dk-thrive - Tumblr blog

[dk-thrive]

Moonlight @ Twilight. 35° F. 5:10 to 5:20 am. April 26, 2024. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. (@dkct25)

[dk-thrive]

Twilight. 35° F. 5:15 to 5:30 am. April 26, 2024. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. (@dkct25)

[dk-thrive]

Before dawn, across the whole road as I pass I feel spiderwebs. Within people's voices, under their words or woven into the pauses, I hear a hidden sound. One thin green light flashes over a smooth sea just as the sun goes down. What roses lie on the altar of evening I inhale carefully, to keep more of. Tasting all these and letting them have their ways to waken me, I shiver and resolve: In my life, I will more than live.

— William Stafford, "Reminders" in A Ritual To Read To Each Other" (Harper & Row, 1984) (via Whiskey River)

[dk-thrive]

I know I am supposed to think I’m whole.

Listen it’s trying to make a void again. In which to hear itself. It’s too alone. Everything wants embodiment. But there’s this noise now it’s replacing everything. This humming of agreement fast-track skipped-step information yes yes yes yes lost hope lost will—dear dis-embodiment, here is an old wind, watch it orchestrate event, I raise my hand to find my face again, I know I am supposed to think I’m whole.

— Jorie Graham, from "Overheard In the Herd" (Poetry Magazine, January 2019)

[dk-thrive]

Moon. 95% illumination. 38° F. 12:50 am. April 26 2024. Darien, CT (@dkct25)

[dk-thrive]

In Cyrus’s active addiction it had taken dread and doom bringing him to his knees, or euphoric physical ecstasy elevating him half-literally out of his body—to break through his dense numb fugue. In sobriety, he still sometimes erroneously expected this of the universe—a stark shock of embodied rapture, the angel dropping from the sky to smack him with clarity’s two-by-four. Cyrus was beginning to realize that the world didn’t actually work this way, that sometimes epiphany was as subtle as a friend showing you something they saw on Twitter.”

— Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!: A Novel (Knopf, January 23, 2024)

[dk-thrive]

But in the end, they are all just stories.

“Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we’ve seen, novels we’ve read, speeches we’ve heard, and daydreams we’ve savoured, and out of all that jumble it weaves a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. This story tells me what to love, whom to hate and what to do with myself. This story may even cause me to sacrifice my life, if that’s what the plot requires. We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories.”

― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow (Harper; February 21, 2017)

[dk-thrive]

This woman who sits so upright in the chair, the face graven by sleepless nights, it is as though the very thing that had given her aspect has been slowly extracted, her grief feeding on the marrow in her bones.

— Paul Lynch, Prophet Song (Atlantic Monthly Press, December 5, 2023)

[dk-thrive]

Full Moon. 40° F. 4:30 to 5:00 am. April 25 2024. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT (@dkct25)

[dk-thrive]

Moonlight @ twilight. 40° F. 5:07 am. April 25 2024. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT (@dkct25)

[dk-thrive]

Full Moon. 40° F. 4:30 am. April 25 2024. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT (@dkct25)

[dk-thrive]

Are you going to war or are you drawing in an audience?

Art changes the opinion of the masses, as much as science does. Art in other cultures, in cultures that were more concerned about the well-being of the group, had art that was not so concerned with inner psychology and one’s isolated problems, but problems as they affected the tribe. Art is not essential, but love is essential, and maybe that is why people make art, to express their love of something—that tree, humans, the world, language, intensity of thought—and the person who doesn’t respond to a work of art is perhaps missing the love of the thing which the artist is pointing to, lovingly. Art is too much a tool for ambition, and not even the ambition to make something beautiful—which, as I write it, seems exhausting, too—but just the personal ambition to rise above other people. Art, I saw yesterday, is not a benign or pleasant, do-goodery thing to be doing, I don’t know how I hadn’t seen it before.”

— Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 6, 2024)

[dk-thrive]

He overcame horrible things every day, only to have them happen all over again. He was like Prometheus having his liver eaten by an eagle every morning, growing it back every night in time to be tortured again at dawn.”

— Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions (Penguin Press, April 18, 2023)

[dk-thrive]

People will say the most heinous things when they’re trying to justify their own failures and madness.

— Catherine Lacey, Biography of X: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 21, 2023)

[dk-thrive]

The window whispering the rain. She comes to be languid with the sense of being before memory, a hollow body filling with the sound of the rain until memory awakens and she is at spill, moving across the landing.

— Paul Lynch, Prophet Song (Atlantic Monthly Press, December 5, 2023)

[dk-thrive]

Daisy. 46° F. 6:06 am. April 24, 2024. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. (@dkct25)

[dk-thrive]

How much of the burden is in the way we watch ourselves?

How much of the burden is in the way we watch ourselves? In the early years of the twenty-first century, everyone is amassing digital information but no one knows how to sort through it. Closets are stacked with old computers. It would be better, of course, to go through all of one’s photos and keep only those worth keeping, but the thought of this induces paralyzing exhaustion. This would involve decision-making, which is cognitively taxing. This would involve delving deep into our personal histories, our pasts, which may involve feelings we don’t feel like feeling. It’s best to just take another photograph. Keep building up the database. Throw it into the cloud, whatever that is. It’s slightly stressful to know that one’s personal database is bloated and disorganized, but you can’t see my cloud. It’s my burden to bear, my weight to carry; luckily, since I’m small, it’s only a cloud... Absorb everything, all of it, at once. Stash it somewhere. Worry about it later.

— Kerry Howley, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State (Knopf, March 21, 2023)