@vesselsofmercy - Tumblr Blog

“Beyond a given point [we are] not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way. As Goethe put it, we must plunge into experience and then reflect on the meaning of it. All reflection and no plunging drives us mad; all plunging and no reflection, and we are brutes.”

—

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

(via exhaled-spirals)

#i believe I am finally learning the rhythm #probably will prove myself wrong somewhere down the line #proving myself wrong is part of the rhythm tho

joslo

“you are not my cure, nobody has that power, (…)”

— Margaret Atwood, from Is / Not in “Selected Poems I: 1965-1975″ (via weltenwellen)

exhaled-spirals

« In its severe forms, depression paralyzes all of the otherwise vital forces that make us human, leaving instead a bleak, despairing, desperate, and deadened state. It is a barren, fatiguing, and agitated condition; one without hope or capacity; a world that is, as A. Alvarez has put it, “airless and without exits.” Life is bloodless, pulseless, and yet present enough to allow a suffocating horror and pain. All bearings are lost; all things are dark and drained of feeling. The slippage […] is first gradual, then utter. Thought, which is as pervasively affected by depression as mood, is morbid, confused, and stuporous. It is also vacillating, ruminative, indecisive, and self castigating. The body is bone weary; there is no will; nothing is that is not an effort, or all-consuming. Like an unstable gas, an irritable exhaustion seeps into every crevice of thought and action. »

— Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast

violentwavesofemotion-deactivat

Odysseus Elytis, tr. by Athan Anagnostopoulos, from “Maria Nephele: A Poem In Two,”

soracities

"[...] Understanding the world as a collection of aesthetics, of brands, instead of a series of philosophies and power struggles means focusing on how things appear, and not how or why they work. It’s bad enough to think about art this way, but thinking of yourself this way is a real disaster, [it] means neglecting what drives you, what fulfills you, what makes you human. The invented lifestyles of these aesthetics offer no path to embodiment, because they aren’t designed for entities with bodies. They’re designed for TikTok, and hashtags, and the wiki."

"Millions of Dead Vibes", Lily Alexandre

wizzard890

The fact is that David Lynch treats the subject of evil better than just about anybody else making movies today—better and also differently. His movies aren’t anti-moral, but they are definitely anti-formulaic. Evil-ridden though his filmic world is, please notice that responsibility for evil never in his films devolves easily onto greedy corporations or corrupt politicians or faceless serial kooks. Lynch is not interested in the devolution of responsibility, and he’s not interested in moral judgments of characters. Rather, he’s interested in the psychic spaces in which people are capable of evil. He is interested in Darkness. And Darkness, in David Lynch’s movies, always wears more than one face. Recall, for example, how Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth is both Frank Booth and “the Well-Dressed Man.” How Eraserhead's whole postapocalyptic world of demonic conceptions and teratoid offspring and summary decapitations is evil… yet how it’s “poor” Henry Spencer who ends up a baby-killer. How in both TV’s Twin Peaks and cinema’s Fire Walk with Me, “Bob” is also Leland Palmer, how they are, “spiritually,” both two and one. The Elephant Man’s sideshow barker is evil in his exploitation of Merrick, but so too is good old kindly Dr. Treeves—and Lynch very carefully has Treeves admit this aloud. And if Wild at Heart’s coherence suffered because its myriad villains seemed fuzzy and interchangeable, it was because they were all basically the same thing, i.e. they were all in the service of the same force or spirit. Characters are not themselves evil in Lynch movies—evil wears them. This point is worth emphasizing. Lynch’s movies are not about monsters (i.e. people whose intrinsic natures are evil) but about hauntings, about evil as environment, possibility, force. This helps explain Lynch’s constant deployment of noirish lighting and eerie sound-carpets and grotesque figurants: in his movies’ world, a kind of ambient spiritual antimatter hangs just overhead. It also explains why Lynch’s villains seem not merely wicked or sick but ecstatic, transported: they are, literally, possessed. Think here of Dennis Hopper’s exultant “I’LL FUCK ANYTHING THAT MOVES” in Blue Velvet, or of the incredible scene in Wild at Heart when Diane Ladd smears her face with lipstick until it’s devil-red and then screams at herself in the mirror, or of Bob’s look of total demonic ebullience in Fire Walk with Me when Laura discovers him at her dresser going through her diary and just about dies of fright. The bad guys in Lynch movies are always exultant, orgasmic, most fully present at their evilest moments, and this in turn is because they are not only actuated by evil but literally inspired: they have yielded themselves up to a Darkness way bigger than any one person. And if these villains are, at their worst moments, riveting for both the camera and the audience, it’s not because Lynch is “endorsing” or “romanticizing” evil but because he’s diagnosing it—diagnosing it without the comfortable carapace of disapproval and with an open acknowledgment of the fact that one reason why evil is so powerful is that it’s hideously vital and robust and usually impossible to look away from.

-David Foster Wallace, "The Theme of Evil in the Films of David Lynch"

whisperthatruns

Kay Ryan, Flamingo Watching (Copper Beech Press, 1994)

neoyorzapoteca

Sakanoe trans. by Kenneth Rexroth, One Hundred Poems from the Japanese

soracities

Mia Mingus, from "Moving Toward the Ugly: A Politic Beyond Desirability" [ID'd]

mournfulroses

Ch'iu Chin, from a poem titled "Two Poems to the Tune of Narcissus by the River," featured in Women Poets of China

Finally getting around to reading Linda Sexton’s memoir about her mom…feeling like it’s going to break my heart but I’m ready

derangedrhythms

Because when I read, I don’t really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude, tr. Michael Henry Heim