Tragically, we are most reminded of the world-in-itself when the world-in-itself is manifest in the form of natural disasters. The discussions on the long-term impact of climate change also evoke this reminder of the world-in-itself, as the specter of extinction furtively looms over such discussions. Using advanced predictive models, we have even imagined what would happen to the world if we as human beings were to become extinct. So, while we can never experience the world-in-itself, we seem to be almost fatalistically drawn to it, perhaps as a limit that defines who we are as human beings.

– In the Dust of This Planet

Eugene Thacker

The dawn in Donnie Darko.

– W.S. Graham. From “Implements in Their Places” (1977). Photo by: R.M. Haines

Do our souls live on betrayal?

‘I became the heartbreaker I sought.
I joined half-naked dancers in the dunes.’

– Glenn Sheldon ‘Dumping a lover, seeking another’

romances like coffee.

all day long at the beach, finger in the sand until the tide comes in
‘wipes off the pictures you drew’ romances.

evenings at the mall, Crate and Barrel, spice racks and sweaters after work.

fights in front rooms, wax off the floors,
blood on lime-green snake-skin sneakers.

broken arms, well designed living rooms.
ruin a perfectly good sofa for everybody.

I’d like to have coffee in the Tate Museum of art someday, 
staring at pictures.
my girlfriend next to me sitting up, falling back, in a sea of white paper cups
popping up in the air with fountains of deep brown coffee producing creamy runs of frothy white 
           milk and toffee across me when I try to pull her out of it.

– Peter Gunn

Carol (2015)

At seventeen I started to hear myself—that voice
that shook me from the doorframe. That knew I could

open a door as well as I could open my mouth. A lipstick
cannot fill emptiness but awake all night it might be a salve

for the sting of hope, all my muscles sore. We all hunger
for blood and bile, the touch that could be ghost or mother—

I don’t have to be afraid. I know what I need and loneliness
is less a curse than it is a devotion and I answer this

with the placidity of a Texas storm in spring. I may appear free
but on Friday night I’m lining up orange bottles and blister packs

and staring at my phone. But once I did wear that pink dress
and I bared my teeth and put lavender in my hair braided and red.

Still, I never forget to worry and my body shakes with answers
and the possibility of crucifixion. Like every day, today

I fool death and bury it in my throat with my youth.
You should understand that these pills are okay and they

keep me breathing and even as you hunger for normal
I hunger for the beauty of knowing, use my body as prophecy,

hear the mockingbird who knows her own hunger for song
and sky. I cannot hold her in my hands but I carry her answers

tucked into my sleeve, her voice is both bird and ambulance and
tonight I touch my wrist, measure my heartbeat—steady and mine

– E. Kristin Anderson, But we knew one thing

Imagine the seashore riddled with gaps,
like an invisible chip on the rim of a glass

going unnoticed until it meets your finger seeking atonal harmonies. Each hole a thick void,

each a woven image of an empty loom on a deserted Ithaca, each vision of land on the horizon becomes a narcotic,

vain. In vein. Euphoria that cuts you at the knees,
sends you kneeling to the sun hot sand, presses your tongue

and teeth to the grit of it, scrapes saccharine intricacies
into your enamel. Until you turn to static, an infinite loop

of white ooze. Sound and shock trailing from the chapped lips of a conch shell. A snail’s eviction notice. An iridescent

liminal space. The catch and release of all expectations,
the suspension of a steel anchor over tranquil water.

– Katrina Smolinsky, Broken Ocean

If you want to know how much I remember,
imagine the mental equivalent of a greenstick,

a grape growing so rich that it bursts, staining
everything.

                    After the light bulb in my room blew
out, the light bulb in my best friend’s room blew out.

The darkness is flirtatious, following me around.
I am telling the story to myself, but only hearing

fragments, as if I were using tin cans with thin
string tied between them.

                                            Here, a tongue on my ear.
Here, a Hakeem. Here, the green of my unbuttoned

primary school shirt. There, there, child.
                                                                  I love you,

he whispered. I turned all the lights on & nothing
happened. Did nothing happen? I do remember this:

opening my arms to the darkness —
                                                             the only thing

allowed to hold me. My very own flesh memory,
thick as a ripened vine.

