“He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he'd seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love.” Franzen on DFW
“Dawn of Man” by Max Ritvo
After the cocoon I was in a human body instead of a butterfly’s. All along my back there was great pain — I groped to my feet where I felt wings behind me, trying to tilt me back. They succeeded in doing so after a day of exertion. I called that time, overwhelmed with the ghosts of my wings, sleep. My thoughts remained those of a caterpillar — I took pleasure in climbing trees. I snuck food into all my pains. My mouth produced language which I attempted to spin over myself and rip through happier and healthier. I’d do this every few minutes. I’d think to myself What made me such a failure? It’s all a little touchingly pathetic. To live like this, a grown creature telling ghost stories, staring at pictures, paralyzed for hours. And even over dinner or in bed — still hearing the stories, seeing the pictures — an undertow sucking me back into myself. I’m told to set myself goals. But my mind doesn’t work that way. I, instead, have wishes for myself. Wishes aren’t afraid to take on their own color and life — like a boy who takes a razor from a high cabinet puffs out his cheeks and strips them bloody. via
from “The Planet Trillaphon as it Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing” by DFW
Elegia by Jacaszek
from La Collectionneuse, dir. Eric Rohmer (1967)
Night and Sleep by Evelyn de Morgan
Uu Uu Uu by Jaakko Eino Kalevi
from “In the Tower” by Thomas Bernhard
Eighteen-year-old inventor, H. Day, wearing headphones attached to a radio under his top hat, May 1922 in the UK. Cannot find more info. about H. Day on the internet; pls get in touch if you manage to find some.
“Matins” by Louise Glück, from The Wild Iris (1992)