a-lovers-discourse

[a-lovers-discourse]

“The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still upon us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer on them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative.”

— Hélène Cixous - The Laugh of the Medusa

[a-lovers-discourse]

“I am the finite that wants its infinite. Love infinites me.”

— Hélène Cixous, from “What is it o’clock?” Stigmata: Escaping Texts

[a-lovers-discourse]

“Because she arrives, vibrant, over and over again; we are at the beginning of a new history, or rather a process of becoming in which several histories intersect with one another. As a subject for history, woman always occurs simultaneously in several places. (In woman, personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and world history.) I wished that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard of song. Time and again, I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents I could burst – burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune.”

— Helene Cixous, Utopias

[a-lovers-discourse]

“She was the perfect combination of hard and soft, with a face that said, ‘I am fierce enough to snap you in half, but I will be merciful enough to give you a chance to turn around and walk away.’ And did I walk away? Of course not.”

— Noor Shirazie

[a-lovers-discourse]

“Poetry is an incessant amorous search under the sign of love for a remembered time at the pitch-dark fringes of evening when we gathered together to bless and believe.”

— Susan Howe, Vagrancy in the Park

[a-lovers-discourse]

The New World (2005) dir.Terrence Malick

[a-lovers-discourse]

“It is important to recognize that their patterns concretized long before you entered their life. Maybe these patterns were dormant or didn’t find immediate expression but you aren’t the origin in most cases. This is important when you provide yourself the closure you deserve. Coming out of abusive relationships, if you feel like filling up the moments of innate, nutritive silence — which is the bridge to closure — with the addictive cacophony of going back for one more conversation/debate/disagreement, you allow them power they don’t deserve but crave and extort regularly.”

— Scherezade Siobhan, Emotional Abuse : Conversation & Closure (via Medium)

[a-lovers-discourse]

Ah, but we die to each other daily

Ah, but we die to each other daily. What we know of other people Is only our memory of the moments During which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same Is a useful and convenient social convention Which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

~ T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party (Mariner; March 18, 1964)

[a-lovers-discourse]

I stopped combing my mind so my thoughts could lock I'm tired of trying to understand Perceptions are mangled, matted and knotted anyway Life is more than what meets the eye and I So elevate I to the third But even that shit seems absurd When your thoughts leave you third eye-solated No man is an island but I often feel alone So I find peace through.. ૐ

Saul Williams, Untimely Meditations, Amethyst Rock Star, 2001.

[a-lovers-discourse]

My attention spans galaxies here and now are immense

Saul Williams, Untimely Meditations, Amethyst Rock Star, 2001.

[a-lovers-discourse]

The fiery sun of my passions evaporates the love lakes of my soul Clouds my thoughts and rains you into existence As I take flight on bolts of lighting claiming chaos as my concubine and you as my me I of the storm, you of the sea, we of the moon, land of the free What have I done to deserve this? Am I happy? Happiness is a mediocre standard for a middle-class existence I see through smiles and smell truth in the distance Beyond one dimensional smiles and laughter lies the hereafter Where tears echo laughter

Saul Williams, Untimely Meditations, Amethyst Rock Star, 2001.

[a-lovers-discourse]

I have me. I have me before you. I have me during us. I have me after you. Anything you bring to the table is extra. Appreciated, but extra none the less.

[a-lovers-discourse]

How is programming people to hate themselves not emotional abuse?

The Miseducation of Cameron Post , dir. Desiree Akhavan

[a-lovers-discourse]

I sometimes become so consumed in the travails of my own heart that I neglect yours...

Saul Williams, Robeson, Amethyst Rock Star, 2001

[a-lovers-discourse]

LORA MATHIS

‘If There’s A Way Out I’ll Take It’ by @lora-mathis;

original photos and edit

[a-lovers-discourse]

“sometimes the whole world of women seems a landscape of red blood things that need healing,”

— Lucille Clifton, from Next: New Poems; “She is Dreaming,”

[a-lovers-discourse]

Zoe Leonard wrote “I want a president” in 1992, in the lead-up to the presidential election. That year, the poet Eileen Myles ran for president as an independent candidate alongside George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot. Originally written for QW, an independent queer magazine that dissolved before the text was published, it circulated organically among the artist’s friends. In 2006, on invitation from LTTR, Leonard contributed the text as a postcard insert. The work has subsequently reached a wide audience online and through books, magazines, and exhibitions. It has been translated into many languages and used in numerous public readings and performances in this country and abroad. See it now in the context of three decades of the artist’s work in Zoe Leonard: Survey. 

[Zoe Leonard, I Want a President, 1992. Typewriting on paper, 21.6 x 35.6 cm / 8 ½ x 14 in. © Zoe Leonard Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth]