booksfornamjoon

[booksfornamjoon]

A Poem To Love

I have a silence that has taken six years to shake. A walk along the Han River. The heart is a fragile dream of a woman without a name. I gave everything I could. I pawned my own and that of others. When I turned around, I swore I had remained with my back turned. I gave everything I could. I have a creak that has removed my ability to love. One day motherhood is a banned window display. Men have names, but they march without heads. So you wonder why I wanted to be the mother of your children. And I can no longer wish for it. I have ruins that keep us. The word is a rite that honours this ancient sacrifice.

[booksfornamjoon]

Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world; than the world doth, nay than the world is. And if those pieces were extended, and streched out in man as they are in the world, man would be the giant, and the world the dwarf; the world but the map, and the man the world. If all the veins in our bodies were extended to rivers, and all the sinews to veins of mines, and all the muscles that lie upon one another, to hills, and all the bones to quarries of stones, and all the other pieces to the proportion of those which correspond to them in the world, the air would be too little for this orb of man to move in, the firmament would be but enough for this star; for, as the whole world hath nothing, to which something in man doth not answer, so hath man many pieces of which the whole world hath no representation.

Devotions Upon Emergent Occassions (1624), John Donne

[booksfornamjoon]

29. It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men!

Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter II: The Free Spirit -  Friedrich Nietzsche (1886)

[booksfornamjoon]

Someone groans on the stairs. You give me time to look at you. The snails crawling on the turned candles. I fill in drool and flame, my sweaty mouth, tears will come from within to honour words. A killer lurks. You carry a photograph, it has my face, without a trace of this disease that, feverish, drags me. I do not recognize myself and yet I am me.

One of my next projects is a collection of poems solely focused on the poems written about my chronic disease and its effects, both physical and psychological. I don't think it will be finished until the end of the year, but it's something that I have been working on for quite some time and that has allowed me to reflect on emotions that I could never have imagined in other circumstances. It's therapeutic in a way, even though it makes me feel vulnerable. Today I want to share with you a poem that I have written tonight on a subject so seemingly banal about looking at a photograph of your "healthy" self. The inexplicable pain and confusion that comes from entering your social media profile and taking a look at your old photos, those in which you were not ill. Longing is a pang of melancholy that you know will never be filled because you cannot return, because you have to learn how to live being another person, because you have been born again and your identity is another. It's hard to write about it, not because it's painful or not, but because it's inexplicable. The processes are long until accepting that everything has changed and that this is not the end, just a new beginning. I guess that's the gift of life.

[booksfornamjoon]

One should always be drunk. That's all that matters. But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk

Charles Baudelaire

[booksfornamjoon]

Don't fight for love. Make love your fight.

booksfornamjoon

[booksfornamjoon]

"Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis." (Marlon Brando)

Joaquin Phoenix as Joker/Arthur Fleck in JOKER (2019) dir. Todd Phillips

“When you bring me out, can you introduce me as Joker?”

[booksfornamjoon]

“Men spoke of how the heart broke up, but never spoke of how the soul hung speechless in the pause.”

— James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (via books-n-quotes)

[booksfornamjoon]

YOU WROTE THE RULES. READ THEM. 

[booksfornamjoon]

보조개 (Surrender)

Just yesterday, in my privacy, a badly wounded little bird took flight and allowed herself to think for a moment that you were beautiful.

He, who dances with the stars, with shining lights like grooves in his dimples, crouched in his indecipherable eyes.

Honestly, I run the risk of getting lost in him and not find the way back home that one day I already lost.

Fool, your smile bathes the earth of the blood that covers its bowels.

It's your fault, now the water of my soul is poured into the transparent drops of your two-syllable name.

Two wings, my wet eyelashes. A butterfly forgetting the glass of her prison, the throat dry before so many verses enunciated in the lonely absence of my nights.

But my love is in the rain.

Words, words, words...

And yet I am mute over the crimson sop in the equator of your mouth.

He, who dances with the stars. Looking at you I am lost in a fire, you are stabbing a slanted knife in a wound without time.

Thus I surrender, in the dark, with an open heart. I surrender, my moonchild love, I surrender to you.

