ainslie hogarth motherthing
[ Text ID: And maybe not destroying the thing you love, / resisting that impulse, is the highest expression of love. ]
in honor of spring starting today here is my finished wintertiming journal <3 december - today!
put down that gravestone
you’ve been carrying. bury
the people who leave–
they are dead to you now.
ghosts are everywhere.
stop holding your heart out
to strangers like samplers,
hoping they’ll love the sun
under all that lonely. people
who love lonely people
are always trying to forget.
you know this, because you
are one of them. & that’s
okay. just breathe in deep.
like a firefighter pulling bodies
from the wreckage, only
you are the wreckage,
you are the fire &
you are also the firefighter
which is all to say that
you are trying to save yourself
from yourself. depression is just
an overstaying visitor
who forgets who actually owns
this body. it is whole without
anyone else in it. there is
no monster here,
only the shape of a falling star
where your heart should be.
northbound & reaching, a
hero telling her story. it starts
like this: once upon a time,
you rode the dragon
& saved your own life.
— Natalie Wee, from “How to Save Your Own Life”, Our Bodies And Other Fine Machines
{Alice Oseman, Radio Silence/ Emily Palermo, from Untitled/ Franz Kafka, from Diaries/ Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar/ Marya Hornbacher, Waiting/ Nikos Kazantzakis, from a letter to Galatea Kazantzaki wr. c. May 1922/ Mahmoud Darwish/ Anna Akhmatova, from The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova; "The Old Portrait"/ Lyric Hunter, from "A Garden," Swallower/ Albert Camus/ Varsha/ Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Meek One}
one thing about orpheus and eurydice is you guys are all like “i’m different i wouldnt turn to look at her” because you are all familiar with the story of orpheus and eurydice. but orpheus wasnt familiar with the story because he was in it lol.
“i wouldn’t look back bc logically if she’s not there it wouldnt help to look and if she is there looking back would cause me to lose her” cool so has love never made you stupid and insane
another thing thats interesting is i think most people assume its a walk of reasonably short length that you have to resist looking back. but we dont know how long that walk was. its out of the underworld, time could work very differently. could be days. could be months. could you walk for months without looking back to see if your love is okay? i dont think you could
exactly. like oh you’re not going to look back? have you never lost a love? there is so much looking back.
february: love and envy
a syllabus on desire, shame, and neighborliness
“love your frenemy” by sara protasi
aeon article by a philosophy professor who specializes in emotions. she writes on the tendency to envy our friends and neighbors and the possibilities of emulative envy. if you prefer listening, much of the content is also in “frenemies” from the podcast counterpoint.
“suffering like mel gibson” by zadie smith
a essay on the ubiquitous suffering and envy of others in the time of covid-19. from intimations, a collection written in late spring 2020 about life during the pandemic. (it’s difficult to find a pdf, so the link is a video image of the essay as it’s read aloud)
selections from a lover’s discourse: fragments by roland barthes
six fragments from barthes’ a lover’s discourse that relate to desire and envy in the context of love: “atopos,” “tutti systemati,” “connivance,” “we are our own demons,” “the orange,” and “jealousy.”
envy by joseph epstein
short, broad-strokes book on envy commissioned for a series on the seven deadly sins. collects some writing on envy from philosophy and fiction with added observations, anecdotes, and musings about envy’s social roles.
“envy” by sianne ngai (p. 137)
a chapter of ngai’s book ugly feelings, which explores aversive emotions through literary theory. she describes envy as an emotion that culture has feminized and investigates the impact of this feminization with an analysis of single white female (1992). see also ngai’s “competitiveness from sula to tyra”. (“invidia’s snake” by elisabeth ladenson in the same journal on envy is another pretty good literary essay on proust that has a feminist critique of the epstein book above)
“my enemy” by joanna klink
poem by american poet joanna klink from her collection raptus.
love and saint augustine by hannah arendt
political theorist hannah arendt’s dissertation, where she writes about neighborly love in saint augustine’s confessions. topics include craving and desire; love of self, god, and neighbor; covetousness; and what it means to love thy neighbor as thyself.
on love and envy: 1. “love your frenemy” by sara protasi, 2. women’s studies quarterly editor’s note by cindi katz and nancy k. miller, 3. “varieties of envy” by sara protasi 4. a lover’s discourse by roland barthes
Baptismal shells, 17th-18th century, private collection.
when helen calls herself and paris οἷσιν ἐπὶ Ζεὺς θῆκε κακὸν μόρον, ὡς καὶ ὀπίσσω ἀνθρώποισι πελώμεθ᾽ ἀοίδιμοι ἐσσομένοισι “those on whom zeus laid a dreadful fate, that we should be a subject of song even for men yet to come” (il. 6.357-358) and when achilles reconciles with agamemnon and says αὐτὰρ Ἀχαιοὺς δηρὸν ἐμῆς καὶ σῆς ἔριδος μνήσεσθαι ὀΐω “but i think the achaeans will remember all too long the quarrel between you and me” (il. 19.63-64)… the prescience and the resentment! they know this iliad will be sung about them for generations upon generations and they are bitter about having to be part of it!
{Quotes: lilyrainpoety ( insta)/ Albert Camus, The Fall/fausto melotti l'uomo costant (1936) /Gemma troy/ainslie hogarth motherthing/‘what i could never confess without some bravado’, emily palermo/ Richard siken/mohmmad darwish//painting:holy Warburton//photos: pinterest}
