#a handbook of disappointed fate

[iphis24]

Sometimes our refusal is in our staying put. We perfect the loiter before we perfect the hustle.

Anne Boyer, "No", in A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

[aschenblumen]

Callar es un momento preliminar del no. Practicar el no hablar es practicar la inflexibilidad, más aún en una multitud. Cicerón escribió cum tacent, clamant –«al callar, gritan»– y tenía razón: nunca confundan el silencio con aceptación. Una habitación repleta de gente callada, que en otro caso hubiera estado alegre, mientras mira a una figura de autoridad, es silencio como sedimento de un no que recién empieza.

—Anne Boyer, «No» en Manual para un destino desencantado. Traducción de Rodrigo Olavarría y Adalber Salas Hernández.

[xshayarsha]

Books ruined my life, and I love them. I love the ecstatic absorption that comes with reading, the self-annihilative surrender to the dead or far away, the luring and the transporting and the cathecting,

Anne Boyer, from A Handbook of Disappointed Fate; Take Up and Read.

[absolvam]

Some days my only certain we is this certain we that didn’t, that wouldn’t, whose bodies or spirits wouldn’t go along. That we slowed, stood around, blocked the way, kept a stone face when the others were complicit and smiling.

Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

[razorsadness]

So you can swear you think the one-ness of this one person feels really special right now, and in most hours you would swear to their specialness, but in fact it isn’t even that person and never limited like that. Sometimes it is one, sometimes it is another, sometimes it is a future-oriented longing, sometimes a nostalgic one, sometimes it is a generalized they-ness, sometimes a him-ness or her-ness, the way all the people of past longing combine with those of the present longing. This is like sometimes how you are in the city you now live in and forget and think you are in a city you used to live in or one you have visited a lot. Then sometimes you feel like you are in all cities at once, or that all cities are basically just one, or that it is that you are driving or walking in a city that makes each city the same like the dream city you have the one-person in. So, too, your longing has both an enlarging and flattening effect: now that you have been alive for some time, it’s clear all this longing is a kind of cosmopolitanism. This is the longing that is not in actual relationship but outside of it. That is when it is longing in in the state of the general but not in the specifics of one-on-one bodily negotiation. You hold a face in your eyes a lot and say “I am a citizen of longing for that one person,” but what you really mean is that you are a citizen of longing for the world.

Anne Boyer, from “Erotology” (as appears in A Handbook of Disappointed Fate)

[thevividgreenmoss]

Anne Boyer

[threwaday]

The object of love is not an object at all, and what you've mistaken a person for an object is what's wrong with love's distortions. To feel the wretched pain of a love after a love has long ended is not just to feel the pain at losing love but to feel pain at the way love turns a person into a possession that can be lost

“Erotology II: The Long Night”  A Handbook Of Disappointed Fate- Anne Boyer

[liliesofpur-i-ty]

from Anne Boyer’s “A Handbook of Disappointed Fate”

[splintersfeelings]

These one persons are so many different ones, and even if the one person has never been your lover you can still remember all of your love in its precise iteration and all of it in different measures combined, and if that person hasn't been your lover yet or for whatever reason never will be, you can make a thousand fictions of when they were. You can think of the time you haven't but did deny the person pleasure. You can think of that time you haven't given but did give pleasure freely as if you were just a radiator or the sun. You can think of that person's face when you made that person weep from your own cruelty or sadness. You can think of the time with that one person a thousand times or ten thousand even if none of it has been yet or will, for whatever reason, be.

Anne Boyer, A Handbook of Disappointed Fate, “Erotology”

[aschenblumen]

Anne Boyer, Manual para destinos defraudados. Traducción de Adalber Salas Hernández.

[endlessandrea]

“The Harm will come: it never doesn’t. It will open up our chests and enter there. Some days it will come by fortune, some days by no agent in particular, and sometimes others will bring it to us, either willfully or on accident. Those others might trip, the harm spilling out of their arms onto us. We might all look at each other startled. We might all have the harm then and eyes full of tears.

The others might take one look at us or many looks at us and decide we deserve the harm. We will look back at them with our faces in the forms of questions or curses. We will say: Were my words or how they were arranged what caused you to bring this to me? Are you upset with my body? Do you seek vengeance against the way my eyes light up or how my body grows tense at the sunlight in particular angles? And How dare you! and What were you thinking?!

Sometimes the ones who bring the harm will answer, but both their answers and their not answering can be methods by which they bring more of the harm. 

The harm will take away the hours of the day or lengthen them. It will drain from us six hundred and fourteen thousand tears. It will force our perception to it so that we do not see the moon in the sky or the reddish-yellow apple we would otherwise eat, so that even our dreams, if we are lucky enough to have them, go to the harm as if the harm has built tracks on which a train can only go toward the location of itself but never actually arrive.

When our loved ones speak to us, we will not hear them because we will hear instead the sound the harm put in us, which at first is the sound like an alarm set by accident that softy complains of itself, and then it becomes the sound of our own ears crashing against the harm, or vice versa, until no other sound is left, and then we cannot remember there were any other sounds at all.”

...

from Anne Boyer: “The Harm”, in A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

[xshayarsha]

You can imagine saying “let’s be as innocent as animals or children” and in this meaning “let’s hold each other’s faces in our faces and eyes and pretend to suffer none of the destruction inherent in this.”

Anne Boyer, from A Handbook of Disappointed Fate; Erotology.

[alwaysalreadyangry]

anne boyer, ‘kansas city’, a handbook of disappointed fate

[razorsadness]

These one persons are so many different ones, and even if the one person has never been your lover you can still remember all of your love in its precise iteration and all of it in different measures combined, and if that person hasn’t been your lover yet or for whatever reason never will be, you can make a thousand fictions of when they were. You can think of the time you haven’t but did deny the person pleasure. You can think of that time you haven’t given but did give pleasure freely as if you were just a radiator or the sun. You can think of that person’s face when you made that person weep from your own cruelty or sadness. You can think of the time with that one person a thousand times or ten thousand even if none of it has been yet or will, for whatever reason, be.

Anne Boyer, from “Erotology” (as appears in A Handbook of Disappointed Fate)

[xshayarsha]

The beloved is My Life, also the reason to live, also why to die or want to, also what to call for when one might be calling for oneself.

Anne Boyer, from A Handbook of Disappointed Fate; My Life.

[thevividgreenmoss]

Anne Boyer