#Otherness

[zegalba]

Cocteau Twins: Otherness (1995)

[leonardospoetry]

"And this is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart."

Mary Oliver

[astranemus]

The best thing for anthropocentric dread, for individual anguish, for heartbreak, for illness, is interrupting your individuality. When you cannot walk, cannot move, cannot leave your bed you do not need to find a tree or landscape or butterfly to be. You can be a mote of dust. A potato bug vaulting across the room. The ten fungal spores that scintillate in each one of your inhalations. The anarchic bacterial legacy that melted into your very molecular makeup. The yellowjacket tapping his armored body against the closed window. Sometimes the answer is not to problematize your wounding, but to slip through it like a doorway into otherness. Other minds. Other types of anguish. Other animals and insects going extinct. Birds singing out courtship songs to mates that will never arrive.

Sophie Strand, The Birth of The Flowering Wand

[celtos]

When you encounter the gaze of the Other, you meet not a seeing eye but a blind one. The gaze is not clear or penetrating, not filled with knowledge or recognition; it is clouded over and turned back on itself, absorbed in its own enjoyment. The horrible truth … is that the gaze does not see you. … You are on your own; the gaze of the Other is not confirming, it will not validate you.

—Joan Copjec

[macrolit]

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether it yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.

How to Read and Why, Harold Bloom

[grrl-beetle]

Cocteau Twins - Otherness

[jt1674]

[trans-enby-culture-is]

nonbinary culture is reclaimimg otherness.

#96

[odd-god]

Less/More/Too/Not Human

Most of my time on Earth -- 35 years of it -- has been staring into The Abyss.

Why?

Because I was born into an era of mass ignorance, hatred, and vice.

Because I was born different.

Because I was called to it, in many ways.

I am brown. I am transgender. I am a man. I am neurodivergent. I am beautiful. I am intelligent. I am strong. I am disabled. I am other. I am someone who experiences paranormal phenomena.

I am human. I am not human. I am less than human. I am more than human. I am too human. Because of all my strengths, flaws, and idiosyncrasies. Like anyone. But... not like.

The way The Other is treated is known by everyone. Everyone who has ever lived knows what it's like to be othered for something they cannot help.

And yet... it is very different when it is 1 or 2 things about you that makes you Other versus... many things.

We all know of people who have been ostracized, bullied, or otherwise slandered for little else than merely existing.

Of course, the question whether or not they deserved it.. whether or not they've done something, is always on the tip of tongues.

The Other is not allowed humanity. They are generally held in contempt by the majority -- regardless of whether they're actually a "good" person or not. When they are "bad" it's blown widely out of proportion. When they're "good", it's suspicious. Any and everything they do is held under a microscope and compared to other people. Whether they're like them or not (in form or function).

Except... except I have stared into The Abyss. We are good friends. I know the darkness and light in my own heart just as well as Humanity's.

We live in a sick world with sick people. Everyone isn't like That. But enough are that we are here, in 2024. Still dealing with the ignorance, hate, and vice of the last thousands of years.

That is where we are now. The rift in humanity is between those who can see themselves in others and those who cannot.

How strange... That we all want to be seen as who we are... yet very few of us can communicate on the same wavelength (no matter how normal or weird). People will not see us or hear us... because they have convinced themselves of something else entirely.

What is it, then?

There's a lack of introspection, a lack of self awareness, a lack of the willingness to change.

But there is also a lack of humanity.

I wonder, after all this time: do we really need more humanity?

Or something... Other?

[keithanime]

Monsters are the patron saints of otherness.

Guillermo del Toro (source: Indiewire)

[cineclubsala1]

Le règne animal, dir. Thomas Caillet (2023)

[thepursuitofunderstanding]

Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten... The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.

