#selfhood

[metamorphesque]

Leila Chatti, “Tea”

[astranemus]

The best thing for anthropocentric dread, for individual anguish, for heartbreak, for illness, is interrupting your individuality. When you cannot walk, cannot move, cannot leave your bed you do not need to find a tree or landscape or butterfly to be. You can be a mote of dust. A potato bug vaulting across the room. The ten fungal spores that scintillate in each one of your inhalations. The anarchic bacterial legacy that melted into your very molecular makeup. The yellowjacket tapping his armored body against the closed window. Sometimes the answer is not to problematize your wounding, but to slip through it like a doorway into otherness. Other minds. Other types of anguish. Other animals and insects going extinct. Birds singing out courtship songs to mates that will never arrive.

Sophie Strand, The Birth of The Flowering Wand

[funeral]

The equivalent, in Heidegger’s philosophy, of the experience of selfhood is the understanding of one’s being, and for Heidegger the ontological ground for the meaning of one’s being is temporality. That is, it is the ecstatical unity of temporality that makes possible the coherence and meaningfulness of our existence. If Heidegger was right, then his ontological analysis helps us to grasp that trauma, in altering the structure of temporality, of necessity also disrupts one’s understanding of one’s being; it fractures one’s sense of unitary selfhood. I am suggesting that clinical features typically explained as dissociation and multiplicity can additionally be comprehended in terms of the impact of contexts of trauma in disorganizing and reorganizing one’s sense of being-in-time. 

Robert D. Stolorow, Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections 

[poupeelait]

oscar wilde, salome // phoebe waller-bridge, fleabag // richard siken, portrait of fryderyk in shifting light // brian fuller, hannibal // agnes varda, jane b. by agnes v.

[deadpoetsmusings]

[nznzz]

Quick portraits

[pratchettquotes]

As far as Polly could tell, Igors believed that the body was nothing more than a complicated kind of clothing. Oddly enough, that's what Nugganites thought, too.

Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment

[haggishlyhagging]

But independence is not the sole preserve of widows and singles. It can also occur in the home itself, right under a husband's nose. This is indeed the symbolism of the witch's nocturnal flights, which lead her to desert the marital bed, escaping the sleeping man's vigilance, to straddle her broomstick and take off for the sabbath. In the demonologists' tirades, which betray the masculine obsessions of their times, the witch's flight, as Armelle Le Bras-Chopard describes it, represents:

“a freedom to come and go, not only without the husband's permission but generally without his knowledge (unless he is a witch himself) and even to his disadvantage. By picking up a broomstick or chair leg and placing it between her legs, the witch awards herself a simulacrum of the virile member that she lacks. And by artificially stepping outside her sex and giving herself that of a man, she is also stepping outside her female gender: the witch is able to accord herself the ease of movement that, within the standard social order, is the unique privilege of men. [...] Granting herself this autonomy, and thereby escaping the man whose principal freedom is manifest through his dominance over her, the witch spirits a portion of the man's power away from him: her liberation is also a larceny.”

Contrary to what today's "backlash" would have us believe, women's autonomy does not entail a severing of connections, but rather the opportunity to form bonds that do not infringe on our integrity or our freedom of choice, bonds that promote our personal development instead of blocking it—whatever lifestyle we choose, whether solo or in a partnership, with or without children. As Pam Grossman writes, "the Witch is arguably the only female archetype that has power on its own terms. She is not defined by anyone else. Wife, sister, mother, virgin, whore—these archetypes draw meaning based on relationships with others. The Witch, however, is a woman who stands entirely on her own." Whereas the example promulgated over the period of the witch-hunts, imposed first by violence and then, later, with the nineteenth-century invention of the housewife ideal, by a clever mix of flattery, seduction and menace, locks women into their role as reproducers and disenfranchises them from participation in the world of work. Thus, women are positioned in such a way that their own identity is constantly at risk of being muddled with others,' of atrophying, of being swallowed up altogether. They are prevented from living and fashioning their own lives, for the sake of representing an imagined quintessence of femininity. In New York, in 1969, the WITCH group caused havoc at a weddings trade fair by releasing mice into the main hall. One of their slogans railed, "Always a Bride, Never a Person."

-Mona Chollet, In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women are Still on Trial

[in-tenebris-et-in-solitudine]

Don't you ever think I need you, I put my peace and mental health above everything.

[metamorphesque]

i'm all the people i've ever loved

loseness lines over time by olivia de recat, @i-wrotethisforme, Kaveh Akbar, Olivie Blake

[ginya-writes]

Your Wormy Shell

No, of course I would still love you

if you were a worm.

I’d put you in a pot of soil

and fill it with whatever it is worms

like to eat.

But you wouldn’t be able to talk to me,

so what is it that you could love?

If not my body, my humour, our conversations,

then what is there left?

I suppose the memory of who it is inside

your wormy shell.

But what if you never had that memory and what

if you met me when I was a worm and you were

just out walking and I was there on the

concrete writhing around.

Fine, if you were a worm, I would think

you were a worm,

maybe at best a nice looking worm but

I wouldn't love you.

[funeral]

Frank Schawlow, "Temporality Revisited: Kierkegaard and the Transitive Character of Time"

[poupeelait]

unknown, untitled // sylvia plath, the unabridged journals of sylvia plath // aleksandra waliszewska, untitled from the painting series nasty children // shizuka mariya, everything eventually goes into the ground // jenny zhang, sour girl // frida kahlo, two fridas

[adiharper]

Destiny's Child

[pratchettquotes]

Dorfl remained impassive.

Carrot nodded. "Anyway, you're free to go. What happens now is up to you. I'll help you if I can. If a golem is a thing then it can't commit murder, and I'll still try to find out why all this is happening. If a golem can commit murder, then you are people, and what is being done to you is terrible and must be stopped. Either way, you win, Dorfl." He turned back and fiddled with some papers on his desk. "The big trouble," he added, "is that everyone wants someone else to read their minds for them and then make the world work properly. Even golems, perhaps."

Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay