a poem by michael ondaatje.
You’re lucky I turned it into its own tumblelog, rather than posting it all in one go, it is that long but I really think you should read it because it is worth it and now I am going to ruin my good spam-saving intentions and reblog it anyway
"They feed back exactly what is given to them. Because they do not believe in words… their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from ‘a broken home’. They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words."
- Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Tiffany took a deep breath. This was about words, and she knew about words. ‘Here is a story to believe,’ she said. ‘Once we were blobs in the sea, and then fishes, and then lizards and rats and then monkeys, and hundreds of things in between. This hand was once a fin, this hand once had claws! In my human mouth I have the pointy teeth of a wolf and the chisel teeth of a rabbit and the grinding teeth of a cow! Our blood is as salty as the sea we used to live in! When we’re frightened the hair on our skins stands up, just like it did when we had fur. We are history! Everything we’ve ever been on the way to becoming us, we still are. Would you like the rest of the story?’
Tell us, said the hiver.
‘I’m made up of the memories of my parents and grandparents, all my ancestors. They’re in the way I look, in the colour of my hair. And I’m made up of everyone I’ve ever met who’s changed the way I think. So who is “me”?’
The piece that just told us that story, said the hiver. The piece that’s truly you.
‘Well… yes. But you must have that too. You know you say you’re “us” – who is it saying it? Who is saying you’re not you? You’re not different from us. We’re just much, much better at forgetting. And we know when not to listen to the monkey.’
—Terry Pratchett
I told him I believed I had a handkerchief.
He asked me: ‘Have you anything in your shoes?’
‘My feet,’ I said, gently.
— e.e. cummings
"we drove into the desert. we drove into death: the sun was so white and rare and rich on our bare legs, and it shone on us until the water had gone from our limbs. we were made thin, dry, stone strong but delicately so. we were drowning in sand and freedom and blue; the sky was so wide, so fucking wide and deep and defiantly limitless that i was scared. scared into thinking that we would be immortal and infinite, because how could you not feel that way under that goddamn sky, that blue, that wind in your eyes. i felt timeless. i believed. i believed the moment would never end, that we would be driving in the desert for the rest of our lives; we were revolutionaries, god’s children, on the verge of disappearing. we were young, ageless, saved, fucked, terrified, ecstatic with the possibility of forever. and if the car had broken then, if we had run out of gas, if night had crashed down upon us, i would have opened my arms to the world and slept in the sand and dreamt of soft deadly oceans and had no fear."
- dark cloudy bars, shiny cadillac cars. (source: windsor)
When his father told him about his alarm at having forgotten even the most impressive happenings of his childhood, Aureliano explained this method to him, and Jose Arcadio Buendia put it into practice all through the house and later on imposed it on the whole village. With an inked brush he marked everything with its name: table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, pan. He went to the corral and marked the animals and plants: cow, goat, pig, hen, cassava, caladium, banana. Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realised that the day might come when things would be recognised by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use. Then he was more explicit. The sign that he hung on the neck of a cow was an exemplary proof of the way in which the inhabitants of Macondo were prepared to fight against loss of memory: This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk. Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.
—gabriel garcia marquez
it seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the centre of your being, then you can’t afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. you’ve got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you’ve got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you’re compelled to start all over again. maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship. see, records have helped me to fall in love, no question. I hear something new, with a chord change that melts my guts, and before I know it I’m looking for someone, and before I know it I’ve found her. I fell in love with rosie the simultaneous orgasm woman after I’d fallen in love with a cowboy junkies song; I played it
and played it
and played it,
and it made me dreamy, and I needed someone to dream about, and I found her, and…well, there was trouble.
"In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them."
- Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (via thebronzemedal) (via buyhercandy)
Reblogged from buy her candy.
“Words,” he said, “is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life. So you must simply try to be patient and stop squibbling. As I am telling you before, I know exactly what words I am wanting to say, but somehow or other they is always getting squiffs-quiddled around.”
“That happens to everyone,” Sophie said.
“Not like it happens to me,” the B.F.G. said. “I is speaking the most terrible wigglish.”
“I think you speak beautifully,” Sophie said.
“You do?” cried the B.F.G., suddenly brightening. “You really do?”
“Simply beautifully,” Sophie repeated.
“Well that is the nicest present anyone is ever giving me in my whole life!” cried the B.F.G. “Are you sure you is not twiddling my leg?”
“Of course not,” Sophie said. “I just love the way you talk.”
“How wondercrump!” cried the B.F.G., still beaming. “How whoopsy-splunkers. How absolutely squiffling! I is all of a stutter.”
"although the truth is I am not in love with her, she said, ‘I love you,’ I told her how I felt, this is how I told her: I held her hands out to her sides, pointed her index fingers toward each other and slowly, very slowly, moved them in, the closer they got, the more slowly I moved them, and then, as they were about to touch, as they were only a dictionary page from touching, pressing on opposite sides of the word ‘love,’ I stopped them and held them here."
- jonathon safran foer
