"sometimes the milk is black"

an archive of quotes

[mournfulroses]

Roland Barthes, from Complete Works: 1942 - 1961; “Roland Barthes”

[arterialtrees]

[days-of-reading]

ANNE CARSON

[poetsandwriters]

Sometimes it’s so hard, and you really don’t know how to make your work work, and it feels like months or years may have been wasted and you continue to be, beyond all heroic efforts, right smack in the middle of the job, rather than at the end, as you had so brightly hoped. People will tell you that you need a thick skin to be a writer, what with all that disappointment and rejection, but I think part of what makes a good writer is the ability to be porous, to be able to feel all the intricate and complicated notes, the particular music of each moment. No writer should turn the volume down on her own emotional register. That’s her instrument. We have to feel everything.

Ramona Ausubel (Literary Hub, 2016)

[proletarianfeminism]

I am interested in building a society where creativity is a mass condition and not a gift reserved to the happy few, even if half of them are women. Our story at present is that of thousands of women who are agonizing over the book, the painting or the music they can never finish, or cannot even begin, because they have neither the time nor money. We must also broaden our conception of what it means to be creative. At its best, one of the most creative activities is being involved in a struggle with other people, breaking out of our isolation, seeing our relations with others change, discovering new dimensions in our lives.

Silvia Federici, “Putting Feminism Back on its Feet” (via aranrhod)

[dustin-hendersun-deactivated201]

People of all sexual orientations inherit a useful first-aid kit of platitudes from their mother figures: don’t swim immediately after meals; never go to bed with a wet head; don’t talk to old men driving vans older than they are. But when you’re gay, a mother can only teach you so much about navigating the messy world of your own desires. This is one of the minor tragedies of lesbianism: We often have to seek out advice about how to figure out our identities elsewhere. This “seeking out” is why lesbians still watch The L Word years after its finale; why so many young queers talk about the internet like it’s a favorite aunt; why lives like Lesley [Gore]’s are worth the space in our public and personal archives. We should be able to consult with and see ourselves in our gay grandmothers — witness how they survived.

Remembering Leslie Gore: A Lesbian Icon (via buxombibliophile)

[uncleanwithjoy]

“Freud, apparently, did not like the telephone, however much he may have liked listening. Perhaps he felt, perhaps he foresaw that the telephone is always cacophony, and that what it transmits is the wrong voice, the false communication...No doubt I try to deny separation by the telephone--as the child fearing to lose its mother keeps pulling on a string; but the telephone wire is not a good transitional object, it is not an inert string; it is charged with a meaning, which is not that of junction but that of distance: the loved, exhausted voice heard over the telephone is the fade-out in all its anxiety. First of all, the voice, when it reaches me, when it is here, while it (with great difficulty) survives, is a voice I never entirely recognize; as if it emerged from under a mask (thus we are told that the masks used in Greek tragedy had a magical function: to give the voice a chthonic origin, to distort, to alienate the voice, to make it come from somewhere under the earth). Then, too, on the telephone the other is always in a situation of departure; the other departs twice over, by voice and by silence: whose turn is it to speak? We fall silent in unison: crowding of two voids. I’m going to leave you, the voice on the telephone says with each second.”

- Roland Barthes, “Fade-out” in A Lover’s Discourse, p. 114-115

[uncleanwithjoy]

“Werther: ‘The oranges I had set aside, the only ones as yet to be found, produced an excellent effect, though at each slice which she offered, for politeness’s sake, to an indiscreet neighbor, I felt my heart to be somehow pierced through.’ The world is full of indiscreet neighbors with whom I must share the other. The world is in fact just that: an obligation to share. The world (the worldly) is my rival. I am continually disturbed by intruders: a vague connection, met by chance and who forces his way into our company, sits down at our table; neighbors in the restaurant whose vulgarity visibly fascinates the other, to the point where he is unaware if I am speaking to him or not; even an object, a book for instance, in which the other is absorbed (I am jealous of the book). Everything is irksome which briefly erases the dual relation, which alters the complicity and relaxes the intimacy: ‘You belong to me as well,’ the world says.”