– Logan February, Taint

& his jaw doesn’t leave the ground for four whole days.

meanwhile, the trees curve their shadows around him.

meanwhile, the moon doesn’t leave the sky. meanwhile,

the raven’s nest in his hair. the whole village stands back.

the mother with her pitchfork, the father with his beckoning torch.

they are all glittering & dressed in black. no one speaks.

the boy keeps crying wolf & hearing silence. the wolf lies dead

behind him, but the boy won’t turn around, won’t look at it,

so the wolf lies dead & the boy keeps crying. he cries –

/wolf are you there/ /wolf did you leave me/

/wolf wolf wolf/ & his mother cries too, but quiet.

the crickets want to be moths & the moths want to be crickets.

the torches dance left & right. the insects’ shadows are cast like

small transient spells. the wolf lies dead & the boy lies too,

cries – /wolf/ & there is no more running. he clamps his teeth

around his wrist, arching himself in a rabid rapture. blood spills &

tastes the earth. the boy cries – /did you stop loving me wolf/

the boy cries –

– Logan February “a boy cries wolf”

Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.

– Gilles Deleuze

—Oh, that was an old story, surely you didn’t believe that. It was a child’s story, and not true.

—But child’s stories are always true.

—Giants and fairies as well? Toby Withers!

—Yes, giants and fairies, in different shapes. There’s a giant bomber and a giant loneliness.

– Owls Do Cry

Janet Frame

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors

a thousand windows and a thousand doors

Not one of them was ours, my dear.

Not one of them was ours.

-Owls Do Cry

Janet Frame

this. http://www.metambesen.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/DEFINITIONS.pdf

Numbers VI

I know there’s a door here

though we’ve never talked about it

you never tell me why

let it speak for itself

a door behind a waterfall

behind number, order

I see this through the dim rain of obsession that’s how I know there’s a door

you don’t confuse with maybe

you can’t disorient a door

this you know, you too are a door

staring at me

and I don’t dare go in,

but I already am

too early to forget

too late to know

you painted it true,

I’m in there already

arched brows long of face

looking back at the eyes

that made me, each of us

shouldering from our coats

until we’re nothing, nothing

but unseen, busy hinges

as angels walk in and out.

– Tamas Panitz

I kept a dream of two thieves under my pillow, and my thieves

are gone, full with my last meal of sleep

to a beach blessed with shell

– Owls Do Cry

Janet Frame

And childhood is nothing, it is only the wind in the telegraph wire for crying there, the toothache in the cavity of night, the too big body curled up in the cot too small, the grandmother breaking her back in the hot Virginny sun, grandmother what big eyes you have; and the boy in the fox’s belly, unstitch, unstitch, boy girl or day locked in the suffocating belly of memory.

– Owls Do Cry

Janet Frame

—Well, if you’re dancing with the right partner, your heart beats in time with his. You can feel his heart, and he can feel yours. They thump on each other.

—Like two tennis balls knocking, I suppose?

—Something like, only different.

Then Francie turned her face sideways, for she liked her profile view better than front on, and she wrung her hands and looked tragic, yet aloof and indifferent, and said,

—But you wouldn’t really understand, you can’t until you’ve been through what I’ve been through. I’ve suffered. We all suffer, from the heart, and then you say the heart’s like a tennis ball.

—I meant the thumping and bouncing.

—The heart, Francie said, is like a globe of fire.»

– Owls Do Cry

Janet Frame

At twilight I went into the street. 
The sun hung low in the iron sky, 
ringed with cold plumage.
If I could write to you
about this emptiness–

All day I tried to distinguish 
need from desire. Now, in the dark, 
I feel only bitter sadness for us, 
the builders, the planers of wood, 
because I have been looking 
steadily at these elms 
and seen the process that creates 
the writhing, stationary tree 
is torment, and have understood 
it will make no forms but twisted forms.

You know, he said, our work is difficult: we confront
much sorrow and disappointment.
He gazed at me with increasing frankness.
I was like you once, he added, in love with turbulence.

– Louise Glück

As I turned over the last page, a wave of sorrow enveloped me. Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real? To distract myself, I walked out into the night; instinctively, I lit a cigarette. In the dark, the cigarette glowed, like a fire lit by a survivor. But who would see this light, this small dot among infinite stars? I stood awhile in the dark, the cigarette glowing and growing small, each breath patiently destroying me. How small it was, how brief. Brief, brief, but inside me now, which the stars could never be.

The riddle was: why couldn’t we live in the mind. 

The answer was: the barrier of the earth intervened. 

From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.

I tell myself to sleep. But, I can’t sleep.

The bowl has a jelly in it in the form of glass

and a rickety pine cone frosted with goldy glitter. Something a girl made a long time ago at Christmas that is extraneous and manufactured.

