the mystery of just being alive

Night is an element of love; like fog. It liberates space, lets freshness cross it. Its magic elevates the body, brings to the surface the mystery of just being alive, being. With or without stars and galaxies, the sky becomes a private territory — the imagination’s own scope. These are moments when one reaches all there is between the moon and oneself.

Etel Adnan – Etel Adnan: on Love and the Cost We Are Not Willing to Pay Today

the flow of time

There is no remedy for time. Or, at least, we do not know what it is. But we must trust in the flow of time, we must live. […] We are time and cannot escape its dominion. We can transfigure it but not deny it or destroy it. This is what the great artists, poets, philosophers, scientists, and certain men of action have done. Love, too, is an answer: because it is time and made of time, love is at once consciousness of death and an attempt to make of the instant an eternity. All loves are ill-starred, because all are made of time, all are the fragile bond between two temporal creatures who know they are going to die. In all loves, even the most tragic, there is an instant of happiness that it is no exaggeration to call superhuman: it is a victory over time, a glimpse of the other side, of the there that is a here, where nothing changes and everything that is, truly is.

Octavio Paz – The Double Flame: Essays on Love and Eroticism

manipulating symbols

Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images to achieve changes in consciousness    —     Alan Moore

Occult flowers

I have put my soul and trust in flowers. Occult flowers, flowers of premonition.

Paul Valéry – The Cemetery, trans. Hilary Corke

dance naked in a thunderstorm

A woman may crave to be near water, or be belly down, her face in the earth, smelling the wild smell. She might have to drive into the wind. She may have to plant something, pull things out of the ground or put them into the ground. She may have to knead and bake, rapt in dough up to her elbows. She may have to trek into the hills, leaping from rock to rock trying out her voice against the mountain. She may need hours of starry nights where the stars are like face powder spilt on a black marble floor. She may feel she will die if she doesn’t dance naked in a thunderstorm, sit in perfect silence, return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon-stained.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes – Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype

Everything we think we know about “horny” is wrong

“Horny” seems so simple. Unlike the onomatopoeia of “bang,” “sizzle,” or “clap,” words that sound like themselves, “horny” is a word that feels like itself. Horny is satisfying, even fulsome in its fleshiness; everything about the word embodies a deep-seated, itchy, essentially unslakable bodily keening for sex.

We know horny. We’ve used it to describe the state of our own bodies and those of others. “You make me so horny,” we might have told someone, and when we said it, we meant it as a compliment. “I’m so horny,” we might have complained, and when we said it, our auditors knew exactly what we were feeling, for they have felt horny too. We grew up with horny. If we search our memories, we might be able to recollect the first time we felt that not-unpleasurable sensation of horniness, that novel genital hue and cry, that new knot tightening in our prepubescent bathing suit areas. We have woken up horny and we have gone to bed horny; it’s a word we know with our mouths, our nipples, and our junk. We have an appetite for sex because we are horny.

We think we know horny upside-down and inside-out, but we don’t. Flay the flesh off “horny,” and you quickly discover we don’t know dick. Everything we think we know about “horny” is wrong, and I’m going show you why. I’m going take you by the hand and lead you down a “horny” rabbit hole studded with desperate pricks, plagued with jilted husbands, strewn with animal parts, slicked with metaphysical ejaculate, and loaded with linguists who can’t quite wrap their gray matter around slang’s favourite word for lust.

Chelsea G. Summers – A History of Horny

Magic

Some of us, who find magic in things, in stones and words, in grass and leaves, long ago realized that it is unimportant where the leaves got their power, only that they have it.

Catherynne M. Valente – The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden

Perpetual State of Transformation

In Nature, nothing Remains Constant. Everything is in a Perpetual State of Transformation, Motion and Change    –   David Bohm

Closing Time

I loved you for your beauty
But that doesn’t make a fool of me:
You were in it for your beauty too
And I loved you for your body
There’s a voice that sounds like God to me

And I lift my glass to the awful truth
Which you can’t reveal to the ears of youth
Except to say it isn’t worth a dime
It’s Closing Time

Leonard Cohen

The God teaches man to disregard human laws

Shivaism has always opposed the anthropocentrity of urban society. Its western form, Dionysism, similarly represents the stage where man in is communion with savage life, with the beasts of the mountain and forest. Dionysus, like Shiva, is a god of vegetation, of trees and of the vine. He’s also an animal god, a bull god. The god teaches man to disregard human laws in order to rediscover divine laws. His cult which unleashes the powers of soul and body, has encountered a lively resistance from city religions, which have always considered it antisocial. Shiva, like Dionysus, is represented by city religions as the protector of those who do not belong to conventional society and thus symbolizes everything which is chaotic, dangerous and unexpected, everything which escapes human reason and which can only be attributed to the unforeseeable action of the gods.

Alain  Daniélou – Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The traditions of Shiva and Dionysus

House Of The Rising Sun

There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
And it's been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God, I know I'm one

[…]

Oh, mother, tell your children
Not to do what I have done
Spend your lives in sin and misery
In the House of the Rising Sun

Alan Price
[variation of a folk classic by Clarence “Tom” Ashley  - Ashley said he had learned it from his grandfather, Enoch Ashley]

never touched after dark…

The old earth Gods of Prussia were believed to live under the elder tree and if offerings were made to it, little men would come, bringing grain and doing housework. If one stood under the elder tree on Midsummer’s Eve, the Faerie king and his fellow faeries could be seen riding by. This mysterious tree was never touched after dark in the Fens in England. In Denmark, elder trees were believed to move around at night and could be found peering into windows of those sleeping. It was also said that faeries in the form of ancestors lived in the tree. If a cradle was made of elder wood, the baby sleeping in it would be either stolen by faeries or the Elder Mother. Or the baby would be pinched blacked and blue by the faeries. Elder was a tree associated with witchcraft from early times, from around 900 AD or before. In Ireland instead of an ash broomstick, witches rode on broomsticks made from elder wood. Country folks would sometimes refer to it as ‘witch wood’. A name for the berries was ‘Holda’s Berries’, which refers to the trees connection with Mother Holda or Hulda, an ancient winter death spirit from old Germanic culture.

Corinne Boyer – Under the Witching Tree: A Folk Grimoire of Tree Lore and Practicum

With the consciousness that they are being hunted by women who would take sexual delight in dismembering them…

To clarify the dilemma women have about sexual enthusiasm for men, it is helpful to contrast it with men’s situation. It is unlikely in the extreme that men will have experienced actual sexual violence from women or its threat. Men do not live in cultures where the degradation and brutalisation of men at the hands of women is the stuff of pornography, entertainment and advertising. Men do not live with the consciousness that they are being hunted by women who would take sexual delight in dismembering them simply on account of their gender. They do not live in a society in which their degradation through sex is the dominant theme of the culture. They do not have to approach women sexually in fear or with distressing images or associations with their own oppression. The images they are likely to carry with them are those of women degraded and brutalised by men. In fact they are likely to have practised sexual arousal with such images, extensively, through pornography and fantasy. It is not surprising, then, that sexologists have identified women’s ‘inhibition’ as the main sexual problem of this century. They have identified as healthy sexual feelings those which the male ruling class experiences and have chosen to avoid recognising the political reasons why women might feel differently.

Sheila Jeffreys – Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

Kittens one day…

That’s the trouble with living things. Don’t last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.

Neil Gaiman – The Ocean at the End of the Lane

thinkers…

Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare    —    Henry David Thoreau

feeling uneasy and afraid

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

Michael Chabon – Maps and Legends

The bicycle

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

Iris Murdoch – The Red and the Green

Splendid thirst of the love Goddess…

Aphrodite’s thirst was never quenched; it was cruel and dreamy. It was certainly the most splendid kind of thirst.

Arthur Rimbaud – Silence and Sacrifice

There was a raw cruelty to their world

I miss the cosmic energy of ancient Greece. They loved their gods to whom everything was given save the supreme power. Free, none of them were in the absolute sense, only Zeus was, though his arbitrariness was often looked at with a critical eye. Prometheus was chained because he rebelled, and lo was condemned to suffer an opposite but equally radical punishment, to turn and turn and never rest. There was a raw cruelty to their world, but I miss them, just the same.

Etel Adnan – Shifting the Silence

Offering

Relax, you said. Breathe.
I relaxed. Counted the clock with hymn:
no weapons
formed against me
shall prosper

You flowered the room with my lungs, flung
me into the couch, to the walls, against
the fireplace. “I own you.”
You made me hear it — own —
with the knuckles’ belted cry.
It roiled from your lips
as panic spilled moths from — forget it.

