darling

There lived a man

2012-01-08T13:40:00.004Z

There lived a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily. He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He had no nose either. He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, he had no spine, and he had no innards at all. He didn’t have anything. So we don’t even know who we’re talking about. It’s better that we don’t talk about him any more.

The Redheaded Man, by Daniil Kharms

Why should not old men be mad?

2011-10-27T16:11:00.000Z

Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly-fisher's wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream,
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it a matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort,
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad.

Why should not old men be mad? by William Butler Yeats
Ben Trovato by Michael Flores

I am so beastly tired of mankind

2011-08-11T12:28:00.002Z

I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.

H.P.Lovecraft

Believe me, I want to be happy

2011-03-31T12:16:00.000Z

You've taken over my mind. You've raped my thoughts with your image viruses then sold me fake cures for your own disease. Your words and pictures scream orders at me like angry prison wardens. When I cover my ears, your voices echo in my head. I hate you. When I see your billboards, your talk shows, your rock concerts and your factories, when I see the work of your twisted libidos, I want to kill you. I want to set fires, plant bombs, derail trains. I want to smash your buildings and tear at your bodies until the skin of my hands is worn to the bone. I am filled with a rage that burns my eyes.

I don't want to feel this way. You have done this to me. These feelings are the fruits of your multi-billion dollar sowing. And I am not alone. There are others like me out here. Every suicide, every madman, every man and woman who gets a gun and just starts shooting — these are your illegitimate children. They don't all know what they are doing. All they know is hate for the invisible walls which you have raised around them, hate for the narrow path you have tried to make them walk. And the innocent pay in blood for your negligence.

Remember this: My mind is big. The more you try to push me down and make me small, the greater the pressure inside me becomes. The greater the pressure, the greater the chance of an explosion. There was once a time when I felt love, but now I feel only hate and anger, and fear at what I might do. And you can tell me to "BE HAPPY," but I know that you really mean "BE QUIET".

Believe me, I want to be happy. You stand in my way.

Your pictures make me want to kill, Abrupt Flyer #5, Feb. 1992
Atomic skirt, Susannah Breslin

Flowers

2011-02-13T17:15:00.000Z

On high stalks, scaly and stained black like snakeskins, were enormous spars, kind of funnel-shaped cornets with the dark violet of putrefaction inside, and the greenish yellow of decomposition outside, like the open thoraxes of dead animals. Long, blood-red spadices, imitating monstrous falluses, came forth from these cornets. Attracted by the corpse-like odor that these horrible plants exhaled, flies hovered in concentrated swarms, swallowed up at the bottom of the spar, which was adorned from top to bottom with silky contractile that enlaced the flies and held them prisoner more effectively than any spider's web. Along the stem, the digitalized leaves were clenched and twisted like the hands of men under torture.

The Torture Garden, Octave Mirabeau
Green Caviar, Marilyn Minter

The other side of i

2011-01-14T14:54:00.001Z

We sail the seas and fly the skies and drive up and down all the roads, but the deepest caves, the cleverest caverns, cannot take us to the underground, tell us what goes on in that inner realm, however it happens . . . or whether, at the genetic center of the self, in pure birth earth, there is no need for action and all is over and nothing's begun: because we're in that fabled place where compacts of conclusion coalesce like veins of coal, compressed past the thought of further futures and consequently beyond each form of the past . . . -- that's what we really don't know and maybe motivates my burrowing -- if there's a bottom nature, and just what's what where the well ends, when we pass beneath its water, when we actually enter 'in' and find ourselves in front of n and on the other side of i.

The Tunnel, William Gass

Incredible and impossible things

2010-12-14T00:13:00.004Z

Some of these melancholic persons... troubled with this disease imagine many strange, incredible and impossible things. Some that they are monarchs and princes, and that all other men are their subjects: Some that they are brute beasts: Some that they be urinals or earthen pots, greatly fearing to be broken: Some that every one that meets them will convey them to the gallows; and yet in the end hang themselves. One thought that Atlas whom the poets fain to hold up heaven with his shoulders, would be weary, and let the sky fall upon him: ...One (person) that had killed his father, was notably detected; by imagining that a swallow upbraided him therewith: So as he himself thereby revealed the murder. But the most notablest example hereof is one that was in great perplexity imagining that his nose was as big as a house..."

