[majestativa]

My muse is ringed in black, and my lyre plays funeral dirges. A black veil covers my emotions.

RENZO NOVATORE — The Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore, transl. by Wolfi Landstreicher, (2012)

[rose1water]

“I [asked] for a proof of God. And I smelled the most intense and overwhelming fragrance of roses.”

— Clarice Lispector

[sun-death]

Gods, Spirits, Fairies: Non-Primitive Accretive Technology and Ancient Accretive Residue.

Modernity frequently interprets ancient religion through a framework of primitivism. Gods, spirits, idols, and ritual practices are treated

[89rooms]

For I am I: ergo, the truth of myself; my own sphinx, conflict, chaos, vortex—asymmetric to all rhythms, oblique to all paths. I am the prism between black and white: mine own unison in duality.

Austin Osman Spare - 'The Logomachy of Zos'

[philosophybits]

“To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it. Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no-one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy. The only relation of consciousness to happiness is gratitude: in which lies its incomparable dignity.”

— Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 72

[bonewoven]

But gnosis is not primarily rational knowledge. The Greek language distinguishes between scientific or reflective knowledge (“He knows mathematics”) and knowing through observation or experience (“He knows me”), which is gnosis.

As the gnostics use the term, we could translate it as, “insight,” for gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself. And to know oneself, they claimed, is to know human nature and human destiny.

— Introduction [xix] of The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

[funeral]

To die means to be capable of death as death. The animal perishes. It has death neither ahead of itself nor behind it. Death is the shrine of Nothing, that is, of that which in every respect is never something that merely exists, but which nevertheless presences, even as the mystery of Being itself. As the shrine of Nothing, death harbors within itself the presencing of Being. As the shrine of Nothing, death is the shelter of Being. We now call mortals mortals—not because their earthly life comes to an end, but because they are capable of death as death. Mortals are who they are, as mortals, present in the shelter of being. They are the presencing relation to Being as Being.

Martin Heidegger, "The Thing" in Poetry, Language, Thought

[malviver]

[philosophybits]

“Scrutinizing ever so carefully, crafty in wisdom, parading your arrogance — all this invites mistrust.”

— Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, Watson tr. (Ch 13)

[undinesea]

The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness, he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences.

Arthur Rimbaud, “The ‘Voyant’ Letter to Paul Demeny,” from Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950

[quotespile]

“He was almost intrigued by the idea of giving in to his oddness, turning into one of those remote, ineffectual creatures, so warped by their solitude that they became distasteful to normal people.”

— Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer

[bardskull]

“It can clearly be said that tyranny suppresses and eliminates freedom — but, on the other hand, tyranny is only possible where freedom has been domesticated and has evaporated into vacuous concepts.”

— The Forest Passage, Ernst Jünger (1951).

[rotgospels]

“She felt in turn chosen and damned, cherished daughter of God and terrible child of the devil.”

— Paul Lachance, Angela of Foligno: Complete Works

[rozieramati]

carl jung

[acertainknot]

Post-literacy won’t replace reason with madness, but it might give us madness of a new and different type.

Kriss, S. (2026) 'Reading is Magic: What Will Happen in Our Second Peasanthood', Numb at the Lodge, 12 April. Available at: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/reading-is-magic (Accessed 16 April).

[weekendpoetry]

"Les gens n'ont de charme que par leur folie. Voilà ce qui est difficile à comprendre. Le vrai charme des gens c'est le côté où ils perdent un peu les pédales, c'est le côté où ils ne savent plus très bien où ils en sont. Ça ne veut pas dire qu'ils s'écroulent au contraire, ce sont des gens qui ne s'écroulent pas. Mais, si tu ne saisis pas la petite racine ou le petit grain de folie chez quelqu'un, tu peux pas l'aimer. On est tous un peu déments, et j'ai peur, ou je suis bien content, que le point de démence de quelqu'un ce soit la source même de son charme."

"La folie des gens". Gilles Deleuze

[serpentsleep]

“I no longer see in me anything but cracks, impotence, useless agitation. I feel corrupt; everything that I touch is corrupt.”

—

Georges Bataille (via nssrnv)

Inner Experience