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One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
—Aldous Huxley, ‘Island’ (via stoicremains) (Source: stoicremains.us)
Until you can act perfectly naturally, according to your own nature, you will never be content with who you’re being. The more you act like yourself the nearer you come to a fulfillment of your real needs.
—Anaïs Nin, from a diary entry featured in Henry and June: From “A Journal of Love” -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin (1931-1932)
In popular culture we have “the bachelor pad,” and “the bachelor lifestyle,” but no such phrases for women. Women who live alone are objects of fear or pity, witches in the forest or Cathy comics. Even the current cultural popularity of female friendship still speaks to how unwilling we all are to accept women without a social framework; a woman who’s “alone” is a woman who’s having brunch with a bunch of other women. When a woman is truly alone, it is the result of a crisis—she is grieving, has lost something, is a problem to be fixed. The family, that fundamental social unit, dwells within the female body and emanates from it. Women are the anchors of social labor, the glue pulling the family, and then the community, together with small talk and good manners and social niceties. Living alone as a woman is not just a luxury but a refusal to bend into the shape of patriarchal assumption and expectation.
—Helena Fitzgerald, The Fierce Triumph of Loneliness (via arabellesicardi) (Source: catapult.co)
“The borrowed truths are the ones to which one clings more tenaciously, and all the more since they remain foreign to our intimate self. It takes much more precaution to deliver one’s own message, much more boldness and prudence, than to sign up with and add one’s voice to an already existing party. I believe to be true, tragically true, that what is called “experience” is often but an unavowed fatigue, resignation, blighted hope. They have almost all compromised. That is what they call “learning from life”. They have denied the truth that was in them.”
— André Gide, from a journal entry featured in The Journals Of Andre Gide Vol II 1914-1927
“Ultimately I am suggesting that a better way of thinking about patriarchy is as emotional manipulation. Characterizing it as misogyny, or “hatred of women,” increasingly misses the mark because it fails at descriptive precision. Hatred seems vague, outlandish, or unrelatable and this makes the accusation easy to dismiss. With the rise of feminism’s influence, patriarchy has sought different techniques, echoing Foucault’s belief that politics use a “sort of silent war to reinscribe that relationship of force.” The Male Sentimental can ultimately be seen as the result of a bargain with feminism: one can be a man with feelings, pass the feminist test, and still keep power. Patriarchy operates at the register of emotion where it can’t afford to operate through violence or coercion. In this light it also becomes quickly apparent that the appeal of the sensitive male subject is subtended by his potential for violence. As Eve Sedgwick’s therapist once described her father, “someone who could punish but doesn’t, or whom you can relate to so that he won’t.”
—An essay by Lazz on an insidious 21st century form, over at mixed feelings
(Source: whateverjeanne)
If the outside corresponded to the inner life in people, we couldn’t have “bodies” as we do. The inner life is too complex, too various, too fluid. Our bodies incarnate only a fraction of our inner lives. (The legitimate basis for the paranoid endless anxiety about what’s “behind” the appearances.) Given that they would still have inner lives of the energy + complexity that they have now, the bodies of people would have to be more like gas—something gaseous yet tangible-looking like clouds. Then our bodies could metamorphose rapidly, expand, contract—a part could break off, we could fragment, fuse, collide, accumulate, vanish, rematerialize, swell up, thin out, thicken, etc. etc. As it is, we’re stuck with a soft but still largely determinate (especially determinate with regard to size + dimension + shape) material presence in the world—almost wholly inadequate to these processes which then become “inner” processes. (i.e., far from wholly manifested, needing to be discovered, inferred; capable of being hidden, etc.) Our bodies become vessels, then—and masks. Since we can’t expand + contract (our bodies), we stiffen them a lot—inscribe tension on them. Which becomes a habit—becomes installed, to then re-influence the “inner life.” The phenomenon of character armor that Reich focused on.
An imperfect design! An imperfect being!
Of course, maybe we wouldn’t have so much subjectivity if the “outer” were better designed to register the interior life. Maybe subjectivity as we experience it (all the pressure, the force, the energy, the passion of it) is precisely the result of this “confinement” inside our being. (Like the pressure build up when a gas is heated up inside a sealed metal container.)
—Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh (8.12.1967)
It requires youthfulness to hope and youthfulness to recollect, but it requires courage to will repetition. He who will only hope is cowardly. He who wants only to recollect is a voluptuary. But he who wills repetition, he is a man, and the more emphatically he has endeavoured to understand what this means, the deeper he is as a human being. But he who does not grasp that life is repetition and that this is the beauty of life, has condemned himself and deserves nothing better than what will happen to him — death
—Kierkegaard - Repetition (via oo111111)
Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929), Stars (F.U.S.), 1953. Acrylic and gouache on paper, 35.5 x 31 cm.
The white art world killed Basquiat
[“While the white art world in general professed to adore Basquiat, the “adoration” they emphatically felt often failed to be based on a deep emotional connection to the actual paintings. Due to the challenging nature of the work that Basquiat produced, white viewers who could not allow themselves to be moved by the canvases’ confrontations with white supremacy and capitalism imposed a kind of false intimacy with his work. To truly be moved by him would be uprooting the very tangible racial and social hierarchies that the art world clung to.”]
[YES!, this article is so on. the white art world keeps sucking black/brown genius dry. this is a must read for a lot of ppl these days.]