A fasinating manuscript in the British Museum (Sloane, 160: fol. 39)
Image by Antoine D'Agata

After the massacre

2010-12-07T22:51:00.008Z

Wherever there is spilt blood to justify, acts of piracy to be consecrated, violation to bless, hideous trade to protect, you are sure to see him, that British Tartuffe, pursuing the work of abominable conquest on the pretext of religious proselytism or scientific study. His cunning and ferocious shadow hangs over the desolation of conquered peoples, tied up with that of the cut-throat soldier and vindictive Shylock. In virgin forests, where the European rightly inspires more dread than the tiger, on the threshold of the humble straw-huts that have been devastated, between the burned-out shacks, he appears after the massacre, like a scavenger, to plunder the dead the evening after the battle. A worthy counterpart of his rival the Catholic missionary who also brings civilization on the end of torches, and the point of sabers and bayonets.

The Torture Garden, Octave Mirabeau

Dark things

2010-09-10T15:30:00.004Z

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers

Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVII
Bas Zoontjens

A human being

2010-08-12T13:04:00.005Z

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects.

Robert A. Heinlein
Six month exposure of the Clifton Suspension Bridge by Justin Quinnell

The problem of living

2010-08-04T10:10:00.000Z

Everywhere there were people living out their lives using aspects of suicide against themselves. They did not even have the authenticity of the final act to speak for them. Suicide is, in short, the one continuous, everyday, ever-present problem of living. It is a question of degree. I’d seen them in all varying stages of development and despair. The failed lawyer, the cynical doctor, the depressed housewife, the angry teenager... all of mankind engaged in the massive conspiracy against their own lives that is their daily activity. The meaning of suicide, the true meaning, had yet to be defined, had yet to be created in the broad dimensions it deserved.

Daniel Stern

Being born

2010-06-21T11:42:00.001Z

Despotism covers society’s surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

Democracy In America, Alexis de Tocqueville (1835)

Here she comes now

2010-03-08T23:39:00.005Z

She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold
Of Night primeval, and of Chaos old!
Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying rainbows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea's strain,
The sick'ning stars fade off th' ethereal plain.

The Dunciad (Book IV), Alexander Pope
The MUSE

A taste for Pornography

2010-02-14T16:01:00.020Z

A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.

JG Ballard
Photo by Enrique Metinides

And do you not know that you are each an Eve?

2010-01-30T11:17:00.002Z

"The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the Devil's gateway: You are the unsealer of the forbidden tree: You are the first deserter of the divine law: You are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert even the Son of God had to die."

Tertullian, 202 AC
Photo by Elena Dorfman

What comes next

2009-11-18T16:39:00.001Z

It seemed the kind of life we wanted.
Wild strawberries and cream in the morning.
Sunlight in every room.
The two of us walking by the sea naked.

Some evenings, however, we found ourselves
Unsure of what comes next.
Like tragic actors in a theater on fire,
With birds circling over our heads,
The dark pines strangely still,
Each rock we stepped on bloodied by the sunset.

Clouds Gathering, by Charles Simic
image by Richard Hamilton

The most atrocious crimes

2009-10-30T15:05:00.001Z

The temperament of women exposes her to the most singular inconveniences and inconsistencies. Extreme in good, she is also extreme in evil. She is inconstant and changeable; she "will" and she "wont". She is easily disgusted with that which she has pursued with the greatest ardor. She passes from love to hate with prodigious facility. She is full of contradictions and mysteries. Capable of the most heroic actions, she does not shrink from the most atrocious crimes.

Satan is Society, Nicholas Francis Cooke, 1870
Photo by Mark Seliger

The community

2009-10-25T12:37:00.010Z

In the long run, the State, the Community, the established form of life remained, remained intact and impregnable, the individual, trying to break forth from it, died of fear, or of exhaustion, or of exposure to attack from all sides, like men who have left the walled city to live outside in the precarious open. This is the tragedy of Hardy, always the same: the tragedy of those who, more or less pioneers, have died in the wilderness, whither they have escaped for free action, after having left the walled security, and the comparative imprisonment, of the established convention. This is the theme novel after novel: remain quiet within the convention, and you are good, safe and happy in the long run, though you never have the vivid pang of sympathy on your side; or, on the other hand, be passionate, individual, willful, you will find the security of the convention a walled prison, you will escape and you will die, either of your own lack of strength to bear the isolation and the exposure, or from a direct revenge from the community, or from both.

DH Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy (1936)

A shroud of thoughts

2009-10-13T11:29:00.010Z

I stood among them, but not of them, in a shroud
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Lord Byron
pic by Nick Zantop, Life Element Magazine #100

the madness of space

2009-07-06T14:36:00.007Z

Throw away the lights, the definitions,

And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that,

But do not use the rotted names.

How should you walk in that space and know

Nothing of the madness of space,

Nothing of its jocular procreations?

Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar
Photo: Marilyn Minter, Green Pink Caviar (via)

Fear of wolves

2009-04-26T16:12:00.003Z

Throughout the course of the generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.

History Of The Night, Jorge Luis Borges

Ordinary Sufferings

2009-02-13T14:02:00.004Z

The soul is not stupefied into mere sensations by a worthless sympathy with our own ordinary sufferings.

Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A lovely Light

2008-07-10T07:52:00.004Z

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light!

Fist Fig, Edna St. Vincent Millay
Tina Chow by Bob Colacello

We are what we repeatedly do

2008-05-29T15:25:00.003Z

You know how it is waking
from a dream certain you can fly
and that someone, long gone, returned

and you are filled with longing,
for a brief moment, to drive off
the road and feel nothing

or to see the loved one and feel
everything. Perhaps one morning,
taking brush to hair you'll wonder

how much of your life you've spent
at this task or signing your name
or rising in fog in near darkness

to ready for work. Day begins
with other people's needs first
and your thoughts disperse like breath.

In the in-between hour, the solitary hour,
before day begins all the world
gradually reappears car by car.

Morning, Deborah Ager

I am nobody

2008-04-13T22:59:00.007Z

Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

I am nobody, Emily Dickinson
Foto, by Mortem Bjarnhof (via)

A storm of flowers

2008-03-09T15:26:00.003Z

An immense green head of hair, ornamented by a storm of flowers, whose locks fell everywhere, escaped in insane dishevelment, created dreams of a swooning young giantess thrusting her head backward in the convulsionsof her orgasm, a stream of gorgeous hair rising like a pond of perfumes.

The sin of father Mouret, Emile Zola

Words and things

2008-03-02T18:48:00.003Z

All myth is an enriched pattern,
a two-faced proposition,
allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life.
Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars.
And from the true lies of poetry
trickled out a question.

What really connects words and things?

The Beauty of the Husband, Ann Carson

They were not composed altogether of flesh and blood

2007-12-21T01:05:00.002Z

They had shape...but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die.

HP Lovecraft

Wars may be fought with weapons

2007-12-01T18:02:00.002Z

But they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.

George S. Patton, 1933

All things innocent

2007-11-10T14:52:00.002Z

I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,
The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,

All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.

The Meadow Mouse, Theodore Roethke
Installation by Esther Stocker

And they are bitter

2007-11-10T11:56:00.001Z

The tree was planted, and why not for him?
If not, why place him near it, where it grew,
The fairest in the center? They have but
One answer to all questions, "'Twas his will,
And he is good." How know I that? Because
He is all-powerful, must all-good, too, follow?

I judge but by the fruits- and they are bitter-
When I must feed on for a fault not mine.

Caín, Lord Byron

Endings

2007-11-01T22:36:00.001Z

Things do not explode
The fail, they fade

Endings, Dereck Walcott
image by Lieko Shiga

Mortal lovers

2007-05-01T16:44:00.001Z

Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step; for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.

C. S. Lewis (1898 - 1963), 'The Pilgrim's Regress'

The terrible objects

2007-04-30T11:12:00.001Z

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer, are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasures which the most learned voluptuary could suggest, or the liveliest imagination, and the most sound and exquisitely sensible body could enjoy. Nay I am in great doubt, whether any man could be found who would earn a life of the most perfect satisfaction, at the price of ending it in the torments, which justice inflicted in a few hours on the late unfortunate regicide in France. But as pain is stronger in its operation than pleasure, so death is in general a much more affecting idea than pain; because there are very few pains, however exquisite, which are not preferred to death; nay, what generally makes pain itself, if I may say so, more painful, is, that it is considered as an emissary of this king of terrors. When pleasure or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience. The cause of this I shall endeavour to investigate hereafter.

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Edmund Burke

horror vacui

2007-02-24T22:28:00.001Z

In other days, when he was still in the habit of inviting women to his house, he had fitted up a boudoir where, amid dainty carved furniture of the light-yellow camphor-wood of Japan, under a sort of tent of pink Indian satin, the flesh tints borrowed a soft, warm glow from the artfully disposed lights sifting down through the rich material. This room, where mirrors hung on every wall, reflecting backwards and forwards from one to another an infinite succession of pink boudoirs, had enjoyed a great renown among his various mistresses, who loved to bathe their nakedness in this flood of warm crimson amid the aromatic odours given off by the Oriental wood of the furniture...

