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Angela Carter, from The Sadeian Woman

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a variety of hands, 7

  sensory apparatus of the skin smooth fingers sensualist artists

soft or hard hands square hands synthesis and analysis

tactile corpuscles taking a sign thumb, the emblem of man

touch, sense of the fingertips truth unnatural to man uncertainty of exact science

Let the whole universe be for me, in relation to my body, what the stick of a blind man is in relation to his hand. His sensibility really no longer resides in his hand, but at the end of the stick. *

uses of the hand value of the science variation of hands

versatile talents villages of elementary hands writers on the hand

—

selections — punctuated by passages from analogous texts — from index to The Science of the Hand; Or, The Art of Recognising the Tendencies of the human mind by the observation of the formation of the Hands. Translated from the French of M. Le Capitaine C[asimir]. S[tanislas]. Arpentigny and edited with an introduction, appendices, and a commentary on the text by Ed. Heron-Allen. With original plates and explanatory diagrams by Rosamund Brunel Horsley. 1886 Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh copy (archive.org)

* Simone Weil. The Notebooks of. Translated by Arthur Wills (1956) : 19

7 of 7  

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Antony and the Johnsons - Bird Gerhl

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How to Build an Owl

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GOD: I own you like I own the caves. THE OCEAN: Not a chance. No comparison. GOD: I made you. I could tame you. THE OCEAN: At one time, maybe. But not now. GOD: I will come to you, freeze you, break you. THE OCEAN: I will spread myself like wings. I am a bird with tiny feathers. You have no idea what’s happened to me.

How We Are Hungry, Dave Eggers (via commovente)

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So…I know I don´t write nowadays, and I know, yes I know, I hardly ever write such non ficition as this. But this situation, this jarring scraping against the sharp reality is something I simply have to say. 

Ageism is something I have to deal with everyday. Now, is it comparable to sexism or racism? One may say it isn´t of equal weight, and I might partially agree. But only partially because all non-merit based comments and assumptions are sure to affect our self-esteem.

I work at a business college teaching English to undergrads and Master´s degree students. There are younger faces in the language department too, but everyone shares the same teacher´s room. I´d say 85% of the faculty is over 45 or 50, so every single time I walk by them I feel like another student. There is so much ego in that place that sometimes I can´t breathe. Today, walking into the teacher´s room to leave my things in the locker, the professors got up nervously and asked “can I help you?” …I just said “no thanks” and opened my locker, after which they said “ooooh…you´re a teacher” and turned to their business without an apology. 

How many times have I heard from older collegues “you could be my daughter”?. In some cases it was true but…. what´s their point? Doesn´t that automatically devalue me even though we have the very same qualifications? In Poland, where it is customary to call every adult Mr. or Mrs., Living there, I was called “you” countless times (only acceptable for children and teenagers) which I continually found offensive. Whereas In Spain, people only call me Usted (Ms) when I go furniture shopping with my boyfriend. I suppose they assume we are married. 

Anyway, Spain has another “problem”. As there is so much unemployment and so many older people studying with the hope of finding a job in another field, people act younger longer. For example, it is almost unthinkable for an under 30 to have a child. The few and far in between “young” mothers I´ve spoken with encounter discrimination all the time. Unsolicited advice about motherhood and strange looks on the street are just some examples….I shudder to think what I will have to face when I´m a mother at 30 (more or less 2 years away). Perhaps by then I´ll grow a couple of wrinkles, which will tell others that they might as well treat me as an adult. 

And here is when I step down from the soapbox and say goodnight to all the young and the old, the beautiful and the ugly and everything in between.

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I’d wanted to write more about spring. But then the wind came And the strange speech of the flowers Has made it all irrelevant.

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Soon we will slip into spring. Soon we will sleep wholly naked, covered by the thin blanket of the wind blowing from the sea. We will keep the windows of our houses and of our minds wide open. We will trust a little more. We will bare and confess a little more. Women will shave their legs; men will mount their motorbikes. We will stay up, laying skin to skin, singing quiet, spring inspired love songs without a melody. We will fall in love again. We will count the flowers on the balcony and there’ll always be enough. We will chill our wine. We will drink the winter away. Soon we will say “so we have come this long”. We will be proud of living here, of being here; as if it was all our doing.

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Even when I look away I am still looking.

Richard Siken, from Portrait of Fryderyk in Shifting Light (via 7-weeks)

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I will always want myself. Always. Darling, I wrote myself a love poem two nights ago. I don’t know where you get this from but I am whole; woman who grows flowers between her teeth. I tend to my garden. I dance myself out of pain. You think women like me crawl for pity? You ever seen the offspring of a lion eat grass? This wanting of myself gets stronger with age. I host myself to myself. I am whole.