This was your love: if not the body,
then the blood. If not the blood, pray
alone in the cold basement

—	let me start over. When finished
I absorbed the remains. Held between
organs.        You left not telling
tomorrow or how to mend the brown skin once torn.

Luther Hughes

seize the moment…

We live in times of fear and uncertainty, boys and girls. So think about those closest to you right now, seize the moment and don’t waste time on fear. Let the future look after itself and make love your priority…

Witches plunge blindly into the abyss

Witches, like saints, are solitary stars that shine with a light of their own; they depend on nothing and no one, which is why they have no fear and plunge blindly into the abyss with the assurance that instead of crashing to earth, they will fly back out. They can change into birds and see the world from above, or worms to see it from within, they can inhabit other dimensions and travel to other galaxies, they are navigators on an infinite ocean of consciousness and cognition.

Isabel Allende – Paula

Out you slid, cabled and wet…

I looked and saw, collared in my own dark fur, your face, blurry with vernix and strange, like a drawing by the Master pen and ink over wet chalk and pricked for transfer. Out you slid, cabled and wet, delivered, time of birth given; yet what I keep is that first look at your pause half-born, sheathed from the neck down, crowned in unfamiliar regions of light and air, your lungs beginning to draw as you verged on our world and waited, prescient, rare.

Fiona Benson – Childbed

their fate was commonly the same…

Such was the unhappy condition of the Roman emperors, that, whatever might be their conduct, their fate was commonly the same. A life of pleasure or virtue, of severity or mildness, of indolence or glory, alike lead to an untimely grave; and almost every reign is closed by the same disgusting repetition of treason and murder.

Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

the rhythms of their bodies together

When he is inside her, Irish words float up of their own accord. She utters things she has not thought of for so long, language inspired by the rhythms of their bodies together. Urgent and patient, by turns.

Leim an bhradain, the salmon’s leap, a phrase from a poem. O’a mhaighdean rocheansa, the beginning of a prayer.

As she moves toward rapture she remembers a canticle, cleitearnach sciathan, the flutter of wings, the words coming quick on her breath. She repeats them, each sound singeing the air.

Regina McBride – The Land of Women

always writing in white heat…

Henry’s recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making love to a whore, or he may remember his very first love while walking the streets, traveling to see a friend; and life does not stop while he remembers. Analysis in movement. No static vivisection. Henry’s daily and continuous flow of life, his sexual activity, his talks with everyone, his café life, his conversations with people in the street, which I once considered an interruption to writing, I now believe to be a quality which distinguishes him from other writers. He never writes in cold blood: he is always writing in white heat.

It is what I do with the journal, carrying it everywhere, writing on café tables while waiting for a friend, on the train, on the bus, in waiting rooms at the station, while my hair is washed, at the Sorbonne when the lectures get tedious, on journeys, trips, almost while people are talking. It is while cooking, gardening, walking, or love-making that I remember my childhood, and not while reading Freud’s ‘Preface to a Little Girl’s Journal.’

Anaïs Nin – The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

Mass rape

How many rapes occurred inside the walls of the main camp of Ravensbrück is hard to put a figure to: so many of the victims — already, as Ilse Heinrich said, half dead — did not survive long enough after the war to talk about it.

While many older Soviet women were reluctant to talk of the rape, younger survivors feel less restraint today. Nadia Vasilyeva was one of the Red Army nurses who were cornered by the Germans on the cliffs of the Crimea. Three years later in Neustrelitz, northwest of Ravensbrück, she and scores of other Red Army women were cornered again, this time by their own Soviet liberators intent on mass rape. Other women make no excuses for the Soviet rapists. ‘They were demanding payment for liberation,’ said Ilena Barsukova. ‘The Germans never raped the prisoners because we were Russian swine, but our own soldiers raped us. We were disgusted that they behaved like this. Stalin had said that no soldiers should be taken prisoner, so they felt they could treat us like dirt.’

Like the Russians, Polish survivors were also reluctant for many years to talk of Red Army rape. ‘We were terrified by our Russian liberators,’ said Krystyna Zając. ‘But we could not talk about it later because of the communists who had by then taken over in Poland.’ Nevertheless, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs and French survivors all left accounts of being raped as soon as they reached the Soviet lines. They talked of being ‘hunted down’, ‘captured’ or ‘cornered’ and then raped.