The dining-room, draped in black, opened out on to a garden metamorphosed for the occasion, the paths being strewn with charcoal, the ornamental pond edged with black basalt and filled with ink, and the shrubberies replanted with cypresses and pine. The dinner itself was served on a black cloth adorned with baskets of violets and scabious; candelabra shed an eerie green light over the tables and tapers flickered in the chandeliers. While a hidden orchestra played funeral marches, the guests were waited on by naked negresses wearing only slippers and stockings in cloth of silver embroidered with tears...

A Rebours, J.-K. Huysmans

it is this craving void

2007-01-28T17:55:00.002Z

The great object of life is Sensation—to feel that we exist—even though in pain—it is this "craving void" which drives us to Gaming—to Battle—to Travel—to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.

Don Juan, Lord Byron

ONE night I wandered

2006-12-24T14:08:00.001Z

ONE night, when half my life behind me lay,
I wandered from the straight lost path afar.
Through the great dark was no releasing way;
Above that dark was no relieving star.
If yet that terrored night I think or say,
As death's cold hands its fears resuming are.

Canto I, Inferno, Dante Alighieri

The people who went in the dark have seen a great light

2006-12-12T00:14:00.001Z

and for those who were living in the land of the deepest night,
the light is shining

Isaiah 9:2

death by water

2006-12-05T15:39:00.001Z

Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, The Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man.

Fear death by water.

The waste Land, TS Eliot

one single catastrophe

2006-12-04T13:47:00.001Z

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling up wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin

would you

2006-11-25T14:42:00.001Z

Say, i found a piece of rock
And put it in my pocket
And for the day that we are waiting
I put it in a locker
Wish to hang around your neck
As long as you see fit.

But tell me, oh my love
Do you think that you would wear it?

Bonnie "Prince" Billy

Ecstasis

2006-09-21T15:07:00.004Z

'Ecstasis'is trancelike self-removal, schizoid or shamanistic. Dyonisus amorality cuts both ways. He is the god of theatre, masked balls, and free love; but also of anarchy, gang rape and mass murder.

Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia, 1990
Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek Wien X, Candida Höfer

the lucky one

2006-09-20T19:32:00.002Z

Digging a hole.
To bury his child alive.
So that he could buy food for his aged mother.
One day.
A man struck gold.

Take life in the Town of Luck, Anne Carson

Witch-Wife

2006-09-20T14:25:00.002Z

She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun ’tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.

Witch-Wife, Edna St Vincent Millay

Marry, and you will regret it

2006-09-07T15:08:00.002Z

Do not marry, and you will also regret it. Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way. Whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the stupidities of the world, and you will regret it; weep over them, and you will also regret it. Laugh at the stupidities of the world or weep over them, you will regret it either way. Whether you laugh at the stupidities of the world or you weep over them, you will regret it either way. Trust a girl, and you will regret it. Do not trust her, and you will also regret it. Trust a girl or do not trust her, you will regret it either way. Whether you trust a girl or do not trust her, you will regret it either way. Hang yourself, and you will regret it. Do not hang yourself, and you will also regret it. Hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. Whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way.

Text by Søren Kierkegaard
The Liner, from BibliOdyssey

But I can no more curse her

2006-09-07T13:46:00.001Z

I can no more curse her than I can the fire that consumes towns and forests, the water which sinks ships, or the tiger carrying bleeding prey between its jaws into the depths of the jungle.

The Torture Garden, Octave Mirabeau

the monster within

2006-08-21T12:58:00.001Z

Most of the world today is governed by Caesars. Men and more and more treated as things. Torture is ubiquitous. And, as Sartre wrote in his preface to Henri Alleg's chilling book about Algeria, 'Anyone, at any time, may equally find himself victim or executioner.' Suetonius, in holding up a mirror to those Caesars of diverting legend, reflects not only them but ourselves: half-tempted creatures, whose great moral task it is to hold in balance the angel and the monster within - for we are both, and to ignore this duality is to invite disaster.

Robert Graves and the Twelve Caesars, Gore Vidal

Flowers have no time for sentiment

2006-06-18T20:15:00.001Z

So small and fragile - a microcosm of nature, with all the beauty of its strength. It contains the world. Ah, frail and relentless organism heading for its realisation! Flowers have no time for sentiment, milady. They make love, nothing but love... And they do it all the time and in every way they can. It's all they think about. And they're right. Perverse? Because they obey life's only need, which is love? But consider this! The flower is nothing but a sexual organ, milady. Is anything healthier, stronger and more beautiful than a sexual organ? There marvellous petals, these silks, these velvets, these soft, supple and caressing fabrics - they are curtains of the alcove, the drapperies of the nuptial chamber, the perfumed bed where sexes are united, where they pass their fleeting and immortal life enraptured with love. What an admirable example they set us!