[booksfornamjoon]

And by a sleep to say we end

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to tell you that, as you can see, I have not been active in this account. In response to some private messages that I have received throughout these months of hiatus, I would first like to thank people who, even being far away and, for the most part, speak a language and live a very different life from me, have worried or just written to me for any other reason. Secondly, and since this is a space of literary creation that I founded under the inspiration of BTS and its ideals of love for oneself and others, I feel it'd be positive to return to it little by little. The reasons for my poor presence here have been mostly because of my health, both physical and mental. I'm quite reserved in everything concerning myself (that's why I write..., because that way I can distance myself and change my skin in other identities formed by the small crystals of my own reflection in the mirror), so I won't go into details. One of the most courageous acts in the world is falling in love and another showing you vulnerable to others, it's like getting naked before someone for the first time.

For the reasons I mentioned, I was not strong enough to offer the content I wanted to share here, leaving it abandoned until I felt better. Gradually, I have been reducing the discomfort and will continue to reduce it. I needed to stop with some issues and reflect on my state of mind, my priorities and the type of life and person I want to become one day.

Sometimes, even if it hurts and disappoints us, we must stop along the way.

Just today, while painting this drawing, I have decided to write Hamlet's soliloquy on it. When I finished, I thought about this blog, the words of some of you and other people, memories. 

When I was in high school, I read these verses with deep enthusiasm. Finally, I was going to enjoy the most famous fragment in the history of literature along with the first paragraphs of Don Quijote de la Mancha. I read them days before we studied them in class and I was overwhelmed by their beauty, their rhythm, their content. In the maturity of each human being, one of many moments of revelation should be to read this soliloquy. At fifteen, his words resonated with the expectations and experiences of my age, however, I thought I was aware of what they could mean. This morning I read it again and I realized how much I have changed, how these verses remain the same but are always different. They adapt as the waters of a stream slip through the rocks and caress them without them reacting. Over the years, the gentle hammering of their waves changes their shape and hardness. There are so many verses within oneself, so contradictory, so selfish, so destructive, so naive, so hopeful, so vivid, that it is impossible to give up. This was proclaimed by Hamlet. 

The road never ends, neither the anguish nor the joy. Perhaps destiny is confusion, but we must do what we can until that destiny is revealed to us. And the revelation is in the attempt, in the long nights of self-pity, in the decisions that deafened the pain of our heart, in the kisses enunciated in summer nights, in the imperfect poem. To flourish in the sky like a star that will never cease to be watched by men and women sharing the dream and the chimaera of making sense of their own existence.

What can't go, doesn't go, just changes.

To be, or not to be--that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep-- No more--and by a sleep to say we end The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep-- To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause. There's the respect That makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th' unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprise of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I've missed you.

[booksfornamjoon]

“Some people feel like they don’t deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.”

— Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (via books-n-quotes)

[booksfornamjoon]

jungkook: tough on the outside, soft on the inside ♡

[booksfornamjoon]

Matthew Cusick (b.1970) - Rose Wave. 2017. Inlaid maps, acrylic on panel.

[booksfornamjoon]

Pandora’s Box, 1951, Rene Magritte

Medium: oil,canvas

[booksfornamjoon]

“The secret of blue is well kept. Blue comes from far away. On its way, it hardens and changes into a mountain. The cicada works at it. The birds assist. In reality, one doesn’t know….The mystery of sapphire, mystery of Sainte Vierge, mystery of the siphon, mystery of the sailor’s collar, mystery of the blue rays that blind and your blue eye which goes through my heart.”

— Jean Cocteau, from “The Secret of Blue”

“Blue makes no noise. It is a shy colour, without ulterior motives, forewarning or plan; it does not leap out abruptly at the eye like yellow or red, but draws it in, tames it little by little, lets it come unhurriedly, so that it sinks in and drowns, unaware.” 

— Jean-Michel Maulpoix, A Matter of Blue: Poems

“Blue still brings a principle of darkness with it. This colour has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful but it is on the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation.”

— Goethe, Theory of Colours

“Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not. They are pre-psychological expanses, red, for example, presupposing a site radiating heat…All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.”

— Yves Klein, Selected Writings

“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.”

— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

[booksfornamjoon]

You have hibernated, woodpecker.

Your arrow tongue is drumming

frozen ribs.

She is not afraid of snow

because they all wear scarlet clothes.

Sapsucker, you landed in this tree.

And I thought you sang.

That you sang songs of hope

resonating in the home of my heart.

There I planted a flower, in the hole that you cut,

but your peak slices and it doesn't reach the ground.

You slit this trunk.

Leave at least the worms.

You have wintered, woodpecker.

The light you take to beat the winter.

You resonate like a pendulum clock,

like the candies in the psychologist's office.

Please give me your wings.

Wryneck, do you know fear?

You are the continuous drip in the brain spigot.

When you come back I will be building a cage from the bone.