you love yourself: you sow.

main @megkuna

[intopermanence]

“words lack and in the end, I do too”

— Georges Bataille, trans. by Mark Spitzer, from The Collected Poems: “The Undifferentiated Being is Nothing”

[delioncunt]

Winter Light (1963), dir. Ingmar Bergman

[voirlvmer]

“Darkness is only a relative / index of many other aspects of the way light behaves.”

— Mary Jo Bang, “Reading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” from The Last Two Seconds (via smokefalls)

[liliesofpur-i-ty]

“The specter of desire necessarily lies. What’s presented as desirable is masked. Sooner or later the mask falls. Then anguish is unmasked, as is the annihilation of perishable existence. Truly, truly, you long for the night. But you have to take the indirect way; your way is to love friendly faces. These desirable faces proclaim the possession of pleasure, which quickly becomes possession of death. But death can’t be possessed–it’s dispossession. Which is why the scene of pleasure disappoints. To be disappointed is life’s bottom line, its core truth. Without experiencing exhaustion and disappointment you wouldn’t ever know–at the precise moment your courage fails–that insatiable craving for sex is death’s dispossession. To go looking for pleasure is far from cowardice, it’s life’s remotest edge, a raving courage. It’s a ploy used by horror in us of ever being satisfied. Naturally, love’s the most distant possibility. Again and again obstacles conceal love from the mania of love. Desire and love are confused with each other. Love’s a desire to possess an object as great as the totality of desire. Love’s insanity becomes sane when moving towards more insane love. Love makes this demand. Either its object escapes you or you escape it. If love didn’t run away from you, you’d run away from love. Lovers discover each other only in mutual laceration. Each of the two craves suffering. Desire desires in them what’s impossible. Otherwise desire would be quenched, desire would die. When lack of satisfaction begins to prevail, you should satisfy your desire. You should lose yourself in the bosom of unutterable happiness. At that point happiness is the condition for increasing your desire, and satisfaction becomes desire’s fountain of youth.”

— Georges Bataille – from “Alleluia, The Catechism of Dianus” in Guilty trans. Bruce Boone

[megkuna]

Is this about Poland? I don't feel entitled to write about her—I have never written a single word about anything except about me. In the year 1939 I found myself in Buenos Aires, cast out of Poland and out of my former life, in an extremely dangerous situation. A bankrupt past. The present like the night. My future inscrutable. No support from anywhere. The Form is breaking up and falling apart under the blows of universal Becoming...

What's old is nothing but impotence, what's new and incoming is violence. In this wasteland of anarchy, among toppled gods, I am left to my own devices. What do you want me to feel at such a moment? To destroy the past within me? ... To surrender to the future? ... Yes... but I didn't want to surrender my very person to anything, to any incoming configuration-I wanted to be something higher and richer than a configuration. Hence the laughter in Trans-Atlantyk. Such was, more or less, my adventure that generated a grotesque book, spread-eagled between the past and the future.

Witold Gombrowicz, Preface to Trans-Atlantyk

[transatlantyks]

Если у вас в мегаполисе ещё помнят обо мне, ссыльном, Знай, кто спросит: я умер, едва приговор огласили. Мёртвый живу, хожу, тело донашиваю, Оно послушное – ссыхается на костях. Я здесь чужак, варвар, языка не носитель, Неба коптитель, волосы стали белые, Мёртвыми губами учу гетскую грамоту, Мёртвыми ногами топчу твёрдую воду. Что тебе рассказать, чтоб не скучала? Скачут Кони по гладкой реке, и стрелы летают, Рыбы торчат изо льда с открытыми ртами, Некому их вынимать. Некому меня понимать. Вино замёрзло, стоит само без кувшина, Кусок вина отломлю и сосу, как сиську. Яблок не достать. Ты бы меня не узнала. Местные замотаны в шкуры, на тогу косятся, Только лица и видно, да и те в бороде. Даже звёзды здесь не как у людей.

“Ovid Void,” Maria Stepanova and Eugene Ostashevsky

[megkuna]

[megkuna]

And thus I Walk! They're watching with alarm, because perchance nobody at any reception has ever Walked like this... hence by the walls they crouch like scared rabbits, this one and that one has under a piece of furniture crawled, or barricaded himself behind a piece of furniture... and I simply Walk, Walk, and not just Walk, but I walk so that my Walk is like what the hell, perchance I'll smash everything to bits... Oh, Jesus, Mary!

Witold Gombrowicz, Trans-Atlantyk

[halogen2]

I THINK LOVE IS SOMETHING / THAT HAPPENS TO OTHER PEOPLE - Michael Gray Bulla

[habaebiti]

the way this is genuinely life changing stuff for me

[weltenwellen]

An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib

[weltenwellen]

An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib

[megkuna]

"Rumi's gold is not the precious metal but a feeling state arrived at through the alchemical process of altering consciousness, of burning through ego, greed, pettiness, and calculation, to arrive at a more relaxed and compassionate state of being. In sum, the prayer of Sufism is 'teach me to love more deeply.' Gold is the deepest love."

Haleh Liza Gafori, Introduction to Gold (collected poems from Rumi)

[megkuna]

I’ve been short on courage, but I have a heart of sunlight, straight from the king’s hand. I stir up laughter even in those who fear joy. Crack open my shell. Steal the pearl. I’ll still be laughing. It’s the rookies who laugh only when they win.

Jalal al-din Rumi, tr. Haleh Liza Gafori

[totallyfuckd]

From Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky.

[someforbiddenparadise]

The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses by Walter Benjamin (as appears in his 1928 treatise One-Way Street, in a section titled "Post No Bills")

[megkuna]

"[I]nconvenience, though intimate, inevitably operates at a level of abstraction, too, where we encounter each other as kinds of thing but not necessarily in a bad way, because there is no other way to begin knowing each other, or anything. We cannot know each other without being inconvenient to each other. We cannot be in any relation without being inconvenient to each other. This is to say: to know and be known requires experiencing and exerting pressure to be acknowledged and taken in. [...] Acknowledgment requires a disturbance of attention and boundaries. Sustained acknowledgment requires self-reorganization."

Lauren Berlant, On The Inconvenience of Other People

[megkuna]

"Thus, the inconvenience of other people isn't evidence that the Others were bad objects all along: that would be hell. The inconvenience of the world is at its most confusing when one wants the world but resists some of the costs of wanting. It points to the work required in order to be with even the most abstract of beings or objects, including ourselves, when we have to and at some level want to, even if the wanting includes wanting to dominate situations or merely to coexist. The pleasure in anonymity and in being known; the fear of abandonment to not mattering and the fear of mattering the wrong way. I am describing in inconvenience a structural awkwardness in the encounter between someone and anything, but also conventions of structural subordination. Thus 'people' in the title stands for any attachment, any dependency that forces us to face how profoundly nonsovereign we are. The concept also points to hates and to the danger to our sense of well-being that is produced even by the things we want to be near; it clarifies some things about the registers of power that attach dramas of such disturbance to bodies living approximately in the ordinary."

Lauren Berlant, On The Inconvenience of Other People