One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: this is true, this is real.
Jean Baudrillard, Radical Thought, trans. Francois Debrix, 1994
Your lungs fill & spread themselves,
wings of pink blood, and your bones
empty themselves and become hollow.
When you breathe in you’ll lift like a balloon
and your heart is light too & huge,
beating with pure joy, pure helium.
The sun’s white winds blow through you,
there’s nothing above you,
you see the earth now as an oval jewel,
radiant & seablue with love.
It’s only in dreams you can do this.
Waking, your heart is a shaken fist,
a fine dust clogs the air you breathe in;
the sun’s a hot copper weight pressing straight
down on the think pink rind of your skull.
It’s always the moment just before gunshot.
You try & try to rise but you cannot.
Margaret Atwood, Flying Inside Your Own Body (via
pauses-and-silences)
And what’s the point of waking up in the morning if you don’t try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?
Don DeLillo, from “Underworld” (thanks
modernrambler)
And is this your heart arithmetic?
This is the way the wind measures the weather.
Carl Sandburg, from: “How Much?”
Who am I?
Where do I come from?
I am Antonin Artaud
and I say this
as I know how to say this
immediately
you will see my present body
burst into fragments
and remake itself
in ten thousand notorious
aspects
a new body
where you will
never
forget me.
Antonin Artaud, from: “To Have Done With The Judgment Of God”, 1947
(thanks doegewooniets)
Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let their soft drifting signs drop away; your eyes closed like two gray
wings, and I move
Pablo Neruda, from: “Sonnet LXXXI”
Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting
still has a shape in the kindgdom of transformation.
When something’s let go of, it circles; and though we are
rarely the center
of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous
curve.
Rainer Maria Rilke, For Hans Carossa, Translated by Stephen Mitchell
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985
But do you understand, I cry to him, do you understand that along with happiness, in the exact same way and in perfectly equal proportion, man also needs unhappiness!
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed, 1872
