Anonymous asked: YES!
There is no defense against reproach but obscurity; it is a kind of concomitant to greatness, as satires and invectives were an essential part of a Roman triumph.
Ask<
May 7, 2012
May 7, 2012
Anonymous asked: do i speak loudly of my failures? am i the obese person so ashamed of eating the slice of cake i consume the whole thing? will i survive a lesson should i learn? highly regarded oracle.
A failure that holds your attention has something to teach you. Learn that and it will become less interesting.
If you are afraid of wallowing in your failure, try it. Wallow hard for 24 hours. It isn’t very satisfying, even in a dirty way, and knowing this might ease the temptation.
Externalize everything you can of your work, failed or not. Otherwise you will turn into a homunculus of yourself. Think here of popular artists. Take it in a Newtonian way: you move faster by throwing things out of yourself harder.
The rest of us don’t give a fuck about your failures and would be grateful if you shut up about them.
May 5, 2012
Mute it.
May 2, 2012
Ni cagando huevón (“Nor [will I be] shitting out a giant egg”) is a phrase commonly used among youth meaning “Don’t even think about it” or “Absolutely not.”
In crude terms, Rapid Dominance would seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events so [sic] that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at tactical and strategic levels. […]
It will imply more than the direct application of force. It will mean the ability to control the environment and to master all levels of an opponent’s activities to affect will, perception, and understanding. This could include means of communication, transportation, food production, water supply, and other aspects of infrastructure as well as the denial of military responses. Deception, misinformation, and disinformation are key components in this assault on the will and understanding of the opponent.
if I ever refer to myself as a seeker poison me I beg you
How long I slept, wandering between man and horse, I do not know, but eventually I was awakened by the sound of a woman laughing.
to the scale of people and time:—water.org estimates women spend 200 million hours/day collecting water for domestic use ∴ since June 2004, women have spent as much time carrying water as there has been since the extinction of the dinosaurs
Keep a strict eye on eulogistic & dyslogistic adjectives—they shd diagnose (not merely blame) & distinguish (not merely praise).
Gratien Ruhorahoza
Ndarishikanye, Barnabé: «Quand deux clientélismes s’affrontent», Komera No. 3 (March-April 1994)
fetishes of strangers—sexiest or least sexy thing?
Human beings, in classical Haida, are called xhaaydla xhaaydaghaay, “surface people.” Skaay also calls them xhaaydla xhitiit ghidaay, “ordinary surface birds.” Such ideas are widespread in Native American philosophy. The corresponding Navajo term, for example, is nihokáá dine’é, “earth-surface people.” But the Haida term evokes in particular the surface of the sea. “One They Hand Along” is a narrative map locating the world of surface people in relation to the world beneath the waves, which is of special concern to the Haida. The trilogy of which it is a part extends this map to the forest and the sky. We can pass from one world to another, according to these stories, by paddling a canoe across the horizon, or by making a moral choice.
Candido Portinari
Fn 106, p 383 (nominally → p 63, actually 62)
Give me my head, give me my head … Take my apartment, take my paintings, only give me back my head!…
a women who exhales a little more than she inhales
σὺ δέ μοι δὸς ξείνιον, ὥς περ ὑπέστης.
May 2, 2012
April 30, 2012
April 29, 2012
Anonymous asked: it is a moment of unrepentant honesty when a salt-stain, arrangement of strewn trash, corded and bundled construction supplies or a peculiar face deafen one in stillness and send the blood rushing to their feet.
Yes.
1.
The motif of harmful sensation. As its active, passive, and middle voices, think of: gazing upon a gorgon, being gazed upon by a basilisk, and Narcissus gazing upon himself.
Monsters and tragic heroes, then, and you and me, because what do we do when we gaze upon the beauties you list? We stop them. When consciousness tries to recapitulate the intuition that these things do not represent and are therefore honest, that they are their places in the world, that they are completely contingent and inevitable, consciousness destroys.
I only know the beauty of the unconsidered in the moment it leaves. And so, by classical conditioning, I learn to take its loss as part of it. The cold smothering exaltation is nostalgia.
2.
When I mansplain to you that what you are talking about is called Stendhal syndrome, you are furthest from feeling it. Let fools carry on about this pseudo-paradox. Let them say that dissecting lived experience is bad. Let them declaim against criticism and demystification. Let them say that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent. Let them admire their own restraint.
The gibbering monkey of desire and analysis, rending every gentle part of experience with its claw-nails and shitting adjectives all over the Tao, is the soul.
Sure, all you fools, sure, let’s sit around imagining humans who are not like this, who have no monkey, who receive experiences of beauty in perfect and unitary stillness. Sure. Okay, see what we’re doing now? What-iffing and disrespecting people as they are? That’s the monkey talking. Fuckers.
