Emma
KatyslanyJeanette Winterson answers the question How do we fall in love?
in Big Questions from Little People & Simple Answers from Great Minds,
You don’t fall in love like you fall in a hole. You fall like falling through space. It’s like you jump off your own private planet to visit someone else’s planet. And when you get there it all looks different: the flowers, the animals, the colours people wear. It is a big surprise falling in love because you thought you had everything just right on your own planet, and that was true, in a way, but then somebody signalled to you across space and the only way you could visit was to take a giant jump. Away you go, falling into someone else’s orbit and after a while you might decide to pull your two planets together and call it home. And you can bring your dog. Or your cat. Your goldfish, hamster, collection of stones, all your odd socks. (The ones you lost, including the holes, are on the new planet you found.)
And you can bring your friends to visit. And read your favourite stories to each other. And the falling was really the big jump that you had to make to be with someone you don’t want to be without. That’s it.
PS You have to be brave.
explaining how we fall in love to children
eye fishes
“The clear liquid in our eyes is seawater and therefore there are fish in our eyes, seawater being the natural medium of fish. Since blue and green are the colours of the richest seawater, blue and green eyes are the fishiest. Dark eyes are somewhat less fecund and albino eyes are nearly fishless, sadly so. But the quantity of fish in an eye means nothing. A single tigerfish can be as beautiful, as powerful, as an entire school of seafaring tuna. That science has never observed ocular fish does nothing to refute my theory; on the contrary, it emphasizes the key hypothesis, which is: love is the food of eye fish and only love will bring them out. So to look closely into someone’s eyes with cold, empirical interest is like the rude tap-tap of a finder on an aquarium, which only makes the fish flee. In a similar vein, when I took to looking at myself closely in mirrors during the turmoil of adolescence, the fact that I saw nothing in my eyes, not even the smallest guppy or tadpole, said something about my unhappiness and lack of faith in myself at the time.
…I no longer believe in eye fish in fact, but still do in metaphor. In the passion of an embrace, when breath, the wind, is at its loudest and skin at its saltiest, I still nearly think that I could stop things and hear, feel, the rolling of the sea. I am still nearly convinced that, when my love and I kiss, we will be blessed with the sight of angelfish and sea-horses rising to the surface of our eyes, these fish being the surest proof of our love. In spite of everything, I sill profoundly believe that love is something oceanic.”
― Yann Martel, Self
like light and cloudshadows
“How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again.
Gahhhh!
“You are beautiful like demolition. Just the thought of you draws my knuckles white. I don’t need a god. I have you and your beautiful mouth, your hands holding onto me, the nails leaving unfelt wounds, your hot breath on my neck. The taste of your saliva. The darkness is ours. The nights belong to us. Everything we do is secret. Nothing we do will ever be understood; we will be feared and kept well away from. It will be the stuff of legend, endless discussion and limitless inspiration for the brave of heart. It’s you and me in this room, on this floor. Beyond life, beyond morality. We are gleaming animals painted in moonlit sweat glow. Our eyes turn to jewels and everything we do is an example of spontaneous perfection. I have been waiting all my life to be with you. My heart slams against my ribs when I think of the slaughtered nights I spent all over the world waiting to feel your touch. The time I annihilated while I waited like a man doing a life sentence. Now you’re here and everything we touch explodes, bursts into bloom or burns to ash. History atomizes and negates itself with our every shared breath. I need you like life needs life. I want you bad like a natural disaster. You are all I see. You are the only one I want to know.” ~Henry Rollins
But one kiss levitates above all the others. The intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss. The I’ll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when I’m dead, I’ll swim through the Earth, like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.
words ~Jeffrey McDaniel
And silence drops from out of the night into this city, the briefest of silences, like a falter between heartbeats, like a darkness between blinks.
IF NOBODY SPEAKS OF REMARKABLE THINGS
Secretly, there is always this moment, an unexpected pause, a hesitation as one day is left behind and a new one begins.
We are in that moment now, there is silence and the whole city is still.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
Leslie Ann O’Dell
doors and cages
The way out of the room is not through the door, because then you just go into another room, which leads into another room, which leads into a bigger room, and you’re still inside your cage man. That’s not the way out. The way out is to be willing, to give it all up, and love every bit of it as being perfect.
Charles Manson
very vital.
“If you don’t feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself,
of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn’t
very vital.”
John Irving photo. Ryan McGinley
you are……
“You are my Marilyn. You are my lake full of fishes. You are my sky set, my ‘Hollywood in Miniature,’ my pink Cadillac, my highway, my martini, the stage for my heart to rock and roll on, the screen where my movies light up.”
― Francesca Lia Block, Weetzie Bat
Dear Jack
Happy Birthday
“When I die I’ll be a shroud swimming in the Parade on the River, with skinny white arms and Lotus-Eyes, and that will be that, at night.”
