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Cain, José Saramago

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https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/navigating-the-mysteries/

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Pádraig Ó Tuama, from "For Such a Time as This", Kitchen Hymns

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The idea that children love fairy tales because fairy tales treat them seriously and do not shy away from the violence and danger the world has in store strikes me as very correct, but the fact it is generally expressed as "it is dangerous to go alone in the woods because there are wolves there"... gives me pause.

To begin with, this is just one fairy tale narrative (little red riding hood), which is thus elevated to the rank of "quintessential fairy tale" (debatable at best); secondly, this is a (deliberate?) misrepresentation of the tale's *actual* danger, which is the wolf specifically *as it lowers the child's defenses by impersonating her grandma after eating her*. It's not about the child being attacked by a wild wolf in the forest, it's about the horror of using familiar and comforting surroundings within the family sphere as a decoy (the plan is quite an elaborate one, too). And finally, this ties into my main remark, which is that in many fairy tales (a majority? I don't know), the danger children (or more generally fairy tale protagonists) face is less related to a foreign monster than the family itself: snow white, obviously, but also hansel and gretel - abandoned in the forest by their parents, twice!; rumpelstiltskin: the heroine was sold to the king by her lying, greedy father, and risks being executed by her master for most of the tale; donkey skin (self-explanatory); bluebeard (similar forced marriage situation); cinderella (and all the cruel step-mother stories in general...) - also self-explanatory...

Fairy tales tend to admit freely that families and parents can be actively harmful to children, whose perspectives the narrative centers; which is a (well-known) fact that makes everyone uncomfortable Always. So I think it's disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst to act as though the violence comes from the wolves outside and not the family inside.

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bitches will be like "i know a place" n take u to the archeological site of volubilis in morocco

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“To me you are the desert and the sea and everything secretive.”

— Ingeborg Bachmann, from a letter to Paul Celan written c. June 1949  

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Marina Tsvetaeva, Selected Poems; “I'm Glad Your Sickness”

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Rainer Maria Rilke, from Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters

Text ID: I’ve never seen you without wanting to pray to you. I’ve never heard you without wanting to place my faith in you. I’ve never longed for you without wanting to suffer for your sake. I’ve never desired you without wanting to be able to kneel before you.

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anne carson, poem : « Here Is My Propaganda One One One One Oneing On Your Forehead Like Droplets of Luminous Sin »

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Hanif Abdurraqib, In Defense of Despair

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If Charlotte inherited the egoism of Romanticism, Emily drew on a different, more abstract, strand of the Romantic imagination, concerned with the unstable space between dream and reality, with ambiguity and doubleness. In Charlotte's most famous sentence, "Reader, I married him," the identities of the three individuals--the reader, the "I," and the "him"--are secure and separate. Nothing can truly undermine Jane's sense of sovereign self. But Emily's most famous sentence, "I am Heathcliff," affronts our normal sense of what identity is. Two become one as the line between them is erased.

Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth, "Interpreting Emily"

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I just need everyone to know how much I really, really, REALLY hate Aristotle.

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rumi, where did the handsome beloved go?

mahmoud darwish, the cypress broke

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Alejandra Pizarnik, tr. by Yvette Siegert, from “Psychopathology Ward”, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972

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“It is extraordinary that nobody nowadays under the stress of great troubles is turned into stone or a bird or a tree or some inanimate object; they used to undergo such metamorphoses in ancient times (or so they say), though whether that is myth or a true story I know not. Maybe it would be better to change one’s nature into something that lacks all feeling, rather than be so sensitive to evil. Had that been possible, these calamities would in all probability have turned me to stone.”

— The Alexiad, written by Anna Komnene, the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, c. 1148.

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don’t forget that it’s your life. it’s not school’s life, it’s not work’s life, it’s not your family or your partner’s life—it’s perpetually your life, for better or worse. what do you want from this life? forget happy, what motivates you to live? why are you here?

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James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk