nightgate - Tumblr blog

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queen chae

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PONYTAIL!JAY  ✖  210319  -NOTE

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Margaret Atwood, from “Roominghouse, winter”, Selected Poems: 1965-1975

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by d-yohoui

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It's like. No I don't have a bad relationship with my father. Yes I love my father. No I do not know my father. Yes I have fond memories of my father. No I cannot remember ever knowing my father. Yes I know my father loves me. No my father has never said he loves me. Yes I am just like my father. No I am nothing like my father. Yes my father has taught me many things. No I have learned nothing from my father. Yes this man is my father. No I do not know this man.

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Blue Monday, Dadu Shin

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“Did you get enough love, my little dove Why do you cry? And I’m sorry I left, but it was for the best Though it never felt right My little Versailles”

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Gilbert Williams - Angel Falls (1979)

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𝗀𝗈𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝗁𝗈𝗆𝖾

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i wrote this poem while trying to deal with the grief of not being the daughter my mother wanted. it’s probably the hardest thing i’ve ever had to write.

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in Finland, it is illegal to kill a bear when it’s hibernating. If you ask a hunter why that is, a number of them will tell you it’s wrong simply because it is the law, and they don’t make a distinction between what is right, and what is legal. Most people like that are perfectly normal, decent and respectable people, just like the rest of us.

 But if you ask people who think about things, the answer is vague. Killing a hibernating bear would just feel… impolite? You can’t fucking shoot a man when he’s sleeping, that’s just fucking rude. It’s just not the right thing to do.

 Long before hunting laws were established in Finland, you couldn’t kill a sleeping bear, and what commands you is something older than law: tradition. Even at a time when hunting was a matter of life and death, and a bear fighting for its life is mainly a matter of death, you just didn’t kill a hibernating bear, you have to wake it up first. Hunters risked their lives, the lives of their brothers and everyone in the hunting party, who were friends, family and men that they loved, to give the bear a fighting chance.

 In the modern time, the hunting season of bears is in the summer, for the warmest summer months. There are many reasons for why they are allowed to tread safely in autumn and to sleep in peace through the cold months, almost all of which are rational and scientific, and do not touch the old traditions.

 Old faith says a living thing has many souls - henki, luonto, itse. Plants only have one - the one that wills them to grow. Animals have two, both the spark of life and nature that enables them to act. A human being also has the third, one that makes them a person, personality, itse, literally “self”. But the soul that travels in your dreams is not the soul that defines a human - animals have that one as well. When your dog runs in her sleep, her soul is elsewhere, where a dog is needed.

 One’s waking soul is elsewhere when they sleep and dream. A bear’s soul is somewhere else when they are hibernating - there are two words for “hibernation” in finnish, one of which is talviuni, “winter sleep”, and that is the one that bears have - and if you kill a sleeping bear, their soul is not in the body, it is still out there, and it can find you, and as a revenge for killing its body, Ghost Bear will kill your entire fucking family.

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“I imagine myself covered with blood, broken but transfigured and in agreement with the world, both as prey and as a jaw of time, which ceaselessly kills and is ceaselessly killed.”

— Georges Bataille, from ‘Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939′ (via letheane)

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Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987), Knives, 1981. Color polaroid, 4.25 x 3.25 in.

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ok strap in everyone, i’m gonna tell you the story of julia daughter of augustus and iullus antonius son of mark antony, a story that is deliciously scandalous and CRIMINALLY little-known

so yeah, you know mark antony? famously had a scandalous and disastrous affair with cleopatra which led to his death by suicide? a lesser-known fact is that his son ALSO had a scandalous and disastrous affair which led to his death by suicide. i’m pretty sure the antonius family motto was “thots gonna thot”

anwyay, so we’ve got augustus and antony. bitter rivals. had a whole civil war against each other (until antony was defeated and committed suicide). that was in the 30s BCE and we are now in the 10s BCE. so antony’s been dead for 20 years but you’d better believe augustus is still holding onto that grudge. already we’ve got a good romeo and juliet setup for julia and iullus, but wait! there’s more.

in this day and age, augustus is very into building a Family Dynasty, but he only has one biological child, his daughter julia. so what does he do? he marries her off to his nephew marcellus. marcellus dies, so augustus marries her off to his BFF and right-hand man agrippa. agrippa dies, so augustus marries her off to his stepson tiberius. at this point you can imagine julia is probably pretty tired of being married off. she seems to have gotten along well enough with marcellus and agrippa, but she and tiberius did NOT like each other and REALLY did not want to get married, but augustus forced them to.

meanwhile, augustus has recently passed a series of laws making adultery a criminal offense (rather than just a private matter) for the first time ever in the roman world. so what is julia to do? how about, rebel against the marriage her father forced her into and the adultery laws he passed by having an affair with the son of his greatest rival. like. she didn’t have to go that hard, but she did. she is my hero.

but of course, the affair gets exposed…..and things get ugly. julia has basically made a complete fool of augustus and he is PISSED AS ALL HELL so he exiles her to some random island for the rest of her life. now, julia supposedly had several lovers including iullus. all these other lovers get exiled as well, but poor iullus? he gets sentenced to execution. supposedly iullus was conspiring against augustus and committing treason, or at least augustus believed that he was, or at least augustus pretended to believe that he was so he’d have an excuse to execute him. was iullus actually Conspiring, or was he just a dumbass thot who wanted to get some? alas, we may never know.

anyway, iullus commits suicide rather than letting augustus execute him. just like his dad, mark antony. poetic much? meanwhile julia lives in exile for many years and dies shortly after augustus dies, possibly because tiberius, the new emperor and her ex-husband who is still mad that she cheated on him 15 years ago, cuts off her food supply and starves her to death. and there you have it folks. where’s the oscar-winning period drama of these events that we deserve??

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ANIS MOJGANI x ALEXANDER HARDING

‘For Those Who Can Still Ride In An Airplane For The First Time’, spoken word, uploaded on Youtube on 20 Apr. 2009;

Visible Light series (2010), photography