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[jeanwhy]

The Other Side of Hope (Toivon tuolla puolen). 2017, dir. Aki Kaurismäki

[jeanwhy]

All present men are stand-ins for former men. And all men are stand-ins for our fathers. And even our fathers mean less than our own self-preservation. May you not go around the world looking to fill what you fear you lack with the flesh of another human being. That's part of what this story is for.

Animal, Lisa Taddeo

[jeanwhy]

The primary task here is to comb through the historical clues while constantly following the central axis northward through the uniform darkness, otherwise I will completely lose my way. There’s a good possibility that this axis already exists in our pineal glands, although right now I know nothing of it. The primary task also includes: bidding farewell not only to my relatives, but also to humanity, in entering the one-person isolation module.

Hu Fang, Dear Navigator, Part 1

[jeanwhy]

So What

Franklin K.R. Cline

i’m trying

to avoid this dangerous culture of want

mercury it seems is always in retrograde

it’s all getting jumbled

meanwhile i’m telling someone i don’t remember

if they asked or not

about pastoral poetry it describes the land without calling it stolen

generally speaking

anyway why write poems about the land

it describes itself

--

http://www.vegetarianalcoholicpress.com/titles/so-what

[jeanwhy]

I learned that when I am traumatized, I make a line and I say dangerous/safe... Sometimes when you stay in that mode too long, the line becomes good/bad, nice/evil, angel/devil, not me/me, friends/enemies. But the line is not real. I’m not saying remove the line, but if we understand that it isn’t real, it may enable us to look at the thing that we are calling over there differently. And when you acknowledge it and look at it — that enemy, that evil, that bad thing — the more you learn how to master it and temper it.

Michaela Coel, profiled by E. Alex Jung

[jeanwhy]

- I long for the world outside, the sinking world that’s drowning under its own representations, and for a chance to return to the real, and the wonder of the city, and the beauty of nature, and people you can reach out and touch. The lives we were promised feel so distant now…. I want to feel more of life.

Dean Kissick’s Quarantine Diary

[jeanwhy]

“At first, I was salty about not having access to a theater rehearsal room or dance studio, and then I remembered: I started making performance art in my living room. Move those tables out of the way, friends. Let’s go! My students have made the most lovely pieces in the corner of our classroom, using the window shades, writing and erasing text on the windows, going outside. I’m so inspired by that. Even within an institution, we can’t and shouldn’t depend on the institution for our resourcefulness and power.”

Gabrielle Civil

[jeanwhy]

“My theater posits that we need no narrative, that language and the body contain it; we already know what we’ve done.”

Asher Hartman

[jeanwhy]

Take care, you who wish to deal with names for love. Behind their sweetness and wrath, nothing endures. Nothing but wounds and kisses.

Hadewijch, “Love Has Seven Names" (trans. Barnstone, Kolb)

[jeanwhy]

The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, nor describe any of what you learned.

“The Autobiography of My Novel”

Alexander Chee

[jeanwhy]

The damage suffered by people I know and love is almost always based on the trauma of the only elder they had treating them badly or being interested only in their silence. And what you’re left with, by the grace of God and some miracle, is this inner self. Our experiences are painful and sometimes annihilating, and if we have the strength to crawl out of and excavate that wreckage, we have to ask ourselves how to describe the truth of it.

Hilton Als 

The Art of the Essay, No.3

[jeanwhy]

What are my materials for this current crisis of identity? How did I come to be colonized? And how did I find out that I had been colonized? Have I found out? How did I come to equate family and origin as violent and threatening? How did whiteness become, I shudder even to write this, safety—a lack of feeling, a lack of allegiances. It made space, or at least I thought it did, for me. For a me that had no history.

Does Abstraction Belong to White People?

Miguel Gutierrez

[jeanwhy]

I secretly put on my father’s suit. This was a cherished suit from the days when he was much younger and had just begun his business, a time when he was more violent than he is now. As I rolled on the floor and sullied this stolen suit, I was able to overcome at least part of my fear and loathing of my father.

“Why I am a drag performer”

Azangman (trans. Hoyoung)

[jeanwhy]

Nude #7. White room whose walls, having neither planes nor curves nor angles, are composed of a continuous satiny white membrane like the flesh of some interior organ of the moon. It is a living surface, almost wet. Lucency breathes in and out. Rainbows shudder across it. And around the walls of the room a voice goes whispering, Be very careful. Be very careful.

The Glass Essay

Anne Carson

[jeanwhy]

I'm not interested in my emotions insomuch as their being mine, belonging only, uniquely, to me. I'm not interested in their individual aspects, only in how they are traversed by what isn't mine. In what emanates from our planet's history, the evolution of living species, the flux of economics, remnants of technological innovations, preparation for wars, the trafficking of organic slaves and commodities, the creation of hierarchies, institutions of punishment and repression, networks of communication and surveillance, the random overlapping of market research groups, techniques and blocs of opinion, the biochemical transformation of feeling, the production and distribution of pornographic images.

Testo Junkie

Paul B. Preciado (trans. Benderson)

[jeanwhy]

A ruthless, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, fearful, litterbug, wasteful, ungrateful, stingy, war hungry, bloodthirsty, terrified male fist is upon our world. Our society as we live it is antipathetic to any form of natural aging and death, yet we build sophisticated weapons that can kill millions of people in mere seconds. Military and health are contrary concerns, which seems obvious but instead many are oblivious. It is important for those of us who are actively creative to encourage others to find their own creativity because our very survival depends on it, maybe now more than ever.

“Poetry Ritual”

CAConrad

[jeanwhy]

[W]hen we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering, and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like the only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.

Audre Lorde

“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power*”