“The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body follows its own ideas, for my body does not have the same ideas as I.”
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
““You don’t have to understand the work you are watching. The creator most likely doesn’t care to be understood; he/she just wants to be loved.””
— Ohad Naharin (via kickyfeetvintage)
“The black doors close the noble souls of children: the golden keys are in the dressers of the fathers, the mothers; the birds strike with their beaks against the marble steps of the family homes; it will be said that this is a game and that I am a child; now, the door is closed and the papas and the mamas are holding their breath; the marble is dry, the house cold, I decide to begin life as a bird.”
— Alain Jugnon, A Body, In Spite (translated by Nathanaël)
“On that day, I decided to leave things as they are: words will experience the rest.”
— Alain Jugnon, A Body, In Spite (translated by Nathanaël)
“As a child, he was born without anyone noticing. The mother, questioned, speaks of a forgetfulness that night. The father, dead, doesn’t remember forgetting anything. It was the wind passing through.”
— Alain Jugnon, A Body, In Spite (translated by Nathanaël)
“I even saw actors hold their breath, because they lived among men, so as to not have to perform.”
— Alain Jugnon, A Body, In Spite (translated by Nathanaël)
Sometimes I — accustomed as I am to the little lies I and others tell — have a longing for sincerity that brings me to tears. I feel smothered by all the little compromises my life is made of and it makes me want to fight back — uselessly, foolishly — by telling once and for all the truth, the whole truth, holding nothing back, indifferent to whatever might happen next.
Mihail Sebastian, Women (trans. Philip Ó Ceallaigh)
I always mocked life, the world and its peoples all seemed like a game, a humiliation, something empty and meaningless. I wanted to sleep a dreamless sleep and not wake up again.
Sadeq Hedayat, Buried Alive; from 'Buried Alive', tr. Deborah Miller Mostaghel
How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death?
I walk home calmly.
I kiss him.
I kiss him.
at times when hope is too big of a thing to have, curiosity (even clinical or small) is a very good placeholder
undinesea
Whoever goes deeply into poetry escapes from being as certitude, meets with the absence of the gods, lives in the intimacy of this absence, becomes responsible for it, assumes its risk, and endures its favor.
Maurice Blanchot, from “Mallarmé’s Experience,” The Space of Literature