Fernando Pessoa 

[desimonewayland]

Berg & Høeg (Horten) Bolette Berg (Norwegian, 1872-1944) Marie Høeg (Norwegian, 1866-1949) Untitled [Marie Høeg and her brother in the studio] c. 1895-1903 Owner: Preus Museum Collection, Norway

Art Blart

[gregor-samsung]

“ I can say my political consciousness began the moment I recognized my otherness. I was in a graduate seminar on memory and the imagination. The books required were Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory, Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, and Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space. I had enjoyed the first two, but as usual I said nothing, just listened to the dialogue around me, too afraid to speak. The third book, though, left me baffled. I assumed I just didn't get it because I wasn't as smart as everyone else, and if I didn't say anything, maybe no one else would notice. The conversation, I remember, was about the house of memory—the attic, the stairwells, the cellar. Attic? My family lived in third-floor flats for the most part, because noise traveled down. Stairwells reeked of Pine Sol from the Saturday scrubbing. We shared them with the people downstairs; they were public zones no one except us thought to clean. We mopped them all right, but not without resentment for cleaning up some other people's trash. And as for cellars, we had a basement, but who'd want to hide in there? Basements were filled with urban fauna. Everyone was scared to go in there including the meter reader and the landlord. What was this guy Bachelard talking about when he mentioned the familiar and comforting house of memory? It was obvious he never had to clean one or pay the landlord rent for one like ours. Then it occurred to me that none of the books in this class or in any of my classes, in all the years of my education, had ever discussed a house like mine. Not in books or magazines or films. My classmates had come from real houses, real neighborhoods, ones they could point to, but what did I know? When I went home that evening and realized my education had been a lie—had made presumptions about what was "normal," what was American, what was valuable—I wanted to quit school right then and there, but I didn't. Instead, I got angry, and anger when it is used to act, when it is used nonviolently, has power. I asked myself what I could write about that my classmates could not. I didn't know what I wanted exactly, but I did have enough sense to know what I didn't want. I didn't want to sound like my classmates; I didn't want to keep imitating the writers I had been reading. Their voices were right for them but not for me. Instead, I searched for the "ugliest" subjects I could find, the most un-"poetic"—slang, monologues in which waitresses or kids talked their own lives. I was trying as best I could to write the kind of book I had never seen in a library or in a school, the kind of book not even my professors could write. Each week I ingested the class readings and then went off and did the opposite. It was a quiet revolution, perhaps a reaction taken to extremes, but it was out of this negative experience that I found something positive: my own voice. “

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street; 1st edition: Arte Público Press, Houston, Texas, USA, 1984. [Excerpt from author’s introduction to 1993 edition]

[bumpytoad]

I'm Alterhuman because I have an Alternative experience and way of being human that the mainstream doesn't recognize as typical or really have a name for, and this involves and affects my self-perception. I also love things on an extremely deep level that most humans don't understand or share the same appreciation for or even much of any appreciation for, and these things have become part of me.

For me, it's neurological and psychological and identity-forming differences, special interests, defense mechanisms, and imprinting that inform how I experience things, and this way of perceiving is something that does make my spiritual sense of the world rather different, but it's not primarily spiritual (Especially not in the same sense as having a bunch of unverifiable beliefs), and imagination and various things that might not be so unusual do definitely play a big part.

I don't think of reincarnation as playing much of a role. I'm not sure about past lives. I don't have some elaborate backstory or memories. I don't have dreams regarding flashbacks as another species, or living in another time period or being on a different planet. I don't have special abilities from being Alt+H. I do, in fact, believe that anything could be possible, including alternate realities and universes, but for me it's more psychological and I'd like to concern myself with the here and now, rather than speculate about past lives or an afterlife.

I am myself, I am me. Through awareness, it's possible to transcend biology, at least to a certain degree, or else not let it limit you. I am ultimately a creature of my own design. My imagination definitely is a big part of what makes me who I am, though this isn't roleplaying or pretending. For me, it's an artistic construct that became an ingrained part of myself, as well as a result of imprinting and, yes, perhaps a certain level of spirituality. It has sociological implications and relates in a major way to me being Autistic. It's part of my self-concept and is a personal identity and subjective experience.

[awholewave]

I think i am everyone and everyone is me. Therefore I love everyone intensely and judge them all the same.