theydonotmove

[theydonotmove]

Our life is impossibility, absurdity. Everything that we want is in contradiction with the conditions or consequences which are attached to it. It is because we ourselves are a contradiction, being creatures, being God and infinitely other than God.

Simone Weil (via theotreptos)

[theydonotmove]

– Lisel Mueller, “Sometimes, When the Light”

[theydonotmove]

Jean Valentine

[theydonotmove]

Jean Valentine

[theydonotmove]

Jean Valentine

[theydonotmove]

“The Basket House”, Jean Valentine

[theydonotmove]

“A Child’s Drawing, 1941″, Jean Valentine

[theydonotmove]

“Dearest,” Jean Valentine

[theydonotmove]

“Archangel”, Jean Valentine

[theydonotmove]

Orange peels, burned letters, the car lights shining on the grass, everything goes somewhere—and everything we do—nothing ever disappears. But changes. The roar of the sun in photographs. Inching shorelines. Ice lines. The cells of our skin; our meetings, our solitudes. Our eyes. . A bee careens at the window here; flies out, released: a life without harm, without shame. That woman, my friend, circling against her life, a married life; that man, my friend, solitary, anarchic, driving away from home; them driving, to each other— . I know, the hard, half-lost, knowing will; the cold first loneliness again, outside the commonweal, unmoving; . But to say, I know—is there any touch in it? . The words in my dream: “actuarial file.” Actuary, 1. A registrar or notary, who keeps records of the acts of a court ... . To be there; to listen; not invade. Another solitude ... . I watch her face. The lines of will, kindness, hunger. Silence. She moves from one thing to another thing in the kitchen, looks out the window at the other apartment windows ... A woman moves around, across the courtyard, making supper. How many people is she making supper for? Now the woman waters the plants. What is she thinking about. Her head, her arm, look peaceful ... . “Everything that happens, happens once and for all. Is this true? If so, what then?” . Yes. Your story; all of your hope; what you do, breaks. Changes. “If so, what then?” Nothing disappears. And you do last; . The words in the open page of her notebook, I'm so cold. My head hurts. . Come stay here, at my place, a while.—Someday we will be able to say, I did this thing; I did that other thing; I was that woman. Someday, we will be able to take it in, that violence, hold it in our hands ... And the ones who come after us, maybe they can understand us; forgive us; as we do forgive our parents, our grandparents, moving so distantly through their lives ... their silences ... And the ones we were with maybe our friendship can change, can mend ... . Come stay here. Things change ... . She stays home; . Not to invade Wait, here, in the quiet

“Actaurial File”, Jean Valentine.

[theydonotmove]

In blue-green air & water God you have come back for us, to our fiberglass boat.

You have come back for us, & I’m afraid. (But you never left.)

Great sadness at harms. But nothing that comes now, after, can be like before.

Even when the icebergs are gone, and the millions of suns

have burnt themselves out of your arms,

your arms of burnt air, you are with us whoever we are then.

[theydonotmove]

[theydonotmove]

“God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.”

— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

[theydonotmove]

As a classicist I was trained to strive for exactness and to believe that rigorous knowledge of the world without any residue is possible for us. 
This residue, which does not exist—just to think of it refreshes me. To think of its position, how it shares its position with drenched layers of nothing, to think of its motion, how it can never stop moving because I am in motion with it, to think of its shadow, which is cast by nothing and so has no death in it (or very little)—to think of these things gives me a sensation of getting free.

Anne Carson, Variations on the Right to Remain Silent, in Nay Rather (via antigonick)

[theydonotmove]

1.1 History and elegy are akin. The word “history” comes from an ancient Greek verb meaning “to ask.” One who asks about things - about their dimensions, weight, location, moods, names, holiness, smell - is an historian. But the asking is not idle. It is when you are asking about something that you realise you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.

Anne Carson, Nox (via letters-to-nobody)

[theydonotmove]

And you, Jesus, are you not also a mother? Are you not the mother who, like a hen, gathers her chickens under her wings?

….

And you, my soul, dead in yourself, run under the wings of Jesus your mother and lament your griefs under feathers. Ask that your wounds may be healed and that, comforted, you may live again. Christ, my mother, you gather your chickens under your wings; this dead chicken of yours puts themself under those wings. For by your gentleness the badly frightened are comforted, by your sweet smell the despairing are revived, your warmth gives life to the dead, your touch justifies sinners. Mother… Warm your chicken, give life to your dead man, justify your sinner. Let your terrified one be consoled by you; despairing of themself, let them be comforted by you. and in your whole and unceasing grace let them be refashioned by you. For from you flows consolation for sinners; to you the blessing for ages and ages. Amen.

– St Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), basing a prayer around Jesus’s description of himself as a mother hen in Matthew 23:37

[theydonotmove]

Virginia Woolf sent Vita Sackville-West a dummy copy of the first edition of To The Lighthouse, on publication day, 5 May 1927. It was inscribed ‘In my opinion the best novel I have ever written.’ All the pages were blank. A few nights later she kept herself awake worrying that Vita might not have seen the joke, and sent an anxious note to ‘Dearest donkey West’: ‘Did you understand that when I wrote it was my best book I merely meant because all the pages were empty?’ Immediately Vita replied: ‘But of course I realised it was a joke; what do you take me for? A real donkey?’ She followed this with an effusive letter of praise for the ‘real’ To The Lighthouse: ‘Darling, it makes me afraid of you. Afraid of your penetration and loveliness and genius.’

- Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee