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Crackerbell, Mary Ruefle

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Our true vocation is to be ourselves

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Joy Sullivan, from “Culpable”, Instructions for Traveling West

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“It appears vain to limit oneself to reflecting reality as in science, and vain to escape it as in fiction. Action alone proposes to transform the world, in other words, to make it similar to dreams. ‘“To act’’ resonates in the ear with the blast of the trumpets of Jericho. No imperative possesses a more basic efficacy and, for whoever hears it, the necessity to take action is imposed without possible delay and without condition. But he who demands that action realize the will that animates him quickly receives strange responses. The neophyte learns that the will to efficacious action is the one that limits itself to dismal dreams. He accepts; then he slowly understands that action will leave him only the benefit of having acted. He believed in transforming the world according to his dream, but he only transformed his dream on the level of the poorest reality: he can only stifle in himself the will he carried—in order to be able to ACT.”

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Georges Bataille, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in Visions of Excess (Trans. Allan Stoekl)

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And may each one of us realize how important our individual efforts and the compassion that we generate - how important it is in the large scale of things. Every time when we choose to look through our sense of self it's like a flash of lightning in the dark. In eternal darkness - sudden flash of light. It's like a little...rebellion, maybe you could say. Rebellion for the benefit of all beings. For the happiness of all beings. So that all beings could be happy and have peace and be ok - have harmony in their lives. So whether we are practicing vipassana and looking through our self-delusion, whether we are generating bodhicitta, whether we are chanting mantras, doing breathing practices, it's like a beautiful thunderstorm of these lightnings illuminating - even though it's momentarily - illuminating this darkness of samsara. It is a big deal. It's a very big deal.

– Amrita Baba (x)

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it's very berlant, "there is nothing I love more than watching someone use their freedom"

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ph. by Saul Leiter

via Gloria C.

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DEAN: Do you ever get writer’s block?

CARSON: I did during COVID, and that goes back to the pointlessness. There’s so much writing in the world and a lot of it just seems like the same sentence.

DEAN: I’m sure your COVID diaries would be unlike anyone else’s.

CARSON: We’ll never have to judge, because they won’t appear.

DEAN: They’ll be transcribed into some other form, in some other era. I know you’re a lover of anachronism.

CARSON: There’s no such thing. All time is now.

(via Anne Carson Punches a Hole Through Greek Myth)

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it’s funny that whenever you get the things you want, it’s never when you wanted them, or in the form in which you imagined you’d get them, and he said, yes, it’s like there’s some metaphysical law that a desperate want for something results in the withholding of that thing.

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Alphabetical Diaries (Sheila Heti)

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LE: In any case, we both see sex as a site for experiencing this intensified encounter with what disorganizes accustomed ways of being. And as Lauren and I both want to suggest, that encounter, viewed as traumatic or not, remains bound to the nonfutural insistence in sex of something nonproductive, nonteleological, and divorced from meaning making. In this sense sex without optimism invokes the negativity of sex as a defining and even enabling condition. Gayle Rubin reminds us in “Thinking Sex” that “Western cultures generally consider sex to be a dangerous, destructive, negative force,” to which we might add: if only sex lived up to such press more often (Rubin 2011, 148)! If only, that is, the Panoptimism that rules us, even (or especially) in our denial of its hold, did not so often lend value to sex through the world-preserving meanings imposed upon it to repudiate its negativity. One need not romanticize sex to maintain that it offers, in its most intensely felt and therefore least routinized forms, something in excess of pleasure or happiness or the self-evidence of value. It takes us instead to a limit, and it is that limit, or the breaking beyond it, toward which sex without optimism points. LB: ...one no longer has to see sex only as expressing a relation of power, or someone’s singular pleasures, or the shattering activity of the drives. We wouldn’t have needed Rubin to help us calm down and think about sex, and to think about affirming what’s threatening about it either, if we did not need to figure out how sex reproduces normativity while predictably disorganizing assurance about why we want what we want and what our variety of attachments mean; at the same time, not quite knowing ourselves, we demand all sorts of things on behalf of the appetites, such as the right to anonymity, aggression, acknowledgment, pleasure, relief, protection, and, often, repair ... As I wrote recently in an essay about the work of Leo Bersani and David Halperin, “When in a romance someone has sex and then says to the lover, ‘You make me feel safe,’ we understand that she means that there’s been an emotional compensation to neutralize how unsafe and close to the abject sex makes her feel. ‘You make me feel safe’ means that I can relax and have fun where I am also not safe, where I am too close to the ridiculous, the disgusting, the merely weird, or—simply too close to having a desire. Lauren Berlant & Lee Edelman, Sex or the Unbearable

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"Change is never painful. Only the resistance to change is painful."

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Art is real and objective, philosophy ideal and subjective. Schelling, “Philosophy of Art.”

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We must know our dead ones From both sides That is why They rest, and fly.

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my goal for 2025 is small simple and clear: change my whole entire life

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Louis Appleby, Sci-fi Fantasy, 2022.

Acrylic on wood, 130 × 100 cm.

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