Now, it is Monday and manger’s put away

and darkness holds

except for the fluorescence of school.

If I listen to the branches for wind

the world sounds thick

and feels thick

with cold, compartmentalized degrees

shuffling across a lake

without skates or birds or words.

– Kimberly Lyons ‘Skates’

‘How dare you

remind me. How dare I remember.’

– Tamas Panitz

This is the blue you know, the lumpen mountainous fall from every window.

Fall of sight you let the world in

my boat blue modus

dinged deeply by sallow reeds

glides the way blue does its clever map-work

called everywhere anywhere, I wreck on the reefs

o merciless story blue is my name, any name, cause of nothing I come nameless to this blue land.

Tell me, which is worse: that we always have to make matter, the stuff already there;

or that it’s color knows us, blue sun

sacré bleu?

Do we make matter to remember color?

I call forth rocks from the sleek inclinations.

I scuttle on your ribs

and sink straight through to that tireless situation.

– Tamas Panitz ‘the permission’

– Luter Hughes ‘Tenor”

It’s all too much.

He is vexed, irritated. She is behaving badly, getting away with too much; she is learning to exploit him and will probably exploit him further. But if she has got away with much, he has got away with more; if she is behaving badly, he has behaved worse. To the extent that they are together, if they are together, he is the one who leads, she the one who follows. Let him not forget that.

Disgrace

J. M. Coetzee

This blank, stealthy dream was of a different nature. He awoke and could remember nothing. But there was a sense of menace that lingered in him long after. Then he awoke one morning with the old fear but with a faint remembrance of the darkness behind him. He had been walking among a crowd of people and in his arms he carried something. That was all he could be sure about. Had he stolen? Had he been trying to save some possession? Was he being hunted by all these people around him? He did not think so. The more he studied this simple dream the less he could understand. Then for some time afterward the dream did not return.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers

‘CLOUD THREE’

To know their names to number them

in my broken alphabet, fallen runes, loom

of light beyond the dim,

my home. I mean

I live up there too,

father thunder mother air and me a twisted kid between – how it seemed to walk out of a house

and stare up there, suddenly at peace, suddenly where I should be.

All it takes is looking up.

And there it is, the singular multiplicity of form and light, ominous and innocent.

Let me tell you more. let me guess at last

the long caress of light and how cloud shapes it

to our need, need is another word for bodies, we stand here to be the point exactly to which the light aims

ever and ever. The cloud,

this academy of shapes and colors explained all this just now

so even I could understand.

– Robert Kelly

– Tamas Panitz

The ocean is telling you what you always knew and telling the light so the light

can tell you too and it never gives up

like the mind itself, wandering through

a war, you can sense the war even in light and even that

is beautiful, as if everything that happens heals us, I tell that to myself over and over.

—Billie Chernicoff

In this vein, many plays relate how these young people, often helped by valets or other accomplices, give the old parents the run around and finally get what they want, namely marriage. It’s the triumph of love, but not its duration. That is precisely what you might call plotting the encounter. Important works, great novels, are often built around the impossibility of love, its being put to the test, its tragedy, its waning, its separation, end, etc. But there is very little on it lasting positively. We could even say married life has hardly produced a great work. It is a fact that it has rarely inspired artists.

– In Praise of Love

Alain Badiou

So love remains powerful, subjectively powerful: one of those rare experiences where, on the basis of chance inscribed in a moment, you attempt a declaration of eternity.

– In Praise of Love

Alain Badiou

And secondly if “I love you” is always, in most respects, the heralding of ‘I’ll always love you”, it is in effect locking chance into the framework of eternity. We shouldn’t be afraid of words. The locking in of chance is an anticipation of eternity. And to an extent, every love states that it is eternal: it is assumed within the declaration.

– In Praise of Love

Alain Badiou

Why do people so often say: I will always love you? Provided, of course, that it isn’t a ploy. The moralists have naturally mocked that, saying it is never in fact true. Firstly, it isn’t true that it is never true. There are people who always love each other, and a lot more than you might think or say.

– In Praise of Love

Alain Badiou

– Roland Barthes ‘A lover’s discourse: fragments’

The nights were wonderful, and she didn’t have time to think about such things as being scared. Whenever she was in the dark she thought about music.

– The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers

Tonight he read Spinoza. He did not wholly understand the intricate play of ideas and the complex phrases, but as he read he sensed a strong, true purpose behind the words and he felt that he almost understood.

– The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers

When a person knows and can’t make the others understand, what does he do?

