mirror motifs
In the mood for love (2000), dir Wong Kar-wai
isn't it just so pretty to think all along there was some invisible string tying you to me?
Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes What doesn't kill me makes me want you more
Don't want no other shade of blue but you No other sadness in the world would do
I once believed love would be (Burning red) /But it's golden / Like daylight, like daylight
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Mike and Will (Byler) from Stranger Things S2-4 × Taylor Swift lyrics from Seven, Invisible String, Me!, Cardigan, Cruel Summer, It's Nice to Have A Friend, Hoax, Daylight, The Archer
Harry Styles x Vincent van Gogh
From the Dining Table × Bedroom
We haven't spoke since you went away / Comfortable silence is so overrated / Why won't you ever be the first one to break? / Even my phone misses your call, by the way
Sunflower, Vol. 6 × Sunflowers
Sunflower / My eyes, want you more than a melody / Let me inside / Wish I could get to know you // Sunflowers just died / Keep it sweet in your memory / I'm still tongue-tied /Sunflower, sunflower
Canyon Moon × The Starry Night
You gotta see it to believe it / Sky never looked so blue / So hard to leave it / That's what I always do / So I keep thinking back to / A time under the canyon moon
Music for a Sushi Restaurant × Starry Night Over the Rhône
If the stars were edible / And our hearts were never full / Could we live with just a taste? / Just a taste
Little Freak × Wheatfield under Thunderclouds
Little freak, Jezebel / You sit high atop the kitchen counter / Stay green a little while / You bring blue lights to dreams
Matilda × Self-Portrait, 1887
Matilda, you talk of the pain like it's all alright / But I know that you feel like a piece of you's dead inside / You showed me a power that is strong enough to bring sun to the darkest days / It's none of my business but it's just been on my mind
After a lot of thought I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t know myself at all. I’m like a living piano, with lots of wires and mechanical bits inside me in the dark; I never know who comes and plays it, and it is difficult to completely comprehend why as well, I can only know what is playing—whether it’s happiness or sorrow, soft note or sharp, in rhythm or not—just that much. And I know how far up or down my octave will extend. No, do I even know that much? I’m not even sure if I’m a sympathetic grand piano or a cottage piano.
Life is, soberly and accurately, the oddest affair; has in it the essence of reality. I used to feel this as a child—couldn't step across a puddle once, I remember, for thinking how strange—what am I?
The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how big they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met. If you want to find out the circumference of an oil drop, you can use lycopodium powder. That’s what I’ll find. A tub of lycopodium powder, and I will sprinkle it on to my needs and find out how large they are. Then when I meet someone I can write up the experiment and show them what they have to take on. Except they might have a growth rate 1 can’t measure, or they might mutate, or even disappear.
[...]try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given to you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name / Rabindranath Tagore, Letters From A Young Poet / Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante discover the secrets of the universe / Before Sunrise / Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary / Jeannette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit / Maggie Nelson, Bluets / Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet / Ethan Hawke / Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
women in green, reading
Alfred Lambart, Juliet, Daughter of Richard H. Fox of Surrey / Géza Vörös, Reading Woman / Elanor Colburn, The Green Dress / Richard Edward Miller, Miss V in Green Dress / Adolf Richard Hölzel, House Devotion / William W. Churchill, Leisure / Czene Bela, Reading / Emma Fordyce MacRae, Melina in Green
I wish you were here. The days and nights are beautiful as only autumn can be […] My delight is purely aesthetic, and country bumpkin I am good, industrious, and loving; how long will it be, though, before I break out?
— Vita Sackville West, letter to Virginia, 11 Oct 1927
I remember being surprised at how yellow and how red autumn really is.
— Joe Brainard, I Remember
In the corner of Mommy’s heart, a small black mole lifts its head / It becomes a song. A fabulous solo roams desperately looking for death / A song graceful like the deep autumn night / The endless greetings of the dead.
— Kim Hyesoon, Autobiography of Death
Say autumn. / Say autumn despite the green / in your eyes. Beauty despite / daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn / mounting in your throat.
— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
We’re the types who keep from joining everyone outside, or rather, we enjoy-with-skirmish an autumn sunset’s afterglow, anticipating instead the quick tide of darkness that comes next.
— Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood
The mottled lights from across the other bank beamed on the water, reminding me of Van Gogh's Starlight Over the Rhone. Very autumnal, very beginning of school year, very Indian summer, and as always at Indian summer twilight, that lingering mix of unfinished summer business and unfinished homework and always the illusion of summer months ahead, which wears itself out no sooner than the sun has set.
— André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name
I turn melancholy when I lie out in the sun. I mourn my unhappy origins.
Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts
It seems to me that I only begin to live after the sun has gone down and the stars have come out.
Vita Sackville West, letter to Virginia, 18 September 1925
I remember another ruined moon-viewing, the year we took a boat on the night of the harvest full moon and sailed out over the lake of the Suma Temple. We put together a party, we had our refreshments in lacquered boxes, we set bravely out. But the margin of the lake was decorated brilliantly with electric lights in five colors. There was indeed a moon if one strained one’s eyes for it. So benumbed are we nowadays by electric lights that we have become utterly insensitive to the evils of excessive illumination.
