#book: grief lessons

[mylyy]

Anne Carson, from Grief lessons: Four plays by Euripides.

[haleyincarnate]

i am both the land mine and the one who steps on it i am the one who grieves the loss and carries the guilt

Brianna Pastor, Good Grief

[lady-merian]

I recently found an erasable pen. a) this has not really solved my Inktober problems (and may in fact have somehow increased them since it was the day I found it that I first missed a day and then missed several subsequent days). b) there comes a point where something has been erased enough times that it ceases to be erasable. :/ c) it’s funny how different it still is from pencil. With pencil I can more easily get variety in shading. d) Faramir.

[sakshinarula]

[leonieanderson]

To fill the silence within us with light, breath, a voice and love that is how we create poetry.

Leonie Anderson

[cartoonchaos]

“gee i wonder why there’s still so much more fanfiction about male characters” “we need more morally complex female characters” “i love relationships that are doomed by the narrative” “more stories need to treat mentally ill characters with compassion and respect” “all his problems could’ve been fixed if he only went to therapy” you fuckers can’t even handle the ending of fionna and cake

[theresnosafeharbor4myships]

"Losing a loved one has a way of revealing a too-simple truth: that time, as people often claimed but never heeded, really was precious." - from "Lessons in Chemistry" by Bonnie Garmus

[enigmasandepiphanies]

babygirl I have pdfs saved in my computer that you don't even know about

[geniussloci]

Herakles, Anne Carson

[sillytriumphdragon]

Life is cruel. We want something different, something better. We try to make it so, but things often turn out far beyond our expectations or imagination. Life shows us, again and again, that living is not easy. It puts us through one test after another, and each new test feels harder than the last, making us think the previous one wasn’t as bad as it seemed.

Along the way, we lose many treasures in this one life, some of which are gone forever. We continue living without the people we never thought we could live without. We experience all the colors of life before death. Maybe death is easier, and those who left are now in a better place.

[bshocommons]

Besides, even if he knew every word in the English language, he still wouldn’t have any idea what to say. Because what does one say to someone who’s lost everything?

Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

[slverblood]

Why would Anne Carson do this to me?

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief. Ask a headhunter why he cuts off human heads. He'll say that rage impels him and rage is born of grief. The act of severing and tossing away the victim's head enables him to throw away the anger of all his bereavements. Perhaps you think this does not apply to you. Yet you recall the day your wife, driving you to your mother's funeral, turned left instead of right at the intersection and you had to scream at her so loud other drivers turned to look. When you tore off her head and threw it out the window they nodded, changed gears, drove away.

Herakles is a two-part man. Euripides wrote for him a two-part play. It breaks down in the middle and starts over again as does he. Wrecks and recharges its own form as he wrecks and recharges his own legend. Two-part: son of both Zeus (god) and Amphitryon (man) he is immortal, maybe — experts disagree and he himself is not sure. Container of uncontainable physical strength, he civilizes the world by vanquishing its monsters then returns home to annihilate his own wife and children. Herakles is a creature whose relation to time is a mess: if you might be immortal you live in all time and no time at the same time. You end up older than your own father and more helpless than your own children. Herakles is a creature whose relation to virtue is a mess: human virtue derives from human limitation and he seems to have none; gods' virtue does not exist. Euripides places him in the midst of an awareness of all this. But awareness for Herakles is no mental event, it comes through flesh. Herakles' flesh is a cliché. Perfect physical specimen, he cannot be beaten by any warrior, by any athlete, by any monster on the earth or under it. The question whether he can be beaten even by death remains open; it is a fact that he has gone down to Hades and come back alive; here is where the play starts. This becomes the turning point — the overturning point — of his cliché. ... in order to place you at the very heart of Herakles' dilemma, which is also Euripides' dilemma: Herakles has reached the boundary of his own myth, he has come to the end of his interestingness. Now that he's finished harrowing hell, will he settle back on the recliner and watch TV for the rest of time? From Euripides' point of view, the dilemma is practical. A man who can't die is no tragic hero. Immortality, even probable immortality, disqaulifies you from playing that role. (Gods, to their eternal chagrin, are comic.) [...] [...] It is as if the world broke off. Why did it break off? Because the myth ended. [...] [...] Hence the conceptual importance and symbolic possibilities of posture: you can read the plot of a play off the sequence of postures assumed by its characters. Up is winning, down is losing, bent is inbetween. [...] Herakles himself enters gloriously upright but is soon reduced to a huddled and broken form. His task in the last third of the play is to rise from this prostration, which he does with the help of Theseus. Euripides makes clear that Herakles exits at the end leaning on his friend. Herakles' reputation in myth and legend otherwise had been that of lonehand hero. Here begins a new Heraklean posture. Meanwhile throughout the play this image of collaborative heroism is embodied, movingly, in the tableau of the chorus. They are old men; they lean on sticks or on each other. All mortals come to this. Gods remain a problem. You will hear gods' names and see their consequences rawly displayed throughout the speeches and the action. You will sympathize with the chorus who cower before them and also with Herakles who decides not to believe in them — not to believe, that is, in the story of his own life. Bold move. Perhaps he is a tragic hero after all.

[literateish]

“Even if he knew every word in the English language, he still wouldn't have any idea what to say. Because what does one say to someone who's lost everything?”

— Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

[sivavakkiyar]

tbh I only know maybe like 3 works of Anne Carson’s well (tho I was talking to a friend recently who works at a bookstore & is training to be a librarian…we were talking about like fancy prints of new books that aren’t really meant to be read and held and I mentioned Nox which I haven’t read as maybe an example and he straightened up immediately like God pulled a string from his soul to heaven and said “shut up, Mark.” So I guess that one’s pretty good)

but terfs really used to claim her, hard. Was that ever actually rooted in anything?

[sakshinarula]

We are so human, you and I /so scared of being empty /scared of an empty pocket an empty heart /the restlessness of an idle evening /the sacred quiet that settles like dust on our skins /a death unlike the one that we can't come back from

-From Bad Poetry and This Loving, Sakshi Narula

[littmel15-blog]

I will forever always love being a girl.

i’m at the age where i know what a first love feels like.

And I live in a room that is not shared with anybody’s personality but my very own.

The world can crumble down but It won’t matter because i can always cry on pink sheets.

The same girls i grew up with can drive now, but we’ll blast Taylor Swift and Nick Jonas like we did as kids anyways.

We’ll cry over boys, and chemistry homework but fall in love with poetry and the fruit of life it gives.

And we’ll match our nails to our outfit and compliment girls we’ve never spoken to.

We are girls, and one day we’ll outgrow the same room we’ve grown up in. But today i’m a teenage girl who feels too much for her own good and for that i’ll never ever wanna change.