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i try to be chill but my brain writes essays about everything

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“I knew I did from that first moment we met. It was… Not love at first sight exactly, but - familiarity. Like: oh, hello, it’s you. It’s going to be you.”

— Mhairi McFarlane - via 5000letters (via perfect)

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“Treat me the way you treat your poetry. Romance me with the same passion you express in your words. Love me from the same place you write from.”

— Myss Bradley (via quotemadness)

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plurality

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anyway.

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IG: nique_miller

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“Original Sin“ | Prints | IG | FB

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Konstantin Korobov (Russian, 1985) - Star (2024)

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Comic by Andy Singer

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The Rose - Bette Midler

어떤 사람들은 사랑이라고 말하고 강입니다. 그것은 부드러운 갈대를 익사시킵니다. 어떤 사람들은 사랑이라고 말하고 면도기입니다. 그것은 당신의 영혼을 피를 흘리게합니다. 어떤 사람들은 사랑이라고 말하고 굶주리고 끝없는 고통의 필요. 나는 사랑이라고 말하고 꽃입니다. 그리고 당신은 유일한 씨앗입니다. 부서지는 것을 두려워하는 마음 춤을 배우지 못합니다. 깨어나는 것을 두려워하는 꿈 결코 기회가 없습니다. 잡히지 않을 사람입니다. 줄 수없는 사람, 그리고 죽는 것을 두려워하는 영혼 그것은 결코 사는 법을 배우지 않습니다. 밤이 너무 외로울 때 길은 너무 길어 그리고 당신은 사랑이 오직 행운과 강자를 위해 겨울 만 기억해 쓰라린 눈 아래서 태양의 사랑으로 씨앗을 거짓말 봄에는 장미가됩니다.

Some say love, it is a river

That drowns the tender reed.

Some say love, it is a razor

That leaves your soul to bleed.

Some say love, it is a hunger,

An endless aching need.

I say love, it is a flower,

And you its only seed.

It’s the heart afraid of breaking

That never learns to dance.

It’s the dream afraid of waking

That never takes the chance.

It’s the one who won’t be taken.

Who cannot seem to give,

And the soul afraid of dyin’

That never learns to live.

When the night has been too lonely

And the road has been too long,

And you think that love is only

For the lucky and the strong,

Just remember in the winter

Far beneath the bitter snows

Lies the seed that with the sun’s love

In the spring becomes the Rose.

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Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch (trans. Gregory Rabassa)

[Text ID: “As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard.”]

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“Addiction is tricky. For example: a man who quit smoking for 11 years spent 15 seconds in an elevator with a man smoking a cigarette. He gave in.

What I’m trying to say is I think I love you again.” —Unknown ‪

sculpture by David Altmejd

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“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

— bell hooks

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As young women growing up under the protection of Roe, we never really talked with our mother about her abortion. Elisabeth learned that it had occurred when she went through several abortions of her own in the 1980s; but what we know about the story of Ursula’s necessarily different experience comes to us through her written words, as it does to you. “The Princess” was her keynote address to NARAL Pro-Choice America in 1982 when Roe was not even a decade old, and this piece, “What It Was Like,” was a talk for Oregon’s NARAL chapter in 2004. These stories are public statements, performances of Ursula’s own life material as a means to inspire and transform. The second of them, which you are about to hear, is also a rather extraordinary public love letter to her own family.

This is a hard essay to read or listen to, and it’s meant to be. Clearly, it was hard to write; watching Ursula in her 80s read her own words aloud, more than a decade after she wrote them, the emotion is palpable—and that shy little shrug at the end, that letting go. For us, it’s hard to watch. It’s a hard thing to think about your mother having an abortion, and an illegal one at that—to do so takes you to an exquisitely painful, vulnerable place, imagining what she went through: the shame, the grief, the sense of loss she must have experienced, the lingering, corrosive doubt. A hard thought exercise, but necessary to fully honor the fact that she could later choose to carry you to term, bring you into the world, into her world, to love and mother you the way she wanted to mother.

Being a mother was as essential to Ursula as being a writer. They were two fundamental streams of her being, wholly distinct but also quite inseparable. To call them twin aspects of her “creativity” would be to use a word she disliked, for the way it elides the complexity of human work. Yet complexity certainly existed in the deep, perpetual tension between her two vocations, even as they nurtured one another. Nevertheless, she is clear about the early events that made possible her passionate lifelong wrestling match with that tension: neither we, her beloved children, nor her extraordinary body of imaginative work, beloved by so many, would exist had she been forced untimely into motherhood—forced to become “another useless woman.”

It’s hard all over again to engage with this essay knowing that today, after that reprieve of “half a lifetime,” abortion is again illegal in this nation. The dark ages are back: in Texas, Idaho, North Dakota, Tennessee, and more than a dozen other states, pregnancy can now mean facing the prospect of being forced to bear children against one’s will—bearing them “for the anti-abortion people” (who will have nothing to do with helping care for those children). Those who have the privilege and means, as our mother did over 70 years ago, may make the ethical choice to break the law, to have or not have children for themselves; they may have loving family members and find medical professionals willing to risk being criminalized by supporting them. Most do not have this choice, however. Somewhere in Missouri or Idaho, a young person with the capacity to imagine the wider realities we so desperately need, the burning potential to become a transformative storyteller, is being shamed and shoved into the silence of enforced motherhood.

Ursula’s words won’t let us forget what it was like and what is at stake for us all, all over again today. As her daughters, our words here, our voices, our very bodies would not be if our mother had not had the support and the courage to stand up for her own body and mind and heart, and for the possibilities of ours. Our existence embodies the legacy of her fierce love and her fiery and beautiful resistance.

—Elisabeth Le Guin and Caroline Le Guin

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I don't think I'll ever see any of my family on holidays again and I love that for me tbh.

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Note to self to look up current figures on this but holy fucking shit dude

Africa is poor, but we can try to help its people.

It’s a simple statement, repeated through a thousand images, newspaper stories and charity appeals each year, so that it takes on the weight of truth. When we read it, we reinforce assumptions and stories about Africa that we’ve heard throughout our lives. We reconfirm our image of Africa.

Try something different. Africa is rich, but we steal its wealth.

That’s the essence of a report (pdf) from several campaign groups released today. Based on a set of new figures, it finds that sub-Saharan Africa is a net creditor to the rest of the world to the tune of more than $41bn. Sure, there’s money going in: around $161bn a year in the form of loans, remittances (those working outside Africa and sending money back home), and aid.

But there’s also $203bn leaving the continent. Some of this is direct, such as $68bn in mainly dodged taxes. Essentially multinational corporations “steal” much of this - legally - by pretending they are really generating their wealth in tax havens. These so-called “illicit financial flows” amount to around 6.1 percent of the continent’s entire gross domestic product (GDP) - or three times what Africa receives in aid.  

Then there’s the $30bn that these corporations “repatriate” - profits they make in Africa but send back to their home country, or elsewhere, to enjoy their wealth. The City of London is awash with profits extracted from the land and labour of Africa.  

There are also more indirect means by which we pull wealth out of Africa. Today’s report estimates that $29bn a year is being stolen from Africa in illegal logging, fishing and trade in wildlife. $36bn is owed to Africa as a result of the damage that climate changewill cause to their societies and economies as they are unable to use fossil fuels to develop in the way that Europe did. Our climate crisis was not caused by Africa, but Africans will feel the effect more than most others. Needless to say, the funds are not currently forthcoming.

“If African countries are to benefit from foreign investment, they must be allowed to - even helped to - legally regulate that investment and the corporations that often bring it.”

In fact, even this assessment is enormously generous, because it assumes that all of the wealth flowing into Africa is benefitting the people of that continent. But loans to governments and the private sector (at more than $50bn) can turn into unpayable and odious debt.

(Continue Reading)