As for whereof-one-cannot, the fools think it means you mustn’t speak of a butterfly without being one. But I remember how to speak poetry:
The word butterfly is merely data. It is not an opportunity for you to hover, soar, befriend flowers, symbolize beauty and frailty, or in any way impersonate a butterfly. Do not act out words. Never act out words. Never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. Never close your eyes and jerk your head to one side when you talk about death. Do not fix your burning eyes on me when you speak about love. If you want to impress me when you speak about love put your hand in your pocket or under your dress and play with yourself. If ambition and the hunger for applause have driven you to speak about love you should learn how to do it without disgracing yourself or the material.
That’s enough whereof-one-cannot for one day.
You can’t kill the monkey without letting it kill you. If you need its silence — and you probably do — train it. Feed it well but not to excess; let it play and forgive it its trespasses. Do this because you secretly love it, or because if you mistreat it it will find revenge. If you can tell the difference, or which is worse, lucky you.
3.
More strictly, Stendhal syndrome is a response to high art. It happens in museums. It’s less a sense that something was there just before you looked, and more a sense that it’s still behind you. It’s the creepiness of knowing you’re on a path that someone laid for you. People from the woods have this feeling on visits to the city.
Something art can be is an unrepentant honesty that does not turn to stone when wittering, writhing awareness gazes upon it.
4.
Thank you.
April 28, 2012
Anonymous asked: Anonymous Asked: I'm surrounded by vacuums in place of mirrors - each one a painful suction. I am informed by my best judgement that lacks, having taken on the burdensome gift of self-reliance. Orbiting a desire for preservation is the genuine avidity to move laterally toward luminosity; free myself from the past I hate less. I am disillusioned. I have my fear. I have no tools. For every dig, a mirroring mound. I want to be a better host. How do you negotiate terms on a contract you never signed
Exercise helps with depression. It will also order your physical and especially your spatial metaphors. I count: surrounded, vacuums, a place, mirrors, suction, a burden, an orbit, lateral motion, luminosity, tools, and holes and mounds.
If you want to compare your feelings to bone tiredness, have you been bone tired this week? If you tell me you are chasing yourself, what does that mean if you have not run a track against your best time? Pay the owed visit to your body, the mute illiterate whose words you have used today. Run on the waterfront with all the other weenises. Run away from, run past, run toward. Then you can talk. Talk about the desire to move. Talk about trying to judge a long jump — the feeling in your groin as it fears an overstretch. Talk about falling and then sweat in your scrapes.
And with my finger wagging I tell you: Do not confuse exercise with contemporary American-style sport. Many people who should know better see that sports fans are mainly utter shitheads, and but conclude from this that attention to the body itself subtracts from attention to the person. Ignore this if you can. Attend to the body as a king visiting unquiet provinces. Attend to the body as a skillful dom. Steal from it. Run, or walk or row, to seduce and assimilate your meat.
Or you can sit around recursively doubting yourself and feeling glad that however bad things are at least you still appreciate beauty. That might work.
April 28, 2012
Titles from the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog
- Religious sign on highway between Columbus and Augusta, Georgia, indicating revival of interest in religion. This sign was painted red, white and blue
- The Blue and the Gray at Gettysburg, Assembly Tent, Gettysburg Celebration, Pennsylvania
- Charlie Chaplin and others seated on floor, at a Japanese tea ceremony at the home of Charles and Ray Eames, photographed from above
- Raised him dripping to the string-piece
- A red clay Negro cemetery. No attempts to lay out crops. The graves in rows with narrow spaces between. This cemetery was a solid space of red clay washed by the rains. Even the gravestones are colored red by the red clay beaten against them by rain. On such markers as are cut there was misspelling as “bon” for “born,” “die such and such a time twenty one ears.” Bethel Hill High School, Person County, North Carolina
- [Weasel and humming bird]
- Oyster inspecting fire apparatus
- Sculpture of architect Cass Gilbert holding the Woolworth Building, located in the Woolworth Building lobby, New York, New York
- Las Vegas, Nevada’s headlining illusionists Siegfried & Roy (Siegried Fischbacher and Roy Horn) in their private apartment at the Mirage Hotel on the Vegas Strip, along with one of their performing white lions
- Caruso boarding GIUSEPPE VERDI
- Preparing to eat the mummy
- [Woman pointing gun at man laying blanket on beach]
- The street of the slave girls, Chinatown, San Francisco
- Seventy-one years, or, My life with photography. Gypsy Rose Lee under the Bougereau, Sept. 23, 1943
- El panteón de los huelguistas
- Scalp-Shirts
- Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid
April 27, 2012
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Absolutely certain...
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I guess another way to say that is: “the journey is the destination” only works if you’re on a journey, which requires a fucking destination. If...
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For Justin
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“In the act of loving someone, you arm them against you.” - Unknown