“It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds.
But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all.
It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect.”
Ohno Says
Today we learn how to stand walk run twist.
The body doesn’t exist until we create it. What will we create with our bodies?
Before we begin everyone rolls around on the floor stretchy stretchy, purple crushed velvet, bare toes and piled hair.
Then we pray with a rose listening to operatic Amazing Grace.
I think of you and have tears.
He says, You have everything you need in your body, always remember within you there is life and death, dance like you are dead, dance like you are in the womb. In between both you are alive.
He says learn emptiness. Without Emptiness we can never be peaceful.
We learn how to make friends with our space, to use it as a canvas, when you look at space it will be happy to be seen as something beautiful.
A dancer’s job is to make space beautiful.
Butoh dancer’s have eyes everywhere, but the most important is on their back.
Create your own back expression, create your own attractive back.
We move through the space, making friends with the space, move slowly , move with intention, and emotion.
He gives us tiny candies and raw silk.
My body is happy, it stretches and opens and I stand on one leg stretched out like a bird thing. I listen to my bones and my organs. And I am happy. Happy and so inspired.
Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.
for your soul project, K.
Henry’s Miller’s Commandments
COMMANDMENTS
1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to ‘Black Spring.’
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
Under a part titled Daily Program, his routine also featured the following wonderful blueprint for productivity, inspiration, and mental health:
MORNINGS:
If groggy, type notes and allocate, as stimulus.
If in fine fettle, write.
AFTERNOONS:
Work of section in hand, following plan of section scrupulously. No intrusions, no diversions. Write to finish one section at a time, for good and all.
EVENINGS:
See friends. Read in cafés.
Explore unfamiliar sections — on foot if wet, on bicycle if dry.
Write, if in mood, but only on Minor program.
Paint if empty or tired.
Make Notes. Make Charts, Plans. Make corrections of MS.
Note: Allow sufficient time during daylight to make an occasional visit to museums or an occasional sketch or an occasional bike ride. Sketch in cafés and trains and streets. Cut the movies! Library for references once a week.
Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us
Mike Brodie, The Polaroid Kidd
and Neruda..
because you will never again be able to keep it quiet
“Why do we have to listen to our hearts?” the boy asked, when they had made camp that day.
“Because, wherever your heart is, that is where you’ll find your treasure.”
“But my heart is agitated,” the boy said. “It has its dreams, it gets emotional, and it’s become passionate over a woman of the desert. It asks things of me, and it keeps me from sleeping many nights, when I’m thinking about her.”
“Well, that’s good. Your heart is alive. Keep listening to what it has to say.”
“My heart is a traitor,” the boy said to the alchemist, when they had paused to rest the horses. “It doesn’t want me to go on.”
“That makes sense. Naturally it’s afraid that, in pursuing your dream, you might lose everything you’ve won.”
“Well, then, why should I listen to my heart?”
“Because you will never again be able to keep it quiet. ”
“You mean I should listen, even if it’s treasonous?”
“Treason is a blow that comes unexpectedly. If you know your heart well, it will never be able to do that to you. Because you’ll know its dreams and wishes, and will know how to deal with them.”
“My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.
“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”
“On bad days I talk to Death constantly, not about suicide because honestly that’s not dramatic enough. Most of us love the stage and suicide is definitely your last performance and being addicted to the stage, suicide was never an option – plus people get to look you over and stare at your fatty bits and you can’t cross your legs to give that flattering thigh angle and that’s depressing. So we talk. She says things no one else seems to come up with, like let’s have a hotdog and then it’s like nothing’s impossible.
She told me once there is a part of her in everyone, though Neil believes I’m more Delirium than Tori, and Death taught me to accept that, you know, wear your butterflies with pride. And when I do accept that, I know Death is somewhere inside of me. She was the kind of girl all the girls wanted to be, I believe, because of her acceptance of “what is.” She keeps reminding me there is change in the “what is” but change cannot be made till you accept the “what is.”
― Tori
wishes
I still wish on stars, sometimes.
When one is not enough I wish on constellations;
(I wish on entire galaxies.)
You can have my wish tonight. I’ll wish it for you.
I wish you passion that slips in through your skin and wakes you, before you’re ready.
I wish you hope that surrounds you and tucks you in at night.
I wish you quiet when you don’t seek it, and noisy when you need it. I wish you a song that slides inside your hips and won’t be still. I wish you a laugh that throws your head back and refuses to be contained.
I wish you your eight-year-old smile, escaping, in the middle of your important, grown-up day.
(I saw it once peeking out, before you put it away. I know it’s in there.)
I wish you wistful wanting that goes unfulfilled…for awhile.
I wish all your jagged edges washed smooth by tears that come from laughing too hard and too long; from beauty that makes them spill out without your permission.
I wish you forgetting. I wish the ink of your old hurts faded, weathered by the sun, until you can’t read them anymore.