Jun ‘ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
We didn’t talk much. We just lay there and looked up at the stars.
“Too much light pollution,” he said.
“Too much light pollution,” I answered.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante discover the secrets of the universe
When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments. Hahaha! (Except when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)
Jenny Offill, Weather
When I was a little boy Calcutta city was not so wakeful at night as it is now. Nowadays, as soon as the day of sunlight is over, the day of electric light begins. [...] The nerves of the city are throbbing still with the fever of thought which has burned all day in her brain. [...] But in those old times which we knew, when the day was over whatever business remained undone wrapped itself up in the black blanket of the night and went to sleep in the darkened ground-floor premises of the city. Outside the house the evening sky rqge quiet and mysterious. It was so still that we could hear, even in our own street, the shouts of the grooms from the carriages of those people of fashion who were returning from taking the air in Eden Gardens by the side of the Ganges.
Rabindranath Tagore, My Boyhood Days
“I think you love him more than you can bear.” [...] “What am I going to do?” My father’s voice was soft. “Dante didn’t run. I keep picturing him taking all those blows. But he didn’t run.” “Okay,” I said. For once in my life, I understood my father perfectly. And he understood me.
We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!
•••
Fleabag S2 / Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe / Call Me By Your Name
sapphireshorelines reblogged
Oh, to see without my eyes : the female gaze of tenderness
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987) / Anne With An E (2017) / Frances Ha (2012) / Carol (2015) / Parched (2015) / Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) / Jennifer's Body (2009) / Persona (1966)
"I raised my eyes then, and saw Doreen’s head silhouetted against the paling window, her blonde hair lit at the tips from behind like a halo of gold. Her face was in shadow, so I couldn’t make out her expression, but I felt a sort of expert tenderness flowing from the ends of her fingers."
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
David Hettinger
Too often, women’s friendships are misunderstood as second-rate substitutions for romantic heterosexual relationships or veiled lesbian love. Certainly, there’s a long, often hidden history of women’s friendships as masks for actual lesbian relationships that couldn’t be publicly acknowledged. Even when lesbianism isn’t the subtext, close female friendships might be viewed as substitutes for romantic partnership or as supplying something that romantic partners (especially male romantic partners) cannot. Wunker worries that “recycling one storyline—the romance—means dragging all the sedimented associations of that storyline with you.” It seems that culturally we lack a language to adequately describe the character and quality of female friendships without resorting to borrowed vocabulary or miscategorizations.
Leslie Kern, Feminist City
Clarence Hudson White
sapphireshorelines reblogged
real hardship of death consists of the frustrating – very frustrating – inability to argue.
Ram Mohun Roy, translated from bengali
Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity
Albert Camus, The Fall
The dead don’t shout. There is a certain seductiveness about what is dead. It will retain all those admirable qualities of life with none of that tiresome messiness associated with live things. Crap and complaints and the need for affection. You can auction it, museum it, collect it.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
sapphireshorelines reblogged
Before Midnight (2013) dir. Richard Linklater
- Katherine Larson, ‘‘Lake of Little Birds’’, Radial Symmetry
[Text ID: We touch each other briefly / and depart. As if memory wasn’t a wound to bear.]
Ghost Nets / VII
Ghost Nets / VIII
The Scent of Green Papaya, Tran Anh Hung
Radial Symmetry, Katherine Larson
Women in Water
Roberta Di Gregorio, Swimming Pool III / Yuki Ogura, Japanese bathers / Harriet Lee Merrion / Liu Xiaodong, Relaxing in Water / The River Daughters of Plynlimon / Sonia Alins, Dones d’aigua III / Mary Oliver, Felicity
mirror motifs in Agnès Varda's Cleo From 5 to 7
August 1st Today is the first day of August. Sniff. July is over. I got up this morning at 6:30. I don’t know why. The dew was very thick and beautiful. All white. Now, however, the sun is out. The sky is blue. And it is going to be a beautiful day. [...]
August 1st Yesterday was not the first day of August. Today is. A free day. Bill and I tried to collaborate this morning but it didn’t work out. [...]
Aug. 3rd Actually I am not sure if today is the 3rd or not. It might be the 4th or the 5th. It really doesn’t matter. [...]
1. The poem present only in a letter Dickinson had sent to Higginson in August 1877, that Popova imagines to have been possibly written having witnessed the eclipse on September 29, 1875:
It sounded as if the streets were running— /And then—the streets stood still—/ Eclipse was all we could see at the Window/ And Awe—was all we could feel. / By and by—the boldest stole out of his Covert/ To see if Time was there/ Nature was in her Opal Apron—/ Mixing fresher Air.
2. Asaph Hall was about to give up his frustrating search for a Martian moon one August night in 1877, but his wife Angelina urged him on. He discovered Deimos (pic 1 below) the next night, and Phobos (pic 2 below) six nights after that. (x)
•••
Joe Brainard, Dairy 1969 | Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 1925 | Mary Oliver, August, 1993 | Vincent van Gogh, Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity's Gate), 1890 | Maria Popova, Figuring, 2019 | Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, 2016 | Taylor Swift, August, 2020
“I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me.”
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
•••
The Waves, Virginia Woolf | Lady Bird (2017) | The Worst Person in the World (2021) | The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath | Frances Ha (2012)