shehriyana - Tumblr blog

[shehriyana]

I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today.

It's right-handed

I am right-handed

There are grooves for the thumb and knuckle to grip that fit my hand perfectly

I have calluses there from holding my stylus and pencils and the gardening tools.

There are sharper and blunter parts of the edge, for different types of cutting, as well as a point for piercing.

I know exactly how to use this to butcher a carcass.

A homo erectus made it

Some ancestor of mine, three species ago, made a tool that fits my hand perfectly, and that I still know how to use.

Who were you

A man? A woman? Did you even use those words?

Did you craft alone or were you with friends? Did you sing while you worked?

Did you find this stone yourself, or did you trade for it? Was it a gift?

Did you make it for yourself, or someone else, or does the distinction of personal property not really apply here?

Who were you?

What would you think today, seeing your descendant hold your tool and sob because it fits her hands as well?

What about your other descendant, the docent and caretaker of your tool, holding her hands under it the way you hold your hands under your baby's head when a stranger holds them.

Is it bizarre to you, that your most utilitarian object is now revered as holy?

Or has it always been divine?

Or is the divine in how I am watching videos on how to knap stone made by your other descendants, learning by example the way you did?

Tomorrow morning I am going to the local riverbed in search of the appropriate stones, and I will follow your example.

The first blood spilled on it will almost certainly be my own, as I learn the textures and rhythm of how it's done.

Did you have cuss words back then? Gods to blaspheme when the rock slips and you almost take your thumbnail off instead? Or did you just scream?

I'm not religious.

But if spilling my own blood to connect with a stranger who shared it isn't partaking in the divine

I don't know what is.

[shehriyana]

[shehriyana]

Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

[shehriyana]

Do you have a list or something of your favourite academic/theory books? 🥺

sure! all of them should be available on libgen, so enjoy 🧚🏻‍♀️ i did focus on cultural histories rather than theory, though, otherwise it would get too long. virtually all of them are published by the academic presses, and well-sourced and peer-reviewed. no pseudoscience in this household, no sirree! (also, none of them have anything to do with my actual field of study. i’m just like that)

— Medieval Ghost Stories: An Anthology of Miracles, Marvels and Prodigies, — Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages, — After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, — Darkness: A Cultural History, — Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris, — Angels & Angelology in the Middle Ages, — Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion 1250-1750, — Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science, — The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England, — Landscapes of Fear, — Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness, — The Severed Head: Capital Visions, — Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural, — Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, — When the Dead Rise: Narratives of the Revenant, from the Middle Ages to the Present Day, — Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History, — Religion and Its Monsters, — On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, — The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History, — Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages, — Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art, — Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, — From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, Or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends, — A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History's Most Orthodox Empire, — Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, and Other Airborne Females, — The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration, — Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds, — Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages, — Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, — Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers,

etc, etc, etc. 

[shehriyana]

Certain words can change your brain forever and ever so you do have to be very careful about it.

[shehriyana]

its so fucked up how difficult it is to move to another country you shouldn’t need a reason or anything you should be able to show up at the border and be like “the vibes were off back home” and they should let you in

[shehriyana]

by burkhartinteriors

[shehriyana]

[shehriyana]

reblog this but with hashtags for your most favourite and your least favourite beverage

[shehriyana]

reblog this but with hashtags for your most favourite and your least favourite beverage

[shehriyana]

Oh to be a little gay detective who speaks in a preposterous accent and occasionally slips out of it to hint at how ridiculously funny he is as a character within the literary imagination.

Oh to be able to stand up for women who have been belittled by the unkind and the privileged, to be a cerebral force that unfailingly outwits the malevolent and the ignorant.

Oh to have Hugh Grant as my dreamboat partner, who stress bakes every now and then, who I had proposed to with some exceedingly goofy pun (like “only you can fill the Blanc in my life”), who answers the door all messy and covered in flour as I am attending a zoom call in my bathtub in my eccentric little Moroccan hat.

Oh to be Benoit Blanc.

[shehriyana]

Oh to be a little gay detective who speaks in a preposterous accent and occasionally slips out of it to hint at how ridiculously funny he is as a character within the literary imagination.

Oh to be able to stand up for women who have been belittled by the unkind and the privileged, to be a cerebral force that unfailingly outwits the malevolent and the ignorant.

Oh to have Hugh Grant as my dreamboat partner, who stress bakes every now and then, who I had proposed to with some exceedingly goofy pun (like “only you can fill the Blanc in my life”), who answers the door all messy and covered in flour as I am attending a zoom call in my bathtub in my eccentric little Moroccan hat.

Oh to be Benoit Blanc.

[shehriyana]

Being able to question sexuality as a socio-cultural construct be like *am i attracted to men because i am attracted to men or because there is a certain power society attaches to masculinity and it is that power that i have been taught to hunger for* *and in hungering for that power i hunger for the body that represents it* *if someone from a different sex were to wield that power would i also hunger for them* *or would that power hold no meaning just because it is associated with someone who is not a cis-het man*

Like seriously, how much of sexuality is sex?

[shehriyana]

The existence of tinted glass effectuates such visceral passion in me. Tinted glass bottles are so overwhelmingly poetic and so uneventfully commonplace. There, a greenish bottle of whiskey that my father discarded, that I cleaned and dried and filled with water and put dahlias in. Here, a dainty pink bottle of perfume that has run dry. It smells like the youth on my grandmother's wrist, back when wrinkles hadn't settled upon the soft dusk of her skin.

And then, within, the glass bottles in my imagination. I am a merchant of rare sea glass, my ship dances, fierce and inquisitive, upon the harsh waters that bind the world. I collect bottles that smell like time and the sea.

Or else, the bottles upon the dinner table, that colour the sun that passes through it. Take something from me, it says to the sun, and the sun partakes of its beauty.

Just, tinted glass bottles.

[shehriyana]

[shehriyana]

“Identity, according to Cavarero, is not something that we innately possess and reveal, but something we understand through narratives provided to us by others. She writes about a scene in The Odyssey where Ulysses sits incognito in the court of the Phaecians, listening to a blind man sing about the Trojan War. Having never heard his own life articulated by another person, Ulysses starts to weep. Hannah Arendt called this moment, “poetically speaking,” the beginning of history: Ulysses “has never wept before, and certainly not when what he is now hearing actually happened. Only when he hears the story does he become fully aware of his significance.” Cavarero writes, “The story told by an ‘other’ finally revealed his own identify. And he, dressed in his magnificent purple tunic, breaks down and cries.””

— Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

[shehriyana]

bruh i don't even know how to apply make-up. i don't even have the money. i am in it for the colours mostly. the shiny shiny of lip tints. the razzle dazzle of a jelly eyeshadow. i am a raven and the sephora box is a gleaming ribbon left upon the road.