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Edward Steichen, Woods, Twilight 1899 (platinum print)
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oldfarmhousefallfeatures
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Denise Hawrysio - Safe for all Surfaces, 2002
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"There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation."
Joan Didion
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the concept of looking at life from both sides now
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“Sometimes Allaah removes everyone from you so it’s just you and Him. It can be hard to comprehend that at first, but that’s why that first prostration when in despair is actually so blissful.”
— Shaykh Musa Jibril حفظه الله
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Byung-Chul Han, from an interview published in ArtReview
Source: artreview.com
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"You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less."
- James Baldwin, The Artist's Struggle for Integrity
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Carla Santini “Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen” icons
‒ like or reblog if you save
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Do you think people like me can find eternal love?
LOVE IN THE BIG CITY (2024)
yes hello, sana using a donald trump doll to stick her pins in is amazing. 10/10
evergreen
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« As long as the woman from Rijksmuseum in painted silence and concentration day after day pours milk from the jug to the bowl, the World does not deserve the end of the world. »
— Wisława Szymborska, "Vermeer" (Photo by Alexander Klein)
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“Love, with little hands, Comes and touches you With a thousand memories, And asks you Beautiful, unanswerable questions.”
— Carl Sandburg, from The Complete Poems; “Under the Harvest Moon,”
"Axiom 1: People are different from each other.
It is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-evident fact. A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorization have been painstakingly inscribed in current critical and political thought: gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation are pretty much the available distinctions. They, with the associated demonstrations of the mechanisms by which they are constructed and reproduced, are indispensable, and they may indeed override all or some other forms of difference and similarity. But the sister or brother, the best friend, the classmate, the parent, the child, the lover, the ex-: our families, loves, and enmities alike, not to mention the strange relations of our work, play, and activism, prove that even people who share all or most of our own positionings along these crude axes may still be different enough from us, and from each other, to seem like all but different species.
Everybody has learned this, I assume, and probably everybody who survives at all has reasonably rich, unsystematic resources of nonce taxonomy for mapping out the possibilities, dangers, and stimulations of their human social landscape. It is probably people with the experience of oppression or subordination who have most need to know it; and I take the precious, devalued arts of gossip, immemorially associated in European thought with servants, with effeminate and gay men, with all women, to have to do not even so much with the transmission of necessary news as with the refinement of necessary skills for making, testing, and using unrationalized and provisional hypotheses about what kinds of people there are to be found in one's world. The writing of a Proust or a James would be exemplary here: projects precisely of nonce taxonomy, of the making and unmaking and remaking and redissolution of hundreds of old and new categorical imaginings concerning all the kinds it may take to make up a world.
I don't assume that all gay men or all women are very skilled at the nonce-taxonomic work represented by gossip, but it does make sense to suppose that our distinctive needs are peculiarly disserved by its devaluation. For some people, the sustained, foregrounded pressure of loss in the AIDS years may be making such needs clearer: as one anticipates or tries to deal with the absence of people one loves, it seems absurdly impoverishing to surrender to theoretical trivialization or to 'the sentimental' one's descriptive requirements that the piercing bouquet of a given friend's particularity be done some justice. What is more dramatic is that--in spite of every promise to the contrary--every single theoretically or politically interesting project of postwar thought has finally had the effect of delegitimating our space for asking or thinking in detail about the multiple, unstable ways in which people may be like or different from each other."
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
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"Self-censorship was a practical necessity, but it was also part of the process of self-discovery, which makes it doubly unreasonable to accuse writers like Proust or James of failing to support the cause. Far more damage was done by the mutilations and incinerations of embarrassed readers. A diarist might turn his closet into a time-machine, but when it arrived in the future heirs and editors would be waiting to barricade the doors.
Some crude attempts at censorship are easily reversed - hims replaced with hers, and so on - but a great deal of the unread corpus was destroyed forever. Edmund Gosse and the librarian of the London Library organized Symond's papers into a pile in the library garden and set fire to them. Richard Burton's extensive research notes on 'pederasty' were probably destroyed by his widow. Minnie Benson's son Arthur left behind 'a packet of letters of very dangerous stuff' and another packet 'that had to be burned unopened', according to his brother Fred. Edward Lear's papers seem to have been selectively destroyed after his death by the man for whom Lear had harboured a 'twarted, frustrated, impossible love'.
To judge by the large number of known destructions (most presumably went unrecorded), at any moment in the 19th century someone, somewhere, was burning the papers of a homosexual relative. People who were almost certainly homosexual, like Thomas Gray or Thomas Lovell Beddoes, can now have no firm place in the record, especially since the standard of proof demanded of biographers is far stricter for homosexual than for heterosexual subjects. It is almost as if the surviving testimonies to forbidden love were written 2000 years rather than four or five generations ago. Ancient Greek literature and 19th-century confessional gay literature probably survive in approximately the same proportions."
From: 'Strangers. Homosexual love in the nineteenth century', by Graham Robb
Crying a little at the thought of all the queer records we've lost
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Mutuals this, mutuals that
Shout out to the people I follow who didn’t want to follow me back
I respect your decision and love your work
You will never see this post
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ALT ER LOVE WEEK ♡ DAY TWO: FAVOURITE CHARACTER “I have to find out… what my own opinion is. And I have to do it on my own.”