– The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers

‘Come, let us hide nearer each other…’

Else Lasker-Schüler

the way we move through water,
always unsure of when the sinking begins,
never quite ready for the abyss
when it comes.

– Lino Anunciacion

Since the word, the order and disorder, made fast. Since the length of a day pulled through thought. Since power and vacancy, since the fox and the nightingale. Since this circle of smoke touching the tops of our heads and the surface of the river below the field, shining like metal. Since the gift. Since the debt. Lines flickering into view. Since magic and the weight of the hidden. Since this heaviness. Since the inescapable. Pick yourself up and set yourself down. Since we loved and did not want to let go. Since the falling apart and the lashing together. Since hunger and mockery, since grind and twitch, the daily powering down. Since purchase, our satisfaction. Believing in the familiar. A room with a bed and a window and a book. Since the thunderstorm. Since insomnia. Since the memory of a distant promise. Birds disappear into the sky. The train station is empty. Since we came, since we left. Since it could be heard, faintly, without us.

– Ryo Yamaguchi “The Past”

Past the old one, and the little one. Past the painted ceiling, the scene of the dawn. Past numerical hemorrhages and worry, and tenuous light, stacks of chairs. Past the blustering color. Past a river carved into poverty. Past the javelin, past ceremony. Past what has been looked at until it could no longer be what it is. Past concrete, the raw matter spinning inside of it. Past news. Past posters. Past a lot of demolished cars sunken into the landscape, the way eyes are sunken when it’s been days. Past days. Past all and past none. Past the one who knows what we must pass. Past television, conch, courtship, dimethyltryptamine. Past planar and columnar and spheroid, the bundle, the substratum, the ellipse invisible but for its effects. Past coffee and quiet reading, past conversation, flatware, crystal, and cloth. Past music. Past notifications. Past earnestness and tremors. Past manifestos and heights, the pyramid dizzied by birds. Past enforcement, presence. Past the horrible knowledge. Past the noise and past the muted. Past the predicate and thingness. Past the great cedars, the snow fields, the narrows. Past the fencepost and billboard, the cattle grate and fireweed. Past circumstance. Past what I am about to say next. Past it, and that, and this. Past past. Past present. Past future. Past the infinite overtones, past measure. Past eye and past voice. Past the horizon, the vanishing point, the swell, the frustum, the redshift. Past memory. Past dream. Past the gauzy light and the blue-tinted dark. Past the body, the self. Past effort. Past resignation. Past what has long been gone, and the yard, and the home, and the day in which we lived.

– Ryo Ramaguchi “The Future”

The war never happened but somehow you and I still exist. Like obsidian,
we know only the memory of lava and not the explosion that created

us. Forget the gunned-down church, the burning flesh, the cabbage soup.
There is no bus. There is no border. There is no blood. There are

only sweet corn fields and mango skins. The turquoise house and clotheslines.
A heaping plate of pasteles and curtido waiting to be disappeared into our bellies.

In this life, our people are not things of silences but whole worlds bursting
into breath. Everywhere, there are children. Playing freely, clothed and clean.

Mozote does not mean massacre and flowers bloom in every place shoes are
left behind. My name still means truth, this time in a language my mouth recognizes,

in a language I know how to speak. My grandmother is still a storyteller although I am
not a poet. In this life, I do not have to be. This poem somehow still exists. It is told

in my mother’s voice and she makes hurt dissolve like honey in hot water, manzanilla
warming the throat. You and I do not find each other on another continent, grasping

at each other’s necks in search of home. We meet in a mercado, my arms overflowing
with mamey and anonas, and together we wash them in riverwater. We watch sunset fall over

a land we call our own and do not fear its taking. I bite into the fruit, mouth sucking
seed from substance, pulling its veins from between my teeth. Our laughter echoes

from inside the cave, one we are free to step outside of. We do not have to hide here.
We do not have to hide anywhere. A torogoz flies past my face and I do not fear its flapping.

– Janel Pineda

I burn for what’s no longer mine.

– Gavin Yuan Gao

He regarded Blount steadily with half-closed eyes. Blount was not a freak, although when you first saw him he gave you that impression. It was like something was deformed about him—but when you looked at him closely each part of him was normal and as it ought to be. Therefore if this difference was not in the body it was probably in the mind. He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived for a long time with foreigners in South America. He was like a person who had been somewhere that other people are not likely to go or had done something that others are not apt to do.

– The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers

Lavender & cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of. Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.

– James Joyce

I refuse the dark in my heart. Time to do, time to work.

