collectingroots

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by Zipcy

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Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night, the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane - smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending process of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of this daily drama of the body there is no record.

Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill” (via alchemy)

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Fiona Rae (British, b. 1963), Something is about to happen!, 2012. Oil and acrylic on canvas.

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Loving you is every bit as fine as coming over a hill into the sun at ninety miles an hour darling when it’s dawn and you can hear the stars unlocking themselves from the designs of God beneath the disintegrating orchestra of my black Chevrolet. The radio clings to an un- identified station—somewhere a tango suffers and the dance floor burns around two lovers whom nothing can touch—no not even death! Oh! the acceleration with which my heart does proceed, reaching like stars almost but never quite of light the speed of light the speed of light.

Denis Johnson, “Poem,” from The Veil (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987)

One for the journey …

Requiescat in Pace July 1, 1949 - May 24, 2017

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FKA Twigs photographed by Charlie Engman 

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“Fables of the northern forest”

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The Outsiders (1983)

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@catrightsactivist

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Peanut Butter

I am always hungry & wanting to have sex. This is a fact. If you get right down to it the new unprocessed peanut butter is no damn good & you should buy it in a jar as always in the largest supermarket you know. And I am an enemy of change, as you know. All the things I embrace as new are in fact old things, re-released: swimming, the sensation of being dirty in body and mind summer as a time to do nothing and make no money. Prayer as a last re- sort. Pleasure as a means, and then a means again with no ends in sight. I am absolutely in opposition to all kinds of goals. I have no desire to know           where this, anything is getting me. When the water boils I get a cup of tea. Accidentally I read all the works of Proust. It was summer I was there so was he. I write because I would like to be used for years after my death. Not only my body will be compost but the thoughts I left during my life. During my life I was a woman with hazel eyes. Out the window is a crooked silo. Parts of your body I think of as stripes which I have learned to love along. We swim naked in ponds & I write be- hind your back. My thoughts about you are not exactly forbidden, but exalted because they are useless, not intended to get you because I have you & you love me. It’s more like a playground where I play with my reflection of you until you come back and into the real you I get to sink my teeth. With you I know how to relax. & so I work behind your back. Which is lovely. Nature is out of control you tell me & that’s what’s so good about it. I’m immoderately in love with you, knocked out by all your new white hair   why shouldn’t something I have always known be the very best there is. I love you from my childhood, starting back there when one day was just like the rest, random growth and breezes, constant love, a sand- wich in the middle of day, a tiny step in the vastly conventional path of the Sun. I squint. I wink. I take the ride. Eileen Myles

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Jung Ho Yeon, Park Min Hyuk for Koon Korea Nov 2015

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Invisible Horizons by Andreas Mass

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by juanamayah http://ift.tt/1TPCkez

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The Secret Garden (1993)

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waiting for summer

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collectingroots:

I watched a snake once, swallow a rabbit. Fourth grade, the reptile zoo the rabbit stiff, nose in, bits of litter stuck to its fur,

its head clenched in the wide jaws of the snake, the snake sucking it down its long throat.

All throat that snake—I couldn’t tell where the throat ended, the body began. I remember the glass

case, the way that snake took its time (all the girls, groaning, shrieking but weren’t we amazed, fascinated,

saying we couldn’t look, but looking, weren’t we held there, weren’t we imagining—what were we imaging?)

Mrs. Paterson urged us to move on girls, but we couldn’t move. It was like watching a fern unfurl, a minute

hand move across a clock. I didn’t know why that snake didn’t choke, the rabbit never moved, how the jaws kept opening

wider, sucking it down, just so I am taking this in, slowly, taking it into my body:

this grief. How slow the body is to realize. You are never coming back.

-Donna Masini

Slowly