The Spotless Mind @stunstained - Tumblr Blog

“Can you read my hands?” ― Nuala Archer

1.Ocean Vuong / 2.Laura Makabrescu / 3.Sylvia Plath / 4.Clarice Lispector / 5.Adam Custins / 6.Richard Siken / 7.Ilenia Tesoro / 8.Rod McKuen / 9.Adam Custins / 10.Natalie Díaz / 11.Lew Thomas / 12.Ocean Vuong / 13.Adam Custins / 14.Nikki Giovanni / 15.Jen Mazza / 16.Louise Glück / 17.Franz Kafka / 18.Christine Brache / 19.Richard Siken / 20.Philippe Bourgoin / 21.Benjamin Alire Sáenz / 22.Bruno Munari / 23.Ocean Vuong

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Grief is just love with no place to go.

– unknown // Art piece by Ikenaga Yasunari

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Gelitin, Hase, giant knitted rabbit installed hillside in the Piedmont region of Italy, 2005

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I photographed two unknown souls under a beautiful tree.

Moments of everyday life <3

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Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka / Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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Portrait of Fryderyk in Shifting Light by Richard Siken

There is something terribly wrong with his face– empty, restless, one side older than the other. What is a thing? Sediment. A slow river clogged with silt. I sussed the gesso into foam and white roses, stalling. I troubled the shadows and silvered his edges. What can you know about a person? They shift in the light. You can’t light up all sides at once. Add a second light and you get a second darkness, it’s only fair. He is looking at the wall and I am looking at his looking. Difficult thing, to be scrutinized so long. I find parts that overlap with mine and light them up in clays and creams, yellow music singing pink, the flicker of his mouth a purple rust. His face congeals as he settles in. His hair is bronze in here, not gold: walnut, bark, and cinnamon, chipped brick tipped in ink. My shadow falls across his face, blue milk and pistachio, his eyes shine like wedding rings. My shadow falls across him and it doesn’t go away. Some hours later the light has shifted, the floorboards creak. You can’t paint the inside of anything, so why would you try? Painting the inside of anything is dangerous. I imagined my wrists broken just enough to keep the feeling from crawling up my arm. Dangerous thing: an open arm, an open channel. All these things, rungs of the ladder. Lovers do the looking while strangers look away. It isn’t fair, the depths of my looking, the threat of my looking. It’s rude to shake a man visible and claim the results. This side of his face, now this side of his face. His profile up against the tulips. I put down the brush and walked around the room. Even when I look away I am still looking. He is inside his body and I am inside my body and it matters less and less. Shared face, shared looking. A collaboration. He didn’t expect to be handed over, to be delivered. To be tricked into his own face. Anyone can paint a mask. It’s boring. And everyone secretly wants to collaborate with the enemy, to construct a truer version of the self. How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it’s some kind of murder? Difficult, to be confronted with the fact of yourself. Opaque in the sense of finally solid, in the sense of see me, not through me. The selves, glaze on glaze, accumulating their moods and minutes. We tremble and I paint the trembling. I enlarged his mouth and everything went blurry, a forgery. It might as well be. And all my fingers turned to twigs. Inside himself he jumped a little. Why build a room you can live in? Why build a shed for your fears? The life of the body is a nightmare. This is my hand over his face, which isn’t his face anymore, revising. I made a shape of the shape he made, subtracted what he shared with anyone else. There wasn’t much left but it felt like him, wild and scared. It was too much to bear. I put down the brush and looked at my hands. I turned off the headlights of my looking and let the animal get away.