- Roland Barthes, “The Orange” in A Lover’s Discourse, p. 110

[uncleanwithjoy]

“In real mourning, it is the ‘test of reality’ which shows me that the loved object has ceased to exist. In amorous mourning, the object is neither dead nor remote. It is I who decides that its image must die (and I may go so far as to hide this death from it). As long as this strange mourning lasts, I will therefore have to undergo two contrary miseries: to suffer from the fact that the other is present (continuing, in spite of himself, to wound me) and to suffer from the fact that the other is dead (dead at least as I loved him). Thus I am wretched (an old habit) over a telephone call which does not come, but I must remind myself at the same time that this silence, in any case, is insignificant, since I have decided to get over any such concern: it was merely an aspect of the amorous image that it was to telephone me; once this image is gone, the telephone, whether it rings or not, resumes its trivial existence.”

- Roland Barthes, “Exiled from the Image-repertoire” in A Lover’s Discourse, p. 106-107

[uncleanwithjoy]

“Yet to hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at once and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don’t want to show my feelings: that is the message I address to the other.

[...]

Let us suppose that I have wept, on account of some incident of which the other has not even become aware (to weep is part of the normal activity of the amorous body), and that, so this cannot be seen, I put on dark glasses to mask my swollen eyes (a fine example of denial: to darken the sight in order not to be seen). The intention of this gesture is a calculated one: I want to keep the moral advantage of stoicism, of ‘dignity’ (I take myself for Colotilde de Vaux), and at the same time, contradictorily, I want to provoke the tender question (’But what’s the matter with you?’); I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby I gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses; that the other will see, in the fact, no sign.”

- Roland Barthes, “Dark Glasses” in A Lover’s Discourse, p. 42-43

[uncleanwithjoy]

“Love has two affirmations. First of all, when the lover encounters the other, there is an immediate affirmation (psychologically: dazzlement, enthusiasm, exaltation, mad projection of a fulfilled future: I am devoured by desire, the impulse to be happy): I say yes to everything (blinding myself). There follows a long tunnel: my first yes is riddled by doubts, love’s value is ceaselessly threatened by depreciation: this is the moment of melancholy passion, the rising of resentment and oblation. Yet I can emerge from this tunnel; I can ‘surmount,’ without liquidating; what I have affirmed a first time, I can once again affirm, without repeating it, for then what I affirm is the affirmation, not its contingency: I affirm the first encounter in its difference, I desire its return, not its repetition. I say to the other (old or new): Let us begin again.”

- Roland Barthes, “The Intractable” in A Lover’s Discourse, p. 24

[uncleanwithjoy]

“Historically, the discourse of absence is carried on by the Woman: Woman is sedentary, Man hunts, journeys; Woman is faithful (she waits), man is fickle (he sails away, he cruises). It is Woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction, for she has time to do so [...] It follows that in any man who utters the other’s absence something feminine is declared: this man who waits and who suffers from his waiting is miraculously feminized. A man is not feminized because he is inverted but because he is in love. (Myth and utopia: the origins have belonged, the future will belong to the subjects in whom there is something feminine.)”

- Roland Barthes, “The Absent One” in A Lover’s Discourse, p. 13-14

[rhizombie]

Well, if identity is only a game, if it is only a procedure to have relations, social and sexual-pleasure relationships that create new friendships, it is useful. But if identity becomes the problem of sexual existence, and if people think that they have to ‘uncover’ their ‘own identity,’ and that their own identity has to become the law, the principle, the code of their existence; if the perennial question they ask is ‘Does this thing conform to my identity?’ then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility. If we are asked to relate to the question of identity, it must be an identity to our unique selves. But the relationships we have to have with ourselves are not ones of identity, rather, they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation. To be the same is really boring. We must not exclude identity if people find their pleasure through this identity, but we must not think of this identity as an ethical universal rule.

Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity” (1984)

[amotiontoabjection]

The abject is an extremely strong feeling which is at once somatic and symbolic, and which is above all a revolt of the person against an external menace from which one wants to keep oneself at a distance, but of which one has the impression that it is not only an external menace but that it may menace us from inside. So it is a desire for separation, for becoming autonomous, and also the feeling of an impossibility of doing so—whence the element of crisis which the notion of abjection carries with it

(Kristeva in a 1980 interview, qtd. in Weiss 93)

[frankocean]

I read in the paper that my brothers are being thrown from rooftops blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs for violating sharia law. I heard the crowds stone these fallen men if they move after they hit the ground. I heard it’s in the name of God. I heard my pastor speak for God too, quoting scripture from his book. Words like abomination popped off my skin like hot grease as he went on to describe a lake of fire that God wanted me in. I heard on the news that the aftermath of a hate crime left piles of bodies on a dance floor this month. I heard the gunman feigned dead among all the people he killed. I heard the news say he was one of us. I was six years old when I heard my dad call our transgender waitress a faggot as he dragged me out a neighborhood diner saying we wouldn’t be served because she was dirty. That was the last afternoon I saw my father and the first time I heard that word, I think, although it wouldn’t shock me if it wasn’t. Many hate us and wish we didn’t exist. Many are annoyed by our wanting to be married like everyone else or use the correct restroom like everyone else. Many don’t see anything wrong with passing down the same old values that send thousands of kids into suicidal depression each year. So we say pride and we express love for who and what we are. Because who else will in earnest? I daydream on the idea that maybe all this barbarism and all these transgressions against ourselves is an equal and opposite reaction to something better happening in this world, some great swelling wave of openness and wakefulness out here. Reality by comparison looks grey, as in neither black nor white but also bleak. We are all God’s children, I heard. I left my siblings out of it and spoke with my maker directly and I think he sounds a lot like myself. If I being myself were more awesome at being detached from my own story in a way I being myself never could be. I wanna know what others hear, I’m scared to know but I wanna know what everyone hears when they talk to God. Do the insane hear the voice distorted? Do the indoctrinated hear another voice entirely?

[pandanarium]

the trauma of the nightmare does not simply consist in the experience within the dream, but in the experience of waking from it. It is the experience of waking into consciousness that, peculiarly, is identified with the reliving of the trauma. And as such it is not only the dream that surprises consciousness but, indeed, the very waking itself that constitutes the surprise: the fact not only of the dream but of having passed beyond it. What is enigmatically suggested, that is, is that the trauma consists not only in having confronted death but in having survived, precisely, without knowing it. What one returns to in the flashback is not the incomprehensibility of one’s near death, but the very incomprehensibility of one’s own survival. Repetition, in other words, is not simply the attempt to grasp that one has almost died but, more fundamentally and enigmatically, the very attempt to claim one’s own survival. If history is to be understood as the history of a trauma, it is a history that is experienced as the endless attempt to assume one’s survival as one’s own.

Cathy Caruth, ‘‘Unclaimed Experience’’ – writing about Freud’s interpretation of trauma and nightmares. Pg 77. (via pandanarium)

[lil-n-still-growin]

Zur Person Interview with Hannah Arendt, October 1964

[fansylla]

The past is already in debt to the mismanaged present. And besides, contrary to what you may have heard or learned, the past is not done and it is not over, it’s still in process, which is another way of saying that when it’s critiqued, analyzed, it yields new information about itself. The past is already changing as it is being reexamined, as it is being listened to for deeper resonances. Actually it can be more liberating than any imagined future if you are willing to identify its evasions, its distortions, its lies, and are willing to unleash its secrets.

Toni Morrison on How to Be Your Own Story and Reap the Rewards of Adulthood in a Culture That Fetishizes Youth (via dongkelley)