stealing into language @stealingintolanguage - Tumblr Blog

There is a country Lost, a moon grows in its reeds, where all that died of frost as we did, glows and sees. It sees, for it has eyes, each eye an earth, and bright. The night, the night, the lyes. This eye-child's gift is sight. It sees, it sees, we see, I see you, you see me. Before this hour has ended ice will rise from the dead.

Paul Celan, "Ice, Eden" (translated by Michael Hamburger)

#paul celan

Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.

Nicolas Malebranche

#writing #attention #malebranche #paul celan #mindfulness #soul

Finally, after five months of my life during which I could write nothing that would have satisfied me, and for which no power will compensate me, though all were under obligation to do so, it occurs to me to talk to myself again. Whenever I really question myself, there was always a response forthcoming, there was always something in me to catch fire, in this heap of straw that I have been for five months and whose fate, it seems, is to be set afire during the summer and consumed more swiftly than the onlooker can blink his eye.

Franz Kafka, from Diaries

#writing #c #franz kafka #radical mental health

Bring me to the brink of mountains, mystic Dread, rapture of fear I feel and …fail. Still: the swallow slicing blue is beautiful. Stil: the cloud-tugged bell tower’s frozen music. There is in me a man alive, a man alone, Who, heart-stopped above a deep abyss, Can hear a snowball grow one snowflake less, The clock-tick accretions of dust becoming stone. No. I am not that man, not that sadness With its precise ice, its exquisite rue. The pain that sings in me does not sing, and is true. O whirlwind, O real wind In which the avalanche is happening, All my soul is bells, which will not ring.

Osip Mandelstam, translated by Christian Wiman

#poetry #osip mandelstam

unravellingrussia

The Bridge in the Woods by Rafail Sergeevich Levitsky (1847–1940), a Russian impressionist artist who was an active participant in the Peredvizhniki (Itinerant) Movement.

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stealingintolanguage

I remember another article/news item from last year that used similar bullshit terminology to gloss over child prostitution. It introduced an 11-year-old prostituted girl and wrote that she “serves 20-25 customers per day.” Fucking disgusting. An 11-year-old prostituted girl is not a “sex worker” and she does not “serve customers,” what a gross way to make what happens to her sound normal and unobjectionable. In all the news and reports of human trafficking and child prostitution I’ve read, I have never, ever seen anything close to: "20-25 adult men rape this 11-year-old girl every day." Not only does describing the girl’s life situation this way make the wording much more powerful and eye-opening, it names the agent of her misery. It names the problem.

#feminism #language #rape #child abuse #prostitution #patriarchy #pornography #silencing #thank you

I looked out across the Ocean, and determined to drown myself. I was up to my chin when the shout came, and I will never forget it. Never. For it seems to me that any hope in life is such a shout; a voice that answers the silent place of despair. It is silence that most needs an answering — when I can no longer speak, hear me.

Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods

#radical mental health #madnes #despair #hope #voice

And so when you have lost everything, no more roads, no direction, no fixed signs, no ground, no thoughts able to resist other thoughts, when you are lost, beside yourself, and you continue getting lost, when you become the panicky movement of getting lost, then, that’s when, where you are unwoven weft, flesh that lets strangeness come through, defenseless being, without resistance, without batten, without skin, inundated with otherness, it’s in these breathless times that writings traverse you, songs of an unheard-of purity flow through you, addressed to no one, they well up, surge forth, from the throats of your unknown inhabitants, these are the cries that death and life hurl in their combat.

Helene Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays

#writing #helene cixous #terror #despondency #lost #loneliness #vulnerability #madness #radical mental health

kafkaesque-world

You are being judged not because you did something wrong, it is because you were accused of doing something wrong.

Franz Kafka (via kafkaesque-world)

#radical mental health #franz kafka

cockedlockedandchoking

For years mental health professionals taught people that they could be psychologically healthy without social support, that “unless you love yourself, no one else will love you.”…The truth is, you cannot love yourself unless you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation

Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. — “The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog” (via verthandi)

#radical mental health #victim blaming #peer support #love #loneliness #isolation

ailurophobicailurophile-deactiv

The way the animals live, everybody envies them, because look, a cat, when it walks—did you ever see a cat making an aesthetic mistake. Did you ever see a badly formed cloud? Were the stars ever misarranged? When you watch the foam breaking on the seashore, did it ever make a bad pattern? Never. And yet we think in what we do, we make mistakes.

Alan Watts, The Nature of Consciousness (via thereligiousnonbeliever)

#alan watts

housesofsleep

Anna Kavan and the Politics of Madness Victoria Walker

10 December 2013 7pm - exhibition viewing from 6pm

Author Anna Kavan’s critical and popular reception since her death in 1968 has been defined by a cult of personality fuelled by revelations about her psychiatric breakdown, heroin use and adoption of her own fictional character’s name. Victoria Walker unravels some of the accumulated mythology around this writer, and examines her complex association with, and interest in, early twentieth-century psychiatry and psychotherapy.

As well as being treated in private asylums and nursing homes, Kavan underwent a short analysis at the Tavistock Clinic, experienced Ludwig Binswanger’s method of existential psychotherapy at the Bellevue Sanatorium, and had a close personal relationship with her longtime psychiatrist Karl Bluth. Kavan promoted a radical politics of madness, giving voice to the disenfranchised and marginalized psychiatric patient and presaging the anti-psychiatry movement.

Part of a season of performances, talks, films and events accompanying the exhibition ‘Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors’, 10 October 2013 - 2 February 2014. (Thanks, Sean.)

#anna kavan #radical mental health #madness #psychiatry

protoslacker

True sadism, enjoying another person’s distress, is very rare. Normal people would rather just remain oblivious to the suffering of others. Knowledge would spoil their fun, that is, their ability to enjoy the things gleaned or taken from these Others.

Antti Nylén in Eurozine. On meat-eating (via protoslacker)

protoslacker

Those who are banging hard at the wall are deemed barbarians and violent. But we often forget that the wall itself is a form of violence and the decision to build it is perhaps the more violent act. Structural violence escapes blame by naming itself as an objective reality. It insists that the wall was there since time immemorial; it has no history because it represents the natural order of things. It cannot be demolished because it is contrary to natural law.

Raymond Palantino at Mong Palantino. INVISIBLE VIOLENCE (via protoslacker)