darthgrandpaw

[darthgrandpaw]

Bandu is my name. Nommo Bandu! It means the littlest one on the bottom. And it means the reason for everything.

Three Top Mountain, 2014

Tommy Nease

[darthgrandpaw]

Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.

Filipe Branquinho (Mozambican, b. 1977)

Bestia XVII, 2021

[darthgrandpaw]

I know about this kind of story--the lonely look down upon the hungry; the hungry look down upon the starving. The guilty blame the damaged. Those of doubtful righteousness speak of cannibals, the unquestionably vile, the sinners and the damned. It makes everyone feel much better.

Akihiro Furuta / Rainy Sea Play 5

[darthgrandpaw]

So this summer of fires was a good one: there was a common problem, and to resolve it was important to all, and each one put it ahead of his other, personal interests and was repaid by the satisfaction of finding himself in agreement with and respected by many other good people. Later Cosimo was forced to understand that when that common problem no longer exists, associations are no longer useful as they were, and it's better to be a man alone and not a leader.

Point Break (Divx).avi by MARK¢BROWN

[darthgrandpaw]

He understood this: that associations make man stronger and bring out the individual's best talents, and offer the joy, rarely felt if we remain on our own, of seeing how many honest and good and capable people there are, for whom it's worthwhile to wish for good things (whereas if we live on our own, the contrary more often happens, of seeing people's other face, the one that causes us to keep our hand on the hilt guard of our sword).

[darthgrandpaw]

I thought of the few occasions in my life up to now when I tried--I admit--to bring on a fever to avoid school or church. Now a real fire beat in my temples, all the fevers I'd ever begged for, caught up to me at last.

Steven Alexander - Poet XXIII, 2023

[darthgrandpaw]

Maybe I'll even confess the truth, that I rode in with the horsemen and beheld the apocalypse, but still I'll insist I was only a captive witness. What is the conqueror's wife, if not a conquest herself?

Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and some of us don't, but we wear it all the same. There's only one question worth asking now: How do we aim to live with it?

Mike Willcox

[darthgrandpaw]

Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.

First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever.

Cloudy Mountains in the Autumn, Gao Huijun, 2005

[darthgrandpaw]

So there we had it---the ever-growing ball of American paranoia, the ball of string a hundred miles in diameter, with the unsolved assassination of John F. Kennedy at its core.

Seth Collier — Panopticon Park (illustration, 2021)

[darthgrandpaw]

"I am sure you had the best intentions, [sir]," she said. "I never doubted that. But the next time you try to give somebody a wonderful present, make sure they want it first."

lee jenkins in fashion images de mode no. 5

[darthgrandpaw]

If she had died in childhood, she would have remembered life as the place you went, in case you wanted to see bugs eat a grand piano.

Crab Spider (Misumena vatia)

[darthgrandpaw]

Not even the minister thought that every life had a meaning, and that every death could startle us into learning something important, and so on. The corpse was a mediocrity who had broken down after a while. The mourners were mediocrities who would break down after a while. The city itself was breaking down. Its center was already dead... The planet itself was breaking down. It was going to blow itself up sooner or later anyway, if it didn't poison itself first. In a manner of speaking, it was already eating Drano.

There in the back of the church, I daydreamed a theory of what life was all about. I told myself that [all human beings] were cells in what was supposed to be one great big animal. There was no reason to take us seriously as individuals. Celia in her casket there, all shot through with Drano and amphetamine, might have been a dead cell sloughed off by a pancreas the size of the Milky Way.

How comical that I, a single cell, should take my life so seriously!

lush path

[darthgrandpaw]

[He] told us about one of Plato's dialogues, in which an old man is asked how it felt not to be excited by sex anymore. The old man replies that it was like being allowed to dismount from a wild horse.

The shark in pursuit of a meal. In ocean land. 1927.

Internet Archive

[darthgrandpaw]

We all see our lives as stories, it seems to me, and I am convinced that psychologists and sociologists and historians and so on would find it useful to acknowledge that. If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.

Some people, of course, find inhabiting an epilogue so uncongenial that they commit suicide.

Sally Mann. The Turn. 2005

[::SemAp Twitter || SemAp::]

[darthgrandpaw]

RUDY: You want pills from me---without a prescription.

CELIA: I love you.

RUDY: Sure. But it's pills, not love, that make people walk over broken glass at midnight. What'll it be, Celia---amphetamine?

Ximo Gascón (Spanish,b.1952)

Fulla V, 1986

Conté on Cardboard

[darthgrandpaw]

All those wonderful words that came out of me---those were your words. I could never have thought up words that beautiful to say in a million years. I almost lived and died without ever saying anything worth listening to.

Wallace Polsom, Primal Scream (2023), paper collage, 18.3 x 28.4 cm.

[darthgrandpaw]

Incredibly, he has written a play which is going to open in a few hours. He knows it is no good. He considers himself a big mistake. He considers life a big mistake. It probably shouldn't be going on. It is all he can do to give life the benefit of the doubt.

Interior with a piano, Stanislav Yulianovich Zhukovsky