梨園

“In order to be free you simply have to be so, without asking permission of anybody. You have to have your own hypothesis about what you are called to do, and follow it, not giving in to circumstances or complying with them. But that sort of freedom demands powerful inner resources, a high degree of self-awareness, a consciousness of your responsibility to yourself and therefore to other people.”

Andrei Tarkovsky, from “The artist’s responsibility,” Sculpting in Time, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (University of Texas Press, 1987)

— Hélène Cixous, “Bathsheba or the Interior Bible,” Stigmata: Escaping Texts

The Holy Poem by H. Leivick, translated from the Yiddish by A. Z. Foreman

With my holy poem Clenched between my teeth From my wolf cave—my hole, my home— I go out and I roam From street to street: As a wolf with a wretched bone Clenched between his teeth alone. There is prey enough in the street to sate a wolven hate, and sweet is the humid blood that drips from flesh, but sweeter still is the dry dust settling down on jammed lips.

Struggle on the street, The call of throats. Let me this once come out tonight, A deathtooth bite. That bite is me. But I don't come to gnaw. I hunch into my little self With head beneath my paw. Back to my hole I head And lump onto my bed, But I am awake, Untired from holding clenched Between my teeth alone This holy poem As the wolf his wretched bone.

anna akhmatova tr. by judith hemschemeyer, “poem without a hero” (1990) // harrison allen, “report of an autopsy on the bodies of chang and eng bunker; commonly known as the siamese twins” (1875)

Steven Meisel - Madonna and Daniel de la Falaise in New York (1992)

— T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

i love the triodion i love the carnival i love orthodox easter i love clean monday i love lent traditions i love tarama i love lagana i love seafood i love the transition from winter to spring i love bloomed almond trees i love fireflies zooming around i love the epitaphios procession i love easter hymns

you get abused in childhood that one time (the whole time) and become philosophically, poetically, and erotically obsessed with violence. many recorded cases

"In 'Salo' (1976), sex is nothing but an allegory of the commodification of bodies at the hands of power. I think that consumerism manipulates & violates bodies as much as Nazism did. My film represents this sinister coincidence between Nazism & consumerism."

Pier Paolo Pasolini (via DepressedBergman)

When bodies spill out of their boundaries, or when parts are severed from the whole, they become something unsettlingly other. That forces viewers to renegotiate the borderlands between inside and outside, between themselves and the source of their disquiet.

Why Contemporary Women Artists Are Obsessed with the Grotesque, Tess Thackara

— Elizabeth Kadetsky, from The Memory Eaters (University of Massachuesetts Press, 2020)

— Dario Argento

Tree of Life – Peter Stockinger

— Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent.

Scriptures (261): I will claw you out of that cocoon come noon.