#one is the entire lyrics to since i saw vienna written from memory and i know for a fact there's not a single mistake

[dreamonminecraft]

my favorite wilbur lyrics in no particular order:

but i can't say that i/wasted my time/cause i am built by you/and i can't say that i/am glad it is over/cause that wouldn't be true

shout at the wall/cause the walls don't fucking love you

I think I've lost my mind

Blurring the fact and the fictions/While simultaneously fixing/Myself up with a girl/Named Panadol/Bite the tablet, elixir/Disintegrate, mouth's a mixer

we could eat the foam from the headrest/you could suck the wind out of my breath/you could kiss the teeth into my head/and still there's no cause for concern

you held his hands, it felt like flying/now he's just another man/you'd rather he was inside than beside you/but he's talking marriage and a future/he's picking a lock he doesn't go into/less knife in a wound, he's a suture

If I could just break one more night/maybe i could wake up and feel alright/my optimistically set alarm clock time/serves only to mock me with flashing lights

I was gonna wait for you/so this is not an act of spite/it's a visceral coming-to

It's not ahegao hoodie it's a work of art/so let me know when my feelings stop/I'm just your window to another world/where you ended up lost and poor/i don't wanna be a soft boy anymore

i won't wear the cat ears/i won't wear the cat ears/i won't please just don't make me wear the cat ears/I'm so done with the cat ears please no more cat ears

and yes you always do that one thing/cause when you throw and drench me under your drink/i try to figure out what that means/i took it as a taunt

the cute bomber jacket you've had since sixth form/adorned with patches of places you've been/ is nothing on my khaki coat i got from the roadside/when i was 16/my boots are from airports/my backpacks from friends/I'm not a man of substance and so I'll pretend to be/wanderer, wandering, leaving acetic belongings in hostels and restaurant bins/cut that bit out/the roads are my home as horizons my target/if i keep on moving I'll never lose sight of it/treating my memory of you like a fire/let it burn out/don't fight it/try to move on/it's been sixty week since i saw Vienna/a bandage and a wide smile slapped across my face/I'll pick up my hiking boots when I am ready/and I'll put down my roots when I'm dead/the distance is futile/come on don't be hasty/you'll get that feeling deep inside your bones/I'll be gone and/for when you must be alone

and i distrust their name/and i hate their haircut/they look like a prick/but it's all the same/you hug me goodbye/your tounge is razor sharp

my love/i love you everytime your face turns blue/and you speak over microphone/although it's only binary/i think it's timely that i asked if you'd marry me

push down your undesirables and lift up all the fakes/make sure you're not liable when they all make mistakes

you talk about habits/boy i can name a few/but i don't bloody understand it/is it chemical reactions or trained in two

oh I'm starting to succumb to my insecurities/maybe grade school was the place where i peaked

i don't miss you/i miss the thought of what we were

What was your thought when you realized/you'll never feel naive love again?/was it pain or was it sickness?

I want to be the guy/that you fall asleep on call with/I'll make you forget every guy that came before me/cause i like you/and you like my attention/let's skip to the good bit

eat my rent and eat my food/and eat my dues and eat those kids/and maybe use a sextant

and I'll write you songs/until my lungs fall out/until you hear me out

maybe one day I'll live in la Jolla/drinking cocktails out over the water/my own personal sunset/to give each day it's own diploma

when you hold his hands/it doesn't feel like flying/and when you take his breath away/he might as well be dying/and you're dying to breathe/your trapped in his cage/and it's shrinking/and she thought/what if he just never leaves/or he doesn't get the message/or he doesn't hear my pleas/so she just started screaming/why can't he just bore me to death

i said it last time/but I'm not afraid of empty rooms/I'm not afraid of new perfumes/and in fact my dear I'm fucking terrified

he never had cool stories/he doesn't make your heart beat/used to love his mystery/but now he's just exhausting/another day spent/just laying in his room/the stench of incense/and some undelivered food

my keyboards like my heart/it shines in RGB and it's full of blood

cultured men/venetian suntan/red wine and club bands/viagra pills on the nightstand/how's it feel/how's it feel to be so loved?/how's it feel to be so loved yet so alone?