– 8bitfiction

Sitting with you in the kitchen
Talking of anything
Drinking tea
I love you
“The” is a beautiful, regal, perfect word
Oh I wish your body here
With or without bearded poems

Elise Cowen – Sitting

What troubles me about happiness is . . . well, if you ask people in the street if they’re happy, in general they’ll tell you it’s because of another person, a unique person. We have the impression that everyone is unique and that we love them because they’re unique, and that what’s beautiful in love is that ultimately this unique person could be anybody. The more the person is unique in the eyes of the other the more they represent all women, or all men, virtually anyone could be the significant other.

– Agnes Varda

What I try to understand in this film is: what does happiness really mean? Is there anyone allergic to happiness? To what point can one in- troduce unhappy incidents in a life and continue to be happy? I didn’t ask myself, “If I make his wife die will he still be happy?” But deep down I asked myself, “What is the meaning of happiness, this need for happi- ness, this aptitude for happiness? What is this unnamable and slightly monstrous thing?” It’s like in science-fiction novels; there’s this thing there and all you have to do is get away . . . And this “thing” gilded with happiness, where did it come from? What form does it take? Why is it there? Why does it leave? Why can’t the people chasing it catch it? And why can some other people catch it? Why is it that some people who have everything don’t have this? Why do some people who have noth- ing going for them have this? Why doesn’t it have anything to do with merit? This sense of well-being and of happiness seems to have little to do with anything physical, spiritual, ethical, or anything else: there are just some people who feel happy.

– Agnes Varda

Il prend conscience que cet endroit n’a jamais cessé d’être sa destination. Peut-être croyait-il réellement faire du porte-à-porte pour apporter le témoignage de Jéhovah. En réalité, il cherchait uniquement ce garçon.

– N’essuie jamais de larmes sans gants

Jonas Gardell

Car évidemment qu’on peut éprouver le manque de ce qu’on n’a jamais eu, on peut éprouver le manque de quelqu’un qu’on n’a jamais rencontré ou de quelque chose qu’on n’a encore jamais vu.

– N’essuie jamais de larmes sans gants

Jonas Gardell

What I hoped to show in La Pointe Courte was the paralysis of the couple who can’t seem to shake free of their intellectual and emotional problems, and hence can’t manage to think about their affinity to any group. I wanted my audience to understand that there’s no connection between social issues and private problems. Of course, there does exist a level of understanding where these antagonisms disappear. But in La Pointe Courte, I presented a couple in crisis and not only between them- selves, but in terms of their inability to connect with others.

– Agnes Varda

‘Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.’

Ocean Vuong – On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

“The next time someone gets upset near you – crying, yelling, breaking something, being pointed or cruel – watch how quickly this statement will stop them cold: “I hope this is making you feel better.” Because, of course, it isn’t. Only in the bubble of extreme emotion can we justify any of that kind of behavior – and when called to account for it, we usually feel sheepish or embarrassed. It’s worth applying that standard to yourself. The next time you find yourself in the middle of a freakout, or moaning and groaning with flulike symptoms, or crying tears of regret, just ask: Is this actually making me feel better? Is this actually relieving any of the symptoms I wish were gone?”

in the mood to be hugged for an entire day

There is no one left who understands

how I wait

– Anne Sexton

Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable, occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated.

– Letters to a Young Poet

Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps that was it, I kept thinking. Perhaps I was getting too old for the sort of jeezny I had been leading, brothers. I was eighteen now, just gone. Eighteen was not a young age. At eighteen old Wolfgang Amadeus had written concertos and symphonies and operas and oratorios and all that cal, no, not cal, heavenly music. And then there was old Felix M. with his Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. And there were others. And there was this like French poet set by old Benjy Britt, who had done all his best poetry by the age of fifteen, O my brothers. Arthur, his first name. Eighteen was not all that young an age, then. But what was I going to do?

– A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess

How do we come to be here next to each other   

in the night

Where are the stars that show us to our love   

inevitable

Outside the leaves flame usual in darkness   

and the rain

falls cool and blessed on the holy flesh   

the black men waiting on the corner for   

a womanly mirage

I am amazed by peace

It is this possibility of you

asleep

and breathing in the quiet air

– June Jordan “Poem for my love”

Instead of having sex all the time I like to hold you and not get into some involved discussion of what life means. I want you to tell me something I don’t know about you. Something about the day before that photograph in which you’re standing on your head. I want to know about softball and the team picture. Why are you so little next to the others? Were you younger? Were you small as a girl? What I want most is to have been a girl with you and played on the opposite team so I could have liked you and competed against you at the same time.

