Just This Human Heart

Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven

There's still time to change the road you're on

Belladonna of Sadness (1969)

                            like any god -forsaken thing, I want nothing more                                     than my breaths.

—Ocean Vuong, from The Smallest Measure

The rest of us keep pretending we’re happy, or else just go numb. We suffer, but not enough. And so we suffer for nothing.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Mark Rothko, No. 16 (Red, White, and Brown)

Auguste Rodin, Pierre de Wissant

                                     . . . a gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.

—Richard Siken, from Snow and Dirty Rain

Donyale Luna at the David di Donatello film awards, held at the Terme di Caracalla (Baths of Caracalla) in Rome, 29th June 1971.

Junk is surrounded by magic and taboos, curses and amulets. I could find my Mexico City connection by radar.

—William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

Let me tell you: I’m trying to seize the fourth dimension of this instant-now so fleeting that it’s already gone because it’s already become a new instant-now that’s also already gone. Every thing has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space. I want to possess the atoms of time. And to capture the present, forbidden by its very nature: the present slips away and the instant too, I am this very second forever in the now. Only the act of love—the limpid star-like abstraction of feeling—captures the unknown moment, the instant hard as crystal and vibrating in itself: during love the impersonal jewel of the moment shines in the air, the strange glory of the body, matter made feeling in the trembling of the instants—and the feeling is both immaterial and so objective that it seems to happen outside your body, sparkling on high, joy, joy is time’s material and the essence of the instant. And in the instant is the is of the instant. I want to seize my is. And like a bird I sing hallelujah into the air and my song belongs to no one. But no passion suffered in pain and love is not followed by a hallelujah.

—Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

Vincent van Gogh, House at Auvers, details (1890)

              His every day is their paradise & their vacation his income his two bus commute out of tropical city to wherever it is he sleeps alone.

—Jon Dambacher @jondambacher, from Someone taught this kid well