But it’s you/I didn’t think that I’d have to say/But I miss you and think of you almost every single day/And it’s you/I thought I would be braver/But I've missed you too long/My heart flipped to a screensaver/To a screensaver

cause it's only/white wine in a Wetherspoons/fine dining with cheap perfume/DLR closed to worker's strike/god knows how i'll get home tonight

my twitter feeds like my brain/cause i have it on dark mode

i will bake/i will bake/i will bake phallic cake

because you are what reality is made of

I'm a gentleman what can I say?/I'm also really mentally stable/I'm gonna kill myself/if you don't go out with me

cause we're fires we're burning bright/breaking bottles and starting fights/but the evening has other plans/run as they pull up with two more vans

i think about him a lot as well/maybe if he wasn't fine as hell

I use everyone I ever meet/can't find the perfect match/abuse those i love/while i ostracize those who love me back

[marypoppinswasmyfatherbitches]

Oh my goodness, I didnt see the link to your fanfic account! I am dumb. So ignore my previous ask and instead answer this one for the meme. 13, 3, 14, 1 and 2 for Happiness goes on? (I shall leave reviews on your beautiful fanfic soon I promise, they are good.)

(Hiii, sooo…this whole reply is late because I actually typed up ALL OF THIS last night, and then accidentally “x”-ed out of my browser and lost it all, because I am very very stupid. And then was too tired to retype it up before going to sleep. I hope I remember roughly everything, and apologies for that mistake.)

Oh! Haha! Alright then! Thank you! Don’t feel dumb at all for not realizing which AO3 account is mine or for your previous ask(which for others who are curious, said: “1 - 5 for all your fics! Just talk about your favs!”). I was prepared to choose 3 fics (including “Happiness Goes On” since that’s definitely the one I’m most proud of, so I guess that’s closest to a “favorite” right?), and go through the first 5 questions for each, though I won’t lie and say it wouldn’t have taken some time to answer.

BUUUT…since you said to scrap that first ask, I’ll answer these individual ones for “Happiness Goes On.” And your compliment and promise for a future review means SO goddamn much, thank you sincerely.

(WARNING / REMINDER: This is about my fic that deals with the subject of child molestation, and I do reference that a little bit in this reply. Don’t read further if it makes you uncomfortable, which I entirely understand and respect.)

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13: What music did you listen to, if any, to get in the mood for writing this story? Or if you didn’t listen to anything, what do you think readers should listen to to accompany us while reading?

HA! Well, American Pie obviously, for a majority of it. While brainstorming / writing / editing the epilogue? A lotta Billy Joel. ;)

The idea to use American Pie bounced into my brain when it came on the radio at the thrift shop where I volunteer, one of the rare times my own music speaker battery died. Usually a disaster, because our store radio is pretty crappy, but the sound quality wasn’t too bad that day, and I rediscovered how much I love that song and ‘Why isn’t this on my ipod again?’. Listening to the lyrics, I realized how much some of them fit the Guardians in general, and this story specifically, which I have Gamora mentally note in the fic. I was sitting and casually chatting with the manager while also thinking, ‘Google what year this came out when you get home, but I’m sure it’s the 70′s. Peter would know it, and it could be the Zune. I think it could work.’ I’m proud that I was able to reference the song so many times without actually naming it by title, but I assume most readers knew what it was, it’s just that famous. (I also couldn’t resist the light-hearted joke, later when things calmed down, of Gamora saying “This…is the longest song…I have ever heard.” and Peter smiling without even looking at her and giving a cheeky “I know.”)

In terms of using Billy Joel for the epilogue, I’m just a Billy Joel fanatic. The use of him for this story began just from the We Didn’t Start the Fire joke toward Rocket at the bar (I thought it was clever, Peter!), and later on I saw how The Longest Time fit romantically for Starmora, and some of the lyrics matched the healing themes of the overall story, and I thought ‘Maybe they’ve been playing BIlly Joel since that night; maybe that can be the joke.’ Why shouldn’t his Greatest Hits albums (at least) be on the Zune? I struggled a lot over what song should be the final one Gamora comments on before they switch artists to appease the group. I never specify which romantic Billy Joel song Peter and Gamora slow danced to during their “date night” in that six-week summary, but I like to imagine it was Just the Way You Are. I considered Keeping the Faith or Vienna for the final one, but I thought they deserved something more fun and naughty to analyze this time, so Only the Good Die Young it is. :D

In conclusion, I listened to The Longest Time, and the entire An Innocent Man studio album, a lot (as if I needed an excuse).3: What’s your favorite line of narration?

