tender

var sc_project=10394505; var sc_invisible=1; var sc_security="14646ad1"; var scJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://secure." : "http://www."); document.write(""); "Tenderness toward the unknown and anonymous, which was tenderness to the self.”  ― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient journal, feminism, islam,

[jackofalltradescrafting]

Rosy-faced Lovebirds on a cactus in Paradise Valley, Arizona. 

[2productive]

[bobbole]

Japanese mother of pearl fantail dove, 1880

[bobbole]

Japanese mother of pearl fantail dove, 1880

[tenderculture]

“True blind rage is like true blind courage—if you have ever seen a squirrel trapped in a cage or a bird fly into a room by accident, you will understand this. It does not matter that the squirrel’s claws cannot shake open the cage, or the windowpane will not give way to the bird’s thumping. For some—animals, children—despair and doom galvanize.” — Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

[shopcat]

do you want to see the best trail cam photo ever

[shopcat]

let it be known he is chilling like crazy

[litteraeignotae]

Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman

[tenderculture]

In Preacher’s Daughter, Isaiah is a murderer. But in the holy texts, he is a prophet who was martyred, murdered in gruesome circumstances, but whose promises of a coming messiah welcomes hope, redemption, and healing after a time of suffering and tribulation. What to make of this subversion? Maybe the fact that abusers can be adept at appearing like a promise, a redemption, and a source of love, only to later to reveal themselves as the opposite. The martyr in Preacher’s Daughter is not the namesake of the prophet, it is Ethel. Blessed are the meek. Through the mythic, the religious, the profane, Ethel tells us the terrifying truth. The world wants to comfort us with images of victory and illusions of liberation. But reality is different. Terror still resides here.  What is the cost of intergenerational and childhood trauma? What is the cost when that is combined with gender-based violence? It costs us our very life. Before you traumatise your girls with ideologies that only know of punishment and limitation, think of the emotional life of the woman she will become. Think of the fate that you invite for her. No woman deserves the fate of Ethel Cain, who knew liberation only in heaven.

Ethel Cain, Generational Trauma, the Sacred and the Profane, Diana Rahim

[hairtusk]

Andrei Tarkovsky's mother, Maria Vishnyakova (1930s) | Margarita Terekhova in Mirror (1975, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)

[sailermoon]

huge shout out to this little kid for writing my favorite poem

[tenderculture]

dreamt i was unwell and heading home. but on the way there i notice a brown bear who was also not feeling well. i felt so much sympathy for the creature, so alone and unwell just like me. i know it would not be able to take public transportation or any other kind of transporation really, so we walked together the whole journey home which would take 2 hours.

[kindwhispers]

Taipei Story (1985) dir. Edward Yang

[ecultured]

nina simone photographed by michael ochs in 1967

[caesarsaladinn]

I missed most of the Iraq war due to being a baby, but every time I read about it I start wondering why we aren’t all talking about it all of the time

[caesarsaladinn]

it feels like the sort of unforced error that should be obsessively postmortemed for the next fifty years, a catastrophe that should utterly delegitimize the society that made it happen, but instead everybody’s like “oh yeah, that. lmao, that was crazy”

[septembriseur-deactivated202502]

I have to add to this because I was teaching a text about this topic to a bunch of post-2003 undergraduates recently and each time I do so I experience the same sense of disorientation.

This is a war about which the accepted, mainstream consensus is that no one is able to explain the U.S. decision to invade Iraq. The people involved in that decision are unable, in retrospect, to explain or justify it. In almost every postmortem of this decision, you will find some reference to the fact that Richard Haass, who advised Colin Powell at the State Department in 2001-3, has said that he “will go to [his] grave not knowing” why the U.S. invaded Iraq. George Packer, in The Assassins’ Gate, describes the invasion as “something that some people wanted to do.”

This is a war that destroyed a country. It created ISIS. It destabilized the Middle East. It killed a minimum of c. 200,000 people. It displaced millions more. It resulted in devastating losses to the cultural heritage of Iraq. And twenty years on, no one is able to explain why it happened.

It seems to me that there are several important lessons here.

[mournfulroses]

Kim Addonizio, from Mortal Trash: Poems; "Scrapbook," originally published in 2016

[mournfulroses]

Franz Kafka, from a letter to Felice Bauer written in 1912, featured in Letters To Felice

[mysteriouseggsbenedict]

I love Matilda because it's a story about a child who sees injustice around her and gets mad about it and questions why things aren't fair, and instead of the ending being that she learns how the world works and that life isn't fair, she catapults one of the adults who abused her out of a building with her mind