Tagged: desire
Fucking beauty
Then there is that other element permeates everything; desire.
If you have this, you can fuck up any or all of the above and still succeed in making something beautiful.
TINDERSTICKS The Something Rain out 21 February on Constellation
Neck
Why are the young so beautiful—
a foal or a fledgling sparrow, head
half hidden in a ruff of feathers;
a human infant with the milky,
demanding innocence;
even an adolescent boy, awkwardness
shadowed by grace, in his own
invisible force field of desire?
LINDA PASTAN, from “On Seeing an Old Photograph,” in her new collection Traveling Light. New York: Norton, 2011 p9.
see also: “The Burglary” “Eve on Her Deathbed” “Accidents” “Why Are Your Poems So Dark?”
Photo: KIRBY
Silver
langueur / languor
The Satyr says: I want my desire to be satisfied immediately. If I see a sleeping face, parted lips, an open hand, I want to be able to hurl myself upon them. This Satyr—figure of the immediate—is the very contrary of the Languorous. In languor, I merely wait: “I knew no end to desiring you.” (Desire is everywhere, but in the amorous state it becomes something very special: languor.)
ROLAND BARTHES, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
Photo: Quinnford + Scout
Language is a skin:
I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is “I desire you,” and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure.
(No one wants to speak of love unless it is for someone.)
ROLAND BARTHES, from A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
Photos: Rome is Burning
Aaaaa
Fill
Delicious
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Basically
Here is my horoscope, by Rob Brezsny, for the week of Valentine’s Day 2008:
Scholar Suzanne Juhasz says that Emily Dickinson‘s eroticism “inflects and charges” most of her poems. “Erotic DESIRE—sensuous, nuanced, flagrant, extreme, outlandish, and profound—is her way of interacting with the world.” From an astrological perspective, it would make perfect sense if you experimented with a similar predilection in the coming days, Leo. During the superheated grace period you’ll be enjoying, interesting things are likely to happen to you if you basically just make love to the whole world. The urge to merge shouldn’t just be the icing on the cake. It should be the icing, the cake, the plate it’s on, your eating of the cake, your feeding of the cake to others, and all the stories you tell yourself about your encounter with the cake.
MARK DOTY, The Art of Description: World Into Word. Minneapolis : Graywolf 2010.
Happy Solstice.
Compel
Last vestige of belief
A first indication of glimmering understanding is the desire to die. This life seems unendurable, another unreachable. One no longer feels ashamed of wanting to die; one petitions to be moved from one’s old cell, which one hates, into a new one, which one will come to hate. A last vestige of belief is involved here, too, for during the move might not the prison governor by chance walk down the passage, see the prisoner, and say: “Don’t lock this man up again. He’s coming with me.”
from The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka
Photos: wingedwillie and teen on motorcycle
Surroundings
People often say that I’m curious about too many things at once: botany, astronomy, comparative anatomy. But can you really forbid a man from harbouring a desire to know and embrace everything that surrounds him?
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
Photo: Jont
In the hollow of one’s hand
There are moments that come to me in the shower. Emotions combine in certain alchemical ways and bring upon me a desire to fall to my knees, heart pregnant with celestial fire. I am ready to subjugate myself… prepared to say, “Not my will, but Thine.” But, sadly, I am apostate.
In their graceless state the godless are supposed to be allergic to places of terror and emptiness. Foxholes, Ground Zero, outer space—all locations, I’ve been told, where you won’t find atheists. “Clay is fashioned into vessels,” reads the 11th chapter of the Tao Te Ching (written 2,500 years after Noah’s flood carved out the Grand Canyon), “but it is on their empty hollowness that their use depends.”
PAUL FORD, from Just Like Heaven, The Morning News, January 8, 2010
Artist: BORRIS TORRES, WSC/Monday, oil on canvas, 16” x 20”, 2010
Majestic necessities
There are few emotions about places for which adequate single words exist; we are forced instead to make awkward piles of words to convey what we feel as we watch the light fade on an early-autumn evening, or when we encounter a pool of perfectly still water in a clearing.
But at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a word came to prominence by means of which it became possible to indicate a specific response towards precipices and glaciers, night skies and boulder-strewn deserts. In their presence one was likely to experience, and could count on being understood if one reported that one had felt, a sense of sublime.
Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically introduces viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are… that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.
This is the lesson written into the stones of the desert and the ice fields of the poles. So grandly is it written there that we may come away from such places not crushed but inspired by what lies beyond us, privileged to be subject to such majestic necessities. The sense of awe may even shade into a desire to worship.
ALAIN de BOTTON, The Art Of Travel
New York : Pantheon, 2002.
Making a choice.
The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. The faculties are called into no exercise by doing a thing merely because others do it, no more than by believing a thing only because others believe it. If the grounds of an opinion are not conclusive to the person’s own reason, his reason cannot be strengthened, but is likely to be weakened by his adopting it: and if the inducements to an act are not such as are consentaneous to his own feelings and character (where affection, or the rights of others are not concerned), it is so much done towards rendering his feelings and character inert and torpid, instead of active and energetic.
He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision.
