do you have any pieces on a lovers language + the world between them? ❤
“Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten.”
— Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal
“you up? you ever think about how / english maybe isn’t our first language? / the way I’m sitting right now is my / first language. the way I bring my / hand to your jawline is my first language. the / way I become movement inside / your hands is my first language.”
— Rachelle Toarmino, “You Up?”
— Chuck Carlise, “I Can Tell You a Story”
“We two remake our world by naming it together.”
— A.S. Byatt, Possession
“Lovers who touch each other with words, whose contact with each other is made of words, and who can thus repeat themselves without end, marveling at the utterly banal, because their speech is not a language, but an idiom they share with no other, and because each gazes at themselves in the other’s gaze in a redoubling which goes from mirage to admiration.”
— Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
“I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought–and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, letter to his wife Véra
— Porpentine Charity Heartscape, PSYCHO NYMPH EXILE
“You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“I always have such need to merely talk to you. Even when I have nothing to talk about – with you I just seem to go right ahead and sort of invent it. I invent it for you.”
— Virginia Woolf, in a letter to Vita Sackville-West
— Celina Sciamma, in an interview on Portrait of a Lady on Fire
“Do you remember a night when I came along the dark passage to your room in a thunderstorm and we lay talking about whether we were afraid of death or not? That is the sort of occasion on which the things I want to say to you,–and to you only,–get said.”
— Virginia Woolf, in a letter to Vita Sackville-West
“The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.”
— Alain de Botton, On Love
— Vladimir Nabokov, letter to his wife Véra
“I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself.”
— Anaïs Nin, Under a Glass Bell
“It would be madness to try and live so intensely as lovers that every word and every gesture between us was a sacrament, a pure sign that our love exists despite and perhaps even because of our mortality. But we can do what the priest does with his morning consecration before entering the routine of his day; what the communicant does in that instant of touch, that quick song of the flesh, before he goes to work. We can bring our human, distracted love into focus with an act that doesn’t need words, an act which dramatizes for us what we are together. The act itself can be anything: five beaten and scrambled eggs, two glasses of wine, running beside each other in rhythm with the pace and breath of the beloved. They are all parts of that loveliest of sacraments [....] that passionate harmony of flesh whose breath and dance and murmur says: We are, we are, we are...”
— Andre Dubus, “On Charon’s Wharf”
(post via @akamaruu)
