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and kneeling at the edge of the transparent sea i shall shape for myself a new heart from salt and mud.

[self-titled-lives]

Church steeple struck by lightning in Baltimore, MD on the morning of March 28th

Photo by Barbara Haddock Taylor of The Baltimore Sun

[forked-tongue-blasphemer]

Unicorn

Book of hours.

MS M.358, fol. 12v. Morgan Library, ca. 1447.

[kosmogrl]

[weltenwellen]

“Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all.”

— José Saramago, tr. by Tim Crosfield, from his nobel speech c. 1998

[kosmogrl]

[pinkbeetroot]

[maxierodeo]

On "ST. SÉBASTIEN" (IDA RUBINSTEIN)

Léon Bakst, 1911, illustration.

Bakst was the stage designer for the production of Le Martyre de saint Sébastien, by Claude Debussy. In this illustration, Bakst depicts Ida Rubinstein, bound and pierced, as Saint Sebastian. Le Martyre was not a success, (having only a limited run,) much to do with the casting of Ida Rubinstein. Besides her womanhood, Rubenstein's Jewish faith contributed to the banning of Catholic attendance by the Archbishop of Paris. Rubinstein herself helped finance the play, and while under-performing, it was lauded for its modernism.

Saint Sebastian has long been an icon for queerness and homosexuality. Sebastian's pierced body, nude depiction, and sensuous gaze, are often seen as examples of covert homosexuality. (Saraceni's Saint Sebastian contains examples of all three tropes.)

These two visions of Saint Sebastian are entangled. Sebastian the queer lust, and Sebastian the flesh. In Rubinstein's enacting of Sebastian, there is an inherent queering of gaze. Bakst's depiction of Ida-Sebastian has lifted shoulders, closely covered chest (hiding Rubinstein's breasts, with no allusionary contours). Even her hips are obscured by overwhelming fabric. The only traditionally "feminizing" aspect of the image, is the approximation of Rubinstein's face and hair. Rubinstein's "Ida-Sebastian" is a transgender positioning, wherein the definitional lines of Sebastian's nature and iconography are further blurred by Rubinstein's admittance within Sebastian's bounds.

(I'll probably write more and expand later... Maybe in a "continued" post... Maybe here...)

[misguidedinsect-deactivated2026]

everyones got that one neurosis they cant even complain about on tumblr

[earthmoss-deactivated20150101]

train seat patterns from my trip to japan

[kosmogrl]

how it feels to accept that I’m getting worse

[koenji]

Folio from a Manuscript of the Qur'an. Iran, Shiraz, 1550-1575. Ink, colors and gold on paper.

[holdoncallfailed]

richard hell's apartment (via)

[funeral]

Thus the house is not experienced from day to day only, on the thread of a narrative, or in the telling of our own story. Through dreams, the various dwelling-places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days. And after we are in the new house, when memories of other places we have lived in come back to us, we travel to the land of Motionless Childhood, motionless the way all Immemorial things are. [ . . . ] Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

[streetkit]

girl shocked to discover that inaction can have consequences too

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

A Traveler's Needs (Hong Sang-soo, 2024)

[quixoticanarchy]

“A person entering the space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants. He becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer, or driver… distanced from [daily worries] temporarily by the environment of the moment. Subjected to a gentle form of possession, to which he surrenders himself with more or less talent or conviction, he tastes for a while - like anyone who is possessed - the passive joys of identity-loss, and the more active pleasure of role-playing.”

Marc Augé, “Non-Places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity”

[ainavisa]

[andsalttheearthbehindyou]

Eating is a scandal at the heart of human life. On the one hand because eating implies dismemberment and destruction of that which is consumed: we live by making other beings die. On the other hand because eating reveals a contradiction in the basic structure of human desire. We long to be united with objects and beings outside ourselves, and eating—actual incorporation of an object into our own substance — constitutes the ultimate form of union.

Alec Irwin, "Devoured by God: Cannibalism, mysticism, and ethics in Simone Weil." CrossCurrents (2001): 257-272.