aethiopicae

[aethiopicae]

a girl is never simply grocery shopping btw. she is grocery shopping and running away from the horrors. she is grocery shopping and trying to find her childhood whimsy somewhere between the aisles. she is grocery shopping and feeling an amount of grief that is insurmountable. but she is never just grocery shopping

[aethiopicae]

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

[aethiopicae]

[aethiopicae]

"Impossible", Mher Arshakyan (translated by Tathev Simonyan)

[aethiopicae]

The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991)

[aethiopicae]

Cabello/Carceller No Es Él (It’s Not Him) 2007

[aethiopicae]

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

[aethiopicae]

Ruth Orkin. American girl in Italy. 1951

[aethiopicae]

Many folktales throughout different cultures feature a heroine being given the impossible task of sorting through grains/seeds– whether that be picking them from the ashes, from between each other, or from their rotting counterparts.

In this task, she often does as much as she can before submitting to a higher power, whether that power recognizes her virtue or she directly asks for help varies based on the culture and tale.

Featured are eight such tales, most of which can be categorized into “Snake Bride” (ATU 425) type tales or “Cinderella” (Both often ATU 510 in the folklore index– Cinderellas are specifically ATU 510A)

The circle puts them in no particular order, as “origins”  and lineages are muddied, and many of the current incarnations have been influenced by each other, though Ye Xian is the oldest known “complete” version of Cinderella.

Snake Brides:

Psyche, Eros and Psyche (Greco-Roman)

Sukkia, The Snake’s Bride (India)

Donan Sampakang Tale about Gansaļangi and Donan Sampakang (Indonesian)

Cinderellas:

Aschenputtel (German)

Tam, Tấm and Cám (Vietnam)

Unnamed Heroine The Wonderful Birch (Finish & Slavic)

Ye Xian (Chinese)

Neither (ATU 480B– Stepmother and Stepdaughter)

Vasilisa, Vasilisa the Wise (or Beautiful) (Slavic)

[aethiopicae]

Maggie Smith as the fairy queen Titania, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1977)

[aethiopicae]

Alex Dimitrov, from “Together and by Ourselves”

[aethiopicae]

J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Return of the King

[aethiopicae]

Mahmoud Darwish, Life To The Last Drop

[aethiopicae]

the borgias 2.03 / the crown of love by john everett millais / autobiography of a yogi, paramahansa yogananda / the borgias 3.04 / pine to sound, nancy kuhl / the lovers, giulio romano / half-light: collected poems, 'elegy, frank bidart / the borgias 3.09 / aucassin and nicolette by marianne stokes / penelope’s song, louise glück / the borgias 3.03 / civil service, claire schwartz / power politics, 'he shifts from east to west', margaret atwood / the borgias 3.02 / illustration from the mabinogion by alan lee / the selected plays of hélène cixous, 'the perjured city', hélène cixous / the borgias 3.10 / bone, yrsa daley-ward

[aethiopicae]

Elena Ferrante, tr. by Ann Goldstein, from The Days of Abandonment

[Text ID: “I was afraid that the effort I had made not to lose myself had aged me.”]

[aethiopicae]

i don't know where you end and i begin (x)

[aethiopicae]