– Eloise Klein Healy “Asking about you”

– Timothy Liu “Winter”, 1995

We realise flowering and fading together.

And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing,

as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness.

– The Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke

‘But the people here won’t work. They don’t want to work. Look at this place – it’s enough to break your heart.’

‘Hearts have been broken,’ she said. ‘Be sure of that. I suppose you all know what you are doing.

– Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys

He gave me the impression that he was repeating something which he had learned by heart or that, magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling round and round in the same orbit. At times he spoke as if he were simply alluding to some fact that everybody knew, and at times he lowered his voice and spoke mysteriously as if he were telling us something secret which he did not wish others to overhear. He repeated his phrases over and over again, varying them and surrounding them with his monotonous voice. I continued to gaze towards the foot of the slope, listening to him.

– Dubliners

James Joyce

All of a sudden it didn’t bother me not being modern.

Am I in love? – Yes, since I’m waiting.” The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.

The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

the most relatable pic I saw in months

Parfois il tombe amoureux et entame une liaison avec un inconnu assis en face de lui, un homme dont le regard s’attarde sur lui une seconde de trop, un geste qu’il interprète aussitôt comme une sorte de signal, un message secret. En proie à l’excitation, il fantasme sur leur vie commune dans une relation qui ne dure que quelques stations.

– N’essuie jamais de larmes sans gants

Jonas Gardell

Because trust me, no one ever gets to be forty-three and thinks about their life and what it all means, and wishes that they had stood aside more often and allowed more injustice to happen to more already struggling kids while they were back in high school. That is not going to happen. But what will happen is that you are going to grow up and look back one day and be sorry for your silences, and regret the times you stood by and let someone be cruel to someone else, or even worse, joined in on it all yourself.

– One in Every Crowd

Ivan E. Coyote

I don’t want to fall in love. I don’t want to fall in love. I don’t want to fall in love. I don’t want to fall in love. I don’t want to fall in love. I don’t want to fall in love. I don’t want to fall in love. I don’t want to fall in love. I don’t want to fall in love. I don’t want to fall in love. I don’t want to fall in love.

‘La traduction, c’est une imitation dans laquelle on invente, une invention dans laquelle on imite.’

– Michelet (1825)

Differences

A peach and a nectarine taste
the same, but they’re not

– not quite – and some folk swear
by the difference.

You and I
know where to place our minds.

– Hayden Carruth

‘Eye contact: how souls catch fire.’

– Yahia Lababidi ‘Aphorisms’

Aujourd’hui

No longer are the lovers entwined in each other’s arms.

«The smell of jasmine makes people tell their secrets,” I say to him, my voice low.

“Is that jasmine?” he asks, swirling the air with his hand.

I nod. The flashlight’s bright on his face. It’s an inquisition.

“Why do you think I have secrets?” He crosses his arms.

“Who doesn’t?”

“Tell me one of yours, then?

– I’ll Give You the Sun

Jandy Nelson

He’s like a bag of selves. This Einstein one. The fearless meteor-hurling god. The crazy laughing guy. The Ax! There’s more too, I know it. Hidden ones. Truer ones. Because why is his inside face so worried?

– I’ll Give You the Sun

Jandy Nelson

Sometimes I wonder if I’m making the whole thing up and if someone were looking down from above they’d see me alone all day, talking and laughing by myself in the middle of a forest.

– I’ll Give You the Sun

Jandy Nelson

either express your thought clearly or do not express it at all

everything lacks originality

types of moods:

• need coffee
• more coffee
• i am coffee
• the clouds are taunting me with their presence, if i don’t get to watcheth the sunset tonight i will surely dieth
• cute girl what do i do
• i can’t feel my future
• fuck
• i love you, leave me alone

– lovelyfilters

– La Jetée, Chris Marker (1962)

L’amour humain peut prendre de nombreuses expressions. Il peut être violent et passionnel. Il peut être tranquille et modeste. Il peut être jubilatoire et tragique. Il peut être angoisse et souffrance. Il peut être pathétique et même un peu ridicule. Mais il y a une chose qu’il ne peut jamais être : Il ne peut jamais être honteux. 

– N’essuie jamais de larmes sans gants

Jonas Gardell

‘We grow up; but the world remains a child. Star and flower, in silence, watch us go. And sometimes we appear to be the final exam they must succeed on. And they do.’ Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell

‘You are the story I can’t write. Every page of you has to be torn out of me.’

Medbh McGuckian