when simone de beauvoir said “i’m reliving it, neutralizing it, and transforming it into an inoffensive past that i can keep in my heart without either disowning it or suffering from it. that’s not easy. it’s at once painful and poetic.”
Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.
Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.
The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (1982)
A monotype for the evening.
“I must say, I find that girl utterly delightful. Flat as a board, enormous birthmark the shape of Mexico over half her face, sweating for hours on end in that sweltering kitchen, while Mendl, genius though he is, looms over her like a hulking gorilla. Yet without question, without fail, always and invariably, she’s exceedingly lovely.”
if you save it please like or credit @swwtcreature on twitter
We found ourselves on the less prepared side of things…
The Office 4.14 (2005-2013) Dir. Jeffrey Blitz
“When one is alone and lonely, the body gladly lingers in the wind or the rain, or splashes into the cold river, or pushes through the ice-crusted snow. Anything that touches.”— Mary Oliver, from “Leaves and Blossoms Along the Way,” in Felicity
“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
“I stood deep inside a willow and found it better than love. I saw a willow’s heart. It was green and easy to touch. For a moment I was a willow-animal. Anyone could touch me deep inside. I was easy to touch.”— Jim Moore, For a Moment
“You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image: you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.”
– Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes
“As Spectator I was interested in Photography only for “sentimental” reasons; I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.”
— Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
– Susan Sontag, On Photography
(Source: analytik)
“Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter’s tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.”— Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
(via nemophilies)
(Source: tulipnight)