The Torture Garden, Octave Mirabeau

Anything can happen

2006-06-18T12:53:00.001Z

"Anything can happen, the tallest things be overturned, those in high places daunted, those overlooked regarded."

Anything can happen, Seamus Heaney
Motorboat oil, Gerhard Richter

The many men, so beautiful

2006-06-17T09:24:00.002Z

The many men, so beautiful !
And they all dead did lie :
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on ; and so did I.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel T. Coleridge

The Call

2006-05-19T23:30:00.001Z

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

The Call of Cthulhu, HPLovecraft

We don't talk to strangers

2006-05-16T19:58:00.001Z

And when we do, we tell them lies so well rehearsed even we don't always recall if they're true.

The Last Tycoon, Scott Fitzgerald

You lie to yourself and to others

2006-05-13T22:11:00.003Z

You lie to yourself and to others - you lie about everything that, in the depths of your soul, you recognise as the truth. You are forced to pretend outward respect for people and institutions which you find ridiculous. You remain cowardly attached to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn and which you know to lack all foundation. Its the permanent contradictions between your ideas and desires on the one hand, and all the dead forms and phantoms of your civilisation on the other that makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because every moment the free play of your strength is restrained, impeded and checked. Thats the poisonous and mortal wound of the civilised world.

The Torture Garden, Octave Mirabeau

with strange lips

2006-04-28T13:36:00.001Z

She the strange woman, she the flower, the sword,
Red from spilt blood, a mortal flower to men,
Adorable, detestable -- even she
Saw with strange eyes and with strange lips rejoiced,
Seeing these mine own slain of mine own, and me
Made miserable above all miseries made,
A grief among all women in the world,
A name to be washed out with all men's tears.

Atalanta in Calydon, Algernon Charles Swinburne

But suicides have a special language

2006-04-27T23:08:00.001Z

they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

Ann Sexton

La señorita Julia

2006-04-19T11:41:00.001Z

Quizá llegue una época en la que alcancemos un punto de desarrollo, en que seamos ya tan ilustrados, que podamos contemplar con indiferencia el brutal, cínico y despiadado espectáculo que nos ofrece la vida; un tiempo en el que podamos prescindir de esas máquinas de pensar inferiores e imprecisas, llamadas sentimientos, que al desarrollarse nuestros órganos del discernimiento se harán superfluas.

August Strindberg

love es machina

2006-04-12T12:05:00.001Z

La Naturaleza cambia, pero no la Andreida. Nosotros vivimos, morimos y ¿quién sabe...? La Andreida no conoce la vida, ni la enfermedad, ni la muerte. Está por encima de todas las imperfecciones, de todas las servidumbres y conserva la belleza del ensueño (...). Su corazón no puede cambiar porque carece de él. Vuestro deber será destruirlo antes de morir. Un cartucho de nitroglicerina o de panclastita bastará para reducirla a polvo y deshacer su forma en el viento del caduco espacio.

La Eva Futura, Comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

I deplore brutality

2006-04-10T14:45:00.001Z

"It's not efficient"-he said. "On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a special feeling of guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct."

-- William S. Burroughs

sometimes violently

2006-04-08T20:04:00.002Z

One of the reasons that watching a live performance is a hundred times more thrilling than hearing a recording is the experience of witnessing the physical process of sound being made: the sight of human flesh encountering ivory or gut or metal, sometimes violently.

Charlotte Higgins

el intolerable universo

2006-04-06T07:22:00.001Z

El poeta caínico no tiene nombre ni jerarquía social. No cree en nada, y menos en sí mismo. No sabe de dónde viene ni adónde va. No sabe qué hacer ni lo que quiere ser, y no le interesa saberlo. No soporta su mundo ni cualquier otro. No se tolera. Ignora a propósito quién es. Y establece entre él y sus pensamientos cierta insalvable distancia. Entre su mente y el hastío no hay diferencia: calcina lo que toca, esteriliza lo que piensa y hace del tiempo una experiencia de la asfixia. Su reino es un desierto de hielo sin fronteras. Vive el mundo —lo goza— como desde atrás de un vidrio. Por eso cuestiona lo que hay al otro lado de cada cosa, de cada suceso, de cada persona. Es una víctima del más allá, un detractor de lo otro.

Quizás la única verdad palpable sean sus deseos.

Felipe Vázquez

clara

2006-04-04T17:54:00.001Z

I realized that the very thing that held me to her was the frightful rottenness of her soul and her crimes of love. She was a monster, and I loved her for being a monster.

The torture garden, Octave Mirabeau