Ijeoma Umebinyuo  (via sunflower-mama)

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Love, if you are very quiet, more silent than silence and stiller than stillness, to the point when you can hear the air particles moving and the strands of your hair growing, you´ll also hear the laughter of our unborn children. You will understand how they are dying to live. How they rumble and grumble in the pit of my stomach and speak gibberish which is their childish way of expressing love. Maybe you can even hear their feet shuffling through this new and empty apartment, maybe you can even see their tiny footprints if you really strain your eyes. Can you see their faces in my face? Are they superimposed or do they blend into my skin like fresh ink? I sometimes feel like a child myself, sitting in the back of a car, asking constantly "are we there yet?". Is the future here yet? I believe that if we listen and look very closely, we will feel it walking toward us and reaching out its hand.

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Day thoughts, night thoughts

I recognize that there are two different kinds of thinking, two totally different modalities. Like the sides of the Earth, one is caressed by light while the other is smothered under a black blanket of storm-burnt clouds. Night thoughts are resistant to dreams. They come at the peak of insomnia and mix the fears of post-trump america with muddy memories that you imagined long gone. Night thoughts crawl in through the ears and the mouth like thousands of tiny insects. They make the brain and the skin itch. Last night, I was up struggling with them until long past 5 a.m. Praying doesn´t shoo them away, sleeping pills are useless. Nothing really helps but agreeing to battle with them and finally lay down your arms in exhaustion. Night thoughts, you fought a good fight. I admit that you are so strong that only the first thin swords of sun can kill you.

Yes, in the end, day thoughts always arrive. With their "it doesn´t matter", with "the world has more serious problems" and their general work affairs. Thank god for the simple daily necessary acts: making coffee, preparing for the day, buying train tickets, exchanging empty words with a stranger on the bus. They make night thoughts lose relevance. The fear of the future, the medidations of madness, the puzzle poem of words, faces, longings and dreams. All of that dissolves and moves to the background of the brain....Not that it is really gone. Not that it will ever be.

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TO PRACTICE ONLY THE THINGS I WANT TO BE BETTER AT by Bob Schofield

@ambientcrows‘s new year’s resolution

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how light the light is, and how heavy the dark.

2016 shone some subtle light on me, enlightened me, brought me unexpected inner peace, (distrurbed and contrasted by the darkness of outside events). let 2017 be lighter still. not just for me, but for everyone. and for those who have a kind of light, for those who do not carry dark, heavy burdens, it is nothing less than our duty to give some of it away to those who happen to need it.

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I think the paradigm for a poem is DNA—that is, as much information as possible written into as little space as possible. It’s like writing code. There’s so much code in a tiny strand of DNA. And there should be tons of information in a poem. I don’t mean information from the phenomenal world alone. I mean spiritual information, emotional information, concrete information.

Li-Young Lee, interviewed by Paul T. Corrigan for Image Journal (via soracities)

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Immortality may just lie in plurality. The further you can scatter your soul, the more available you make it to the multitudes, the longer it is bound to last. When asked at what age I want to die, I say I never, ever want to die. It seems that creation is my only option, my only gateway. Multiplication has always been my favorite mathematical operation anyway.

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Aleppo rings in my mind like a siren. I used to think war was something you read about in history textbooks, not something present and happening alongside you. But it is happening, and civilians are shot on the spot, people are trapped, starving and cold in their houses, listening to the piercing sound of artillery, watching their city fall apart into pieces around them.

What used to be postcard-worthy and beaming with human life is now a pile of rubble. And looking at the images of ravaged Aleppo I am reminded of Warsaw in 1936, the fearsome fires and screams of a country brought to its knees. Back then, the US stood back watching, many healthy, peaceful countries stood by watching - just like I am doing now. Watching with gaping, wide eyes, feeling helpless and incredulous. I used to think that in this century, we were above slaughter and carnage. I was wrong to think we were more sophisticated than that. But it is happening. And though I am not geographically there, I feel a great proximity to what is going on there because I share the same time-space with it. I can´t hear the bombs, but I can almost hear the barely-beating heart of a dying child in the middle of that hellish city.

And what else can I do but pray? And think: I am lucky, lucky, lucky. To have shelter. To find myself in peace and warmth on this side of the globe, anonymous and alive. Living a life that will probably not be included in any history textbook.