viperslang - Tumblr blog

[viperslang]

The language of pain, stretching back to antiquity, conflated the emotional and the physical. The overlap of grief, anguish, despair and sorrow with physical pain lies at the heart of vernacular expressions of suffering in Ancient Greek, Latin, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi and Chinese, as well as in English and other European languages. For thousands of years, the statement ‘I am in pain’ was an emotional as well as a physical claim. While this semantic overlap seems consistent, the precise conceptualisation has varied enormously, from ὀδύvη (odúnē, Ancient Greek) to dolor (Latin), to wajaʿ (Arabic), to dard (Farsi, Hindi and Urdu), to tòng (Chinese). Moreover, there is a rich history of the iconography of the ineffable: representations of pain that, while it could not be uttered, was nonetheless expressed. By documenting the historically situated processes of experiencing and expressing types of pain, it is possible to show both an enormous variety while insisting upon a long history of the braiding of the emotional and the physical. This has the effect, in turn, of implicitly de-naturalising and situating present-day experiences of pain and of disrupting two centuries of modern medical expertise.

Rob Boddice, The Politics of Pain

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Photographer: Dirk Skiba

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now that twitter is dying, who is back in this hellscape?

and also hi! 

*waves*

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Organising a poetry reading in Scotland next month. Scottish poets/writers based in Stirling, Edinburgh and Glasgow please drop me a message. We want a fun, lively and all-encompassing evening!

Also, drop me a message anyway if you are in and around Edinburgh and do writerly things. 

[viperslang]

Monster” is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, “divine portent,” itself formed on the root of the verb monere, “to warn.” It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening. 

- Susan Stryker, My Words to Victor Frankenstein

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Hello. Scotland folks, I am in your country. Say hi and show me around?

[viperslang]

Hello. Scotland folks, I am in your country. Say hi and show me around?

[viperslang]

Yours: advocacy Mine: disobedience Yours: respectable curiosity Mine: material illiteracy Yours: self-care Mine: ego

Scherezade Siobhan, Cast(e)ing the dye (Published in Poetry At Sangam)

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“I'm not perfect. I'm unfulfilled.” 

―Abdulrazak Gurnah, Admiring Silence

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not all of it is bad i think….…. we are going to be okay i think.

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“In social networks, the function of "friends" is primarily to heighten narcissism by granting attention, as consumers, to the ego exhibited as a commodity.”

 ―Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society

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I am a phantom built out of pain.

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

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This is a shock. Gaspard was so interesting, so talented, and so young. Loved his work. Rest in peace. GASPARD ULLIEL 1984-2022 📸 Drui & Tiago

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"Tenderness is the most modest form of love.  [...] Tenderness is spontaneous and disinterested; it goes far beyond empathetic fellow feeling. Instead it is the conscious, though perhaps slightly melancholy, common sharing of fate." 

—Olga Tokarczuk  | The Tender Narrator

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Lucille Clifton to begin this year. 

Happy New Year!

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We command the pain to remain in the words. not in us.

Alice Notley, Iphigenia

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"Detours, stumbles, and grief may strip me to bare bone, but I’ve slowly, reluctantly friended the lucky dark, meaning gratitude, which floods in to balance what seems so wobbly but is in fact a great conjunction of peace, self-knowledge, compassion." 

 —Linda Parsons, Visitations