The portion in italics is my favorite line, but I’m including the entire sentence for context purposes: “She would need to grow used to him viewing Yondu as a caring parent who was extraordinarily protective of his boy, and would have hunted down this pervert to whistle a glowing arrow through her skull.”14: Is there anything you wanted readers to learn from reading this fic?

Ohh geez, wow, that one is tough. I don’t know if it’s accurate to say this story was intended to educate, but just to explore the idea with fictional characters. I have no expertise on the subject, and would never claim such, or talk down to those who do. I didn’t intend to create a PSA. I suppose all of the “lessons” for Peter (if they can be called that) I hope all readers already know and agree on (basically a collection of “it wasn’t your fault” and “this doesn’t define you” and “trauma isn’t a competition, someone else suffering worse doesn’t invalidate your experience” and “you should feel comfortable talking about anything without judgement or shame” etc.).

Slightly lesser scale messages, there’s also reminders about the importance of communication, trusting each other, letting the other person speak in an argument, not letting one’s jealousy/instincts/bad mood interfere with fairness, not running away from a fight or staying angry, respecting boundaries and privacy, all that healthy relationship jazz that these two are still figuring out. 1: What inspired you to write the fic this way?

This post is already very long, and I could probably talk for hours about the decision-making process for many scenes (of my GotG fics, this took the longest to write and publish, over 2 months), so I’ll try to condense this to a few bullet points that probably don’t fit the “inspired” criteria.

- It was originally going to be in two parts, 4 scenes each, when I thought the epilogue would be much shorter. But as the lil’ wrap-up got longer (because we needed a fluffy conclusion, dammit!), I decided to make it a separate “chapter.”

- I think the concept probably started as one of those strange, angsty “what if?” scenarios I make up in my head at night that I still can’t believe I created into a full-fledged work. I liked the idea of Peter and Gamora having this conversation and her comforting him, but I knew if I was really going to throw it out there for other fans, it had be more balanced with happier moments, too. I just know I was always going to make the offender a woman - both because it would lead to the misunderstanding that she was a past consensual hook-up when Peter was an adult to spark some irritation and jealousy in Gamora, and because it’s realistically different from other sexual assault stories, since women can be pedophiles and child predators too, and they’re just as horrible. :(

- The fanfic idea of “Gamora accidentally starts a fire while trying to cook, and Peter falsely accuses and lashes out at Rocket” was in my head before, but there were two key differences. 1) It was the entire plot, not a light-hearted subplot in the shadows of something bigger, 2) Meredith’s letter was either fully or partially burnt as a result of the fire. By the end Gamora was going to confess it was her fault, that she was trying to surprise Peter by cooking spaghetti, and he would apologize both to her and to Rocket for losing his temper and getting so angry. I hated that idea later and found it too sad (he’s already lost the Walkman and second cassette tape, why would I want him to lose even more from his mother?), and in “Spark My Memory” (the Christmas fic I wrote for “12 Days of Starmora”) the Guardians put his mother’s letter in the photo album gift for Peter, completely safe and unharmed. I like to keep all my fanfics canon-compliant and non-contradictory from each other, so the letter is fine, no burning it.

Yet “Gamora started a fire cooking” still seemed fun to me, as I like the idea that she’s so badass and skilled and intelligent, but failed at something so domestic and simple. Kinda cute. I was so excited to insert it into this, because I think it worked on multiple levels. It’s a driving force for the plot (the reason the team go to the restaurant and they stumble upon that particular waitress), the reason Gamora was already in a bad mood during her fight with Peter, it could be used as a metaphor/comparison for Peter’s anxiety and Gamora’s guilt, it was something for the Guardians to put at a higher priority to tease and mock Gamora for while oblivious to the main story, something for Peter to just break down into giggles over once they changed the subject (because he earned a good laugh after that heartbreaking and vulnerable childhood trauma story), an excuse to give Rocket so many funny lines, an overall silly and sitcommy-style subplot to fall back on, and a sweet “victory!” for Gamora to have (sort of?) conquered by the epilogue. ^_^2: What scene did you first put down?

This is easy. I’ve written all but one (8 out of 9) of my fanfics in order, except for “Just Like Everybody Else.” So ya, I wrote the opening scene first, Baby Groot’s magic trick lesson and Peter’s oh-so-cruel “can only be seen once” deception. I needed to ease readers (and myself) into the angst and heavy shit to follow, and that cute idea had also been in the back of my mind for a while. ^_^

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PHEW, OKAY, ALL RE-TYPED! Thank you again SO MUCH for the lovely ask and wonderful questions, your actual interest and curiosity thrilled me! You see I wasn’t kidding about the incessant babbling. :P

Thank you also for the kudos you left on AO3, and take care!~

[publicdisplaysofreflection]

The Invention of Empathy: Rilke, Rodin, and the Art of “Inseeing”

Empathy, an orientation of spirit decidedly different from sympathy, has become central to our moral universe. We celebrate it as the hallmark of a noble spirit, a pillar of social justice, and the gateway to reaching our highest human potential — a centerpiece of our very humanity. And yet this conception of empathy is a little more than a century old and originated in art: It only entered the modern lexicon in the early twentieth century, when it was used to describe the imaginative act of projecting oneself into a work of art in an effort to understand why art moves us.

That improbable origin and its wide ripples across the popular imagination are what Rachel Corbett explores in You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin (public library) — a layered and lyrical inquiry into the personal, interpersonal, and cultural forces behind and around Rainer Maria Rilke’s iconic Letters to a Young Poet, a book so beloved and widely quoted in the century since its publication that it has taken on the qualities of a sacred text for secular culture. Out of its origin story Corbett wrests a larger story of “how the will to create drives young artists to overcome even the most heart-hollowing of childhoods and make their work at any cost.”

Recounting her revelatory first encounter with the Rilke classic, a gift from her mother, who had in turn received it from a mentor as a young girl, Corbett captures the singular enchantment that this miraculous book has held for generations:

Reading it that evening was like having someone whisper to me, in elongated Germanic sentences, all the youthful affirmations I had been yearning to hear. Loneliness is just space expanding around you. Trust uncertainty. Sadness is life holding you in its hands and changing you. Make solitude your home.

[…]

What gives the book its enduring appeal is that it crystallizes the spirit of delirious transition in which it was written. You can pick it up during any of life’s upheavals, flip it open to a random page, and find a consolation that feels both universal and breathed into your ear alone.

What most people don’t know, Corbett points out, is that as Rilke was bequeathing his poetic wisdom to the recipient of his letters, the nineteen-year-old cadet and aspiring poet Franz Xaver Kappus, he was also channelling his own great mentor — the French sculptor Rodin, for whom Rilke worked for a number of years and whom he revered for the remainder of his life. Despite their staggering surface differences — “Rodin was a rational Gallic in his sixties, while Rilke was a German romantic in his twenties,” Corbett writes, likening Rodin to a mountain and Rilke to “the mist encircling it” — the sculptor became the young poet’s most significant influence. But Rodin’s greatest gift to Rilke was the very thing that lends Letters to a Young Poet its abiding spiritual allure: the art of empathy.

Corbett writes:

The invention of empathy corresponds to many of the climactic shifts in the art, philosophy and psychology of fin-de-siècle Europe, and it changed the way artists thought about their work and the way observers related to it for generations to come.

Empathy may be a concept saturating today’s popular lexicon so completely as to border on meaninglessness, yet it was entirely novel and ablaze with numinous meaning in Rilke’s day. Its invention is the work of two unlikely co-creators — Wilhelm Wundt, a German doctor who “accidentally forged the birth of psychology in the 1860s,” and Theodor Lipps, a philosopher from the following generation. In seeking to understand why art affects us so powerfully, Lipps originated the then-radical hypothesis that the power of its impact didn’t reside in the work of art itself but was, rather, synthesized by the viewer in the act of viewing. Corbett condenses the essence of his proposition and traces its combinatorial creation:

The moment a viewer recognizes a painting as beautiful, it transforms from an object into a work of art. The act of looking, then, becomes a creative process, and the viewer becomes the artist.

Lipps found a name for his theory in an 1873 dissertation by a German aesthetics student named Robert Vischer. When people project their emotions, ideas or memories onto objects they enact a process that Vischer called einfühlung, literally “feeling into.” The British psychologist Edward Titchener translated the word into English as “empathy” in 1909, deriving it from the Greek empatheia, or “in pathos.” For Vischer, einfühlung revealed why a work of art caused an observer to unconsciously “move in and with the forms.” He dubbed this bodily mimesis “muscular empathy,” a concept that resonated with Lipps, who once attended a dance recital and felt himself “striving and performing” with the dancers. He also linked this idea to other somatosensory imitations, like yawns and laughter.

Half a century later, Mark Rothko would observe: “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” He was articulating the model of creative contagion — or what Leo Tolstoy called the “emotional infectiousness” of art — that Lipps had formulated. Corbett writes:

Empathy explained why people sometimes describe the experience of “losing themselves” in a powerful workof art. Maybe their ears deafen to the sounds around them, the hair rises on the backs of their necks or they lose track of the passage of time. Something produces a “gut feeling” or triggers a flood of memory, like Proust’s madeleine. When a work of art is effective, it draws the observer out into the world, while the observer draws the workback into his or her body. Empathy was what made red paint run like blood in the veins, or a blue sky fill the lungs with air.

But although empathy originated in the contemplation of art, it was psychologists who imported it into popular culture, largely thanks to the cross-pollination of art and science in early-twentieth-century Europe. Corbett writes:

In Vienna, the young professor Sigmund Freud wrote to a friend in 1896 that he had “immersed” himself in the teachings of Lipps, “who I suspect has the clearest mind among present-day philosophical writers.” Several years later, Freud thanked Lipps for giving him “the courage and capacity” to write his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. He went on to advance Lipps’s research further when he made the case that empathy should be embraced by psychoanalysts as a tool for understanding patients. He urged his students to observe their patients not from a place of judgment, but of empathy. They ought to recede into the background like a “receptive organ” and strive toward the “putting of oneself in the other person’s place,” he said.

The concept, of course, was far from novel, even if the language to contain it was — half a century earlier, across the Atlantic, Walt Whitman had articulated the very same notion in his timeless treatise on medicine and the human spirit. But Lipps devised the right language to infiltrate the popular imagination and placed himself in the right place, at the right time. When he became chair of the University of Munich’s philosophy department in 1894, his students included the great Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, who would later come to echo a number of Lipps’s ideas in his writings about the spiritual element in art, and Rilke, who enrolled in Lipps’s foundational aesthetics course as soon as he arrived in Munich from Prague.

Central to Lipps’s invention of empathy was his notion of einsehen, or “inseeing” — a kind of conscious observation which Corbett so poetically describes as “the wondrous voyage from the surface of a thing to its heart, wherein perception leads to an emotional connection.” She writes:

If faced with a rock, for instance, one should stare deep into the place where its rockness begins to form. Then the observer should keep looking until his own center starts to sink with the stony weight of the rock forming inside him, too. It is a kind of perception that takes place within the body, and it requires the observer to be both the seer and the seen. To observe with empathy, one sees not only with the eyes but with the skin.

The concept struck Rilke as a particularly revelatory way of looking at not only art but life itself. He wrote in a letter to a friend:

Though you may laugh if I tell you where my very greatest feeling, my world-feeling, my earthly bliss was, I must confess to you: it was, again and again, here and there, in such in-seeing in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this godlike in-seeing.

Corbett captures the crux of Rilke’s insight:

In describing his joy at experiencing the world this way, Rilke echoed Lipps’s belief that, through empathy, a person could free himself from the solitude of his mind. At the same time that Rilke was studying at the zoo in Paris, Lipps was in Munich working on his theory of empathy and aesthetic enjoyment. In his seminal paper on the subject he identified the four types of empathy as he saw them: general apperceptive empathy: when one sees movement in everyday objects; empirical empathy: when one sees human qualities in the nonhuman; mood empathy: when one attributes emotional states to colors and music, like “cheerful yellow”; and sensible appearance empathy: when gestures or movements convey internal feelings.

Out of this dynamic dialogue between inner and outer arises the most elemental question of existence: What is the self? This invites an auxiliary question: If we ourselves can possess a self, how can we know that others are also in possession of selves? Corbett writes:

[This] was the question to which Rilke’s old professor Theodor Lipps’s empathy research eventually led him. He had reasoned that if einfühlung explained the way people see themselves in objects, then the act of observation was not one of passive absorption, but of lived recognition. It was the self existing in another place. And if we see ourselves in art, perhaps we could also see ourselves in other people. Empathy was the gateway into the minds of others. Rilke’s prodigious capacity for it, then, was both his greatest poetic gift and probably his hardest-borne cross.

In the remainder of the spectacular You Must Change Your Life, Corbett goes on to disentangle the intricate mesh of influences and interdependencies that shaped Rilke’s enduring legacy and its broader implications for the inner life of artists. Complement it with Rilke himself on writing and what it means to be an artist and the life-expanding value of uncertainty.