrown together. It is their order and when they catch you -- their  time.

Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

[sisyphean-revolt]

For some, to find beauty is to search through ruins. For some of us beauty must be made over and over again out of the sometimes fragile, sometimes dangerous. To write is to be involved in this act of translation, of succumbing or leaning into another body’s idiom.

Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

[sisyphean-revolt]

Earnestness...becomes the living of each day as if it were the last and also the first in a long life, and the choosing of work that does not depend on whether one is granted a lifetime to complete it well or only a brief time to have begun it well.

Søren Kierkegaard, “At a Graveside,” from Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions

[sisyphean-revolt]

Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood. In the latter case his vanity may suffer; but in the former it will be his heart, his sympathy, forever saying, 'Oh, why do all of you also want to have it as hard as I?'

Friedrich Nietzsche,  §290 Beyond Good and Evil

[centuriespast]

GUILLAUMIN, Armand Barges in the Snow 1881 Oil on canvas Musée Bonnat, Bayonne

[sisyphean-revolt]

If one considers...that a man's every action, not only his books, in some way becomes the occasion for other actions, decisions, and thoughts; that everything which is happening is inextricably tied to everything which will happen; then one understands the real immortality, that of movement: what once has moved is like an insect in amber, enclosed and immortalized in the general intertwining of all that exists.

Friedrich Nietzsche  § 208, Human All Too Human

[sisyphean-revolt]

Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors. For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom.

Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”

[centuriespast]

LOISEAU, Gustave Orchard in Spring 1899-1900 Oil on canvas, 38 x 46 cm Private collection

[sisyphean-revolt]

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury”

[sisyphean-revolt]

For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, 'beautiful/and tough as chestnut/stanchions against (y)our nightmare of weakness/' and of impotence. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling.

Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury”

[sisyphean-revolt]

Certainly, philosophy has many refined ways of harmonizing its concepts on the obsessive timbre of death: above all, the concept of a nothing that displaces the being (ente) of ephemeral substance, and thus forces it to find refuge in the reign of an eternal and disenchanted being (essere) -- pure thought, as Parmenides and Hegel would say.

Adriana Cavarero, “Thinking Difference”

[sisyphean-revolt]

There are always facts, always appearances because every human is a corporeal appearing to the world; and to the need for meaning that these facts require, thought, as language, responds.

Adriana Cavarero, “Thinking Difference”

[atmospheric-minimalism]

Cy Twombly,  Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair, 1985

[sisyphean-revolt]

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings...The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance.

Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic

[sisyphean-revolt]

The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need -- the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic  value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love.  But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.

Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic

[sisyphean-revolt]

One can only become a philosopher, not be one. As soon as one thinks one is a philosopher, one stops becoming one.

Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments #54