All is violent. All is bright.

Late 20s. manchester.

[kafkaswasteddayz]

not now honey, mommy’s yearning for something that once was and will never be again

[apocryphics]

In this short life / that merely lasts an hour / how much — how / little — is / within our / power

[kosmogrl]

[lilkakow]

[sillyguy-supreme]

@chollimaonthewing

[soracities]

Emily Skaja, from "I Liked Myself Better as an Exquisite Skeleton", pub. The Offing [ID'd]

[alisonzai]

[weltenwellen]

Joy Sullivan, “When My Friend Is Low, We Walk by the River”, Instructions for Traveling West

[dajo42]

literally what the fuck do you mean its still january. how is that remotely possible. its been six months minimum

[podcastwizard]

[mooneyedandglowing]

“We have been trained to think of patterns, with the exception of those of music, as fixed affairs. It is easier and lazier that way but, of course, all nonsense. In truth, the right way to begin to think about the pattern which connects is to think of it as primarily (whatever that means) a dance of interacting parts and only secondarily pegged down by various sorts of physical limits and by those limits which organisms characteristically impose.”

— Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature

[weltenwellen]

An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib

[luxe-pauvre]

From the point of view of your neural networks, what does it mean to descend into pattern and habit? Imagine two towns a few miles apart. People interested in caravanning from one settlement to the other take all possible paths: some travellers walk the scenic route along the ridgetops, some prefer the shade of the cliffside, some move among slippery rocks by the river, and others take the riskier but faster route through the woods. With time and experience, one route proves more popular. Eventually the path becomes grooved where the most people have walked, and it starts to become the standard. After some years the local government lays down roadways. After some decades, this expands into highways. Broad optionality reduces to the standard. Similarly, brains begin with many possible routes through the neural networks; with time, the practiced pathways become difficult to exit. Unused paths become thinned away. Neurons that can't find success with the world eventually fold up shop and commit suicide. Through decades of experience, the brain comes to physically represent the environment, and your decisions follow the remaining, hard-paved paths. The upside is that you end up with lightning-fast ways of solving problems. The downside is that it's harder to attack problems with wild unstructured inventiveness.

David Eagleman, Livewired

[apocryphics]

Jenny Odell, "The Case for Nothing"

[cinematicjourney]

All We Imagine as Light (2024) | dir. Payal Kapadia

[kiki-de-la-petite-flaque]

As for me, I see both beauty and the dark side of the things; the loveliness of cornfields and full sails, but the ruin as the well. And I see them at the same time, and chary of that ecstasy. The Japanese have a phrase for this dual perception: mono no aware. It means "beauty tinged with sadness," for there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay. For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe it can make me better at living, and better at loving, and, just possibly, better at seeing.

— Sally Mann

[firstfullmoon]

If you persevere, in time you will have an entirely different problem – not that life is meaningless, but rather that life has almost too much meaning. As the scales fall from your eyes the world rushes into focus, presenting itself with a kind of vibrational eloquence that can, at first, be almost overwhelming. Everything shimmers, everything clarifies, everything wrestles for your attention. Trees feel super-real, their roots plunged into the earth, their branches stretching to the sky, birds are flesh and blood souls, fragile with life, the sky unfolds and rolls, the ocean crashes, people fascinate, books are beautiful, children are whirling dynamos of chaos, dogs bark and cats meow, flowers shout, your neighbour glows, and God runs like a helix through all things. The world awaits you, humming with meaning. You are alive with potential. You are not dead.

— Nick Cave on getting clean, Red Hand Files #258

[firstfullmoon]

And in that first post-heroin spring, my ageless dope body was gone. I’d traded it for a body that was like an empty hive. In the spring the missing swarms flew back through the sunset to fill it up again. [...] Not that I missed the dope body. I was sick of having the kind of problems that demons have—sick to death—but the scale of the human problem was breathtaking. It took my breath away, standing in front of those colossal sunsets. Red and purple. The memory of bedtime when I was four coming back in that color. The memory of my first kiss coming back. The way my bedroom smelled when I was ten and I was sick.

— Michael W. Clune, White Out

[how2forgive]

catching up w ask polly this morning

[punkrockismyreligion]

How does one hate a country, or love one? […] I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?

— Ursula K. Le Guin – The Left Hand of Darkness (1969, p. 212)