I wish you a dream that sinks its teeth into you and won’t let go. That interrupts your plans. That keeps you up at night.
I wish you a heart that aches from stretching in undiscovered places.
I wish you more, and again more, and yes still more: love.
Kate Bartolotta
on kindness
“so it is not that real kindness requires people to be selfless, it is rather that real kindness changes people in the doing of it, often in unpredictable ways. real kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences. it is a risk precisely because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others, in a way that so-called self-interest never can. (the notion of self-interest implies that we always know what we want, by knowing what the self is and what its interests are. it forecloses discovery.) kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them.”
—adam phillips and barbara taylor, on kindness
“A photograph is neither taken nor seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.”
– Henri Cartier-Bresson
A poet is someone
Who can pour Light into a cup
and raise it to nourish your
beautiful parched holy mouth
–Hafiz
“I used to think when I was younger and writing that each idea had a certain shape and when I started to study Greek and I found the word morphe it was for me just the right word for that, unlike the word shape in English which falls a bit short morphe in greek means the the sort of plastic contours that an idea has inside your all your senses when you grasp it the first moment and it always seemed to me that a work should play out that same contour in its form. So I can’t start writing something down til I get a sense of that, that morphe. And then it unfolds, I wouldn’t say naturally, but it unfolds gropingly by keeping only to the contours of that form whatever it is.” — Anne Carson
Last night the moon came
dropping her clothes in the street.
I took it as a sign to start dancing,
falling upwards into the bowl
of sky.
The bowl shatters.
Everywhere is falling everywhere;
nothing else
to do. Here’s the new rule:
Shatter the wineglass and fall
into the glassblowers’ breath.
~Rumi
Real love is free of possession: it is a pure exchange with the universe and it’s elements.
Love is free of control: love is the essence of the universe, the real fuel for creation. Love is free of fears, love is free of the future, free of power, love is a bridge of light, a shamanic exchange.
Love is becoming one with the universe.
~dalceggio
I want a life that sizzles and pops and makes me laugh out loud.
And I don’t want to get to the end, or to tomorrow, even,
and realize that my life is a collection of meetings and pop cans
and errands and receipts and dirty dishes. I want to eat cold tangerines,
and sing out loud in the car with the windows open, and wear pink shoes,
and stay up all night laughing, and paint my walls the exact color
of the sky right now. I want to sleep hard on clean white sheets,
and throw parties, and eat ripe tomatoes, and read books so
good they make me jump up and down.
Shauna Niequist
the uses of sorrow
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
-Mary Oliver
I will sing you as no one ever has…
FROM THE BOOK OF HOURS
I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish formay for once spring clear
without my contriving.If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.-Rilke
“The human body has been spiraled from the vortical tendency of living water, an extension of the primordial ocean, appearing separate but maintaining constant resonance. We are in perpetual resonance with all fluid systems everywhere in the universe, functioning as an undivided whole. We discover ourselves as a continuum of a living process that began billions of years ago and extends to this day.”
– Emilie Conrad
“it’s like mentioning the obvious but in a different tone of voice.”
from tiny vices
quote by Ceal Floyer
“One needs art. Art is an inimitable and precious commodity, a refreshing and reinvigorating elixir, restoring your soul to its natural and ideal equilibrium” (Baudelaire)
Dalceggio
The formula of the movement is to never stop.
My art is an imaginary propaganda for an unknown kingdom, a parallel universe outside reality…I paint Labyrinths of dreams and visions. I rewrite myths and legends. I capture their essence to transmit an invisible but tactile knowledge. I am a Descendant of the Avant-garde and cobra movements: art without limits, everywhere at every moment. Expression of the irrational. A fragile balance between excess and purity: art as a way of life, constant ritual. Only in chaos can really exist freedom.
“The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.
It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down – sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray.
At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing.
But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward.”
— Terence McKenna
Dancing with Lucifer
That’s really about having a little tango, a little dance, with Lucifer. The idea that Dark is not a scary thing if you go in there understanding there is a purity in Darkness. There’s also a lot of distortion in Darkness. It’s a choice where you want to go, and I wanted to get to the truth, not to the drama and to keeping me from the truth.
~Tori Amos
Air and light and time and space
By Charles Bukowski
“-you know, I’ve either had a family, a job, something
has always been in the
way
but now
I’ve sold my house, I’ve found this
place, a large studio, you should see the space and
the light.
For the first time in my life I’m going to have a place and the time to
create.”
No baby, if you’re going to create
you’re going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children
while you’re on
welfare,
you’re going to create with part of your mind and your
body blown
away,
you’re going to create blind
crippled
demented,
you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your
back while
the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment,
flood and fire.
Baby, air and light and time and space
have nothing to do with it
and don’t create anything
except maybe a longer life to find
new excuses
for.”
*Sometimes I need to hear these things again and again
Salastia 