In her memoirs Wanda Wojtasik, one of the rabbits, says it was impossible to encounter a single Russian without being raped. As she, Krysia and their Lublin friends tried to head east towards their home, they were attacked at every turn. Sometimes the approach would begin with romantic overtures from ‘handsome men’, but these approaches soon degenerated into harassment and then rape. Wanda did not say she was raped herself, but describes episodes where soldiers pounced on friends, or attacked them in houses where they sheltered, or dragged women off behind trees, who then reappeared sobbing and screaming. ‘After a while we never accepted lifts and didn’t dare go near any villages, and when we slept someone always stood watch.

Sarah Helm – Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women

A pagan religious festival…

Many folklore customs have their roots planted firmly back in the Dark Ages, when the ancient Celts had divided their year by four major festivals. Beltane or ‘the fire of Bel’, had particular significance to the Celts as it represented the first day of summer and was celebrated with bonfires to welcome in the new season. Still celebrated today, we perhaps know Beltane better as May 1st, or May Day.

Down through the centuries May Day has been associated with fun, revelry and perhaps most important of all, fertility. The Day would be marked with village folk cavorting round the maypole, the selection of the May Queen and the dancing figure of the Jack-in-the-Green at the head of the procession. Jack is thought to be a relic from those enlightened days when our ancient ancestors worshipped trees.

These pagan roots did little to endear these May Day festivities with the either the established Church or State. In the sixteenth century riots followed when May Day celebrations were banned. Fourteen rioters were hanged, and Henry VIII is said to have pardoned a further 400 who had been sentenced to death.

The May Day festivities all but vanished following the English Civil War when Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans took control of the country in 1645. Describing maypole dancing as ‘a heathenish vanity generally abused to superstition and wickedness’, legislation was passed which saw the end of village maypoles throughout the country.

Dancing did not return to the village greens until the restoration of Charles II. ‘The Merry Monarch’ helped ensure the support of his subjects with the erection of a massive 40-metre-high maypole in London’s Strand. This pole signalled the return of the fun times, and remained standing for almost fifty years.

Maypoles can still be seen on the village greens at Welford-on-Avon and at Dunchurch, Warwickshire, both of which stand all year round. Barwick in Yorkshire, claims the largest maypole in England, standing some 86 feet in height.

May Day is still celebrated in many villages with the crowning of the May Queen. The gentlemen of the village may also been found celebrating with Jack-in-the-Green, otherwise found on the signs of pubs across the country called the Green Man.

Ben Johnson – May Day Celebrations

#

Some people believe that the celebrations on May Day began with Beltane and the tree worship of the Druids. Others believe they go back to the spring festivals of ancient Egypt and India. However, May Day as it is celebrated today is more of a European import, believe it or not, from Italy. The people of ancient Rome honoured Flora, the goddess of flowers and springtime, with a festival called Florialia. The goddess was represented by a small statue wreathed in garlands. A procession of singers and dancers carried the statue past a sacred blossom-decked tree. Later, festivals of this kind spread to other lands conquered by the Romans, and of course this included Britain.

As Europe became Christianized, the pagan holidays lost their religious character and either morphed into popular secular celebrations, as with May Day, or were given new Christian interpretations while retaining many traditional pagan features, as with Christmas, Easter, and All Saint’s Day. Beginning in the 20th century, many neopagans began reconstructing the old traditions and celebrating May Day as a pagan religious festival once more….

P

complete chaos…

I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love.

Anna Akhmatova – The Akhmatova Journals, Vol. 1

Offerings in gold and silver

People in exchange for the fulfilment of their wishes could give and actually gave almost anything: money, frankincense, laurel, olive shoots, oak leaves, garlands, songs, branches, chaplets, pictures on which Asclepius was painted as well-doer…or brass rings…, candles…, offerings in gold and silver… Some patients even dedicated their sandals to the god; they had made a long trip in order to visit him, and thus it seemed fitting that they should give him their shoes. Whatever it was, the god received it graciously

 E. J. Edelstein & Edelstein – Asclepius: collection and interpretation of the testimonies (Vol. 2)

blow job

It’s a straightforward act, yet it’s a slippery one. “Milkshake,” “skull-fuck,” “hummer,” or “head” all name it; likewise, you might suck a dick—or you might enjoy getting your cock sucked, or both. Opting for delicacy, you might call it “oral” or “fellatio.” But real talk: if we’re going to name the sexual act of giving pleasure to a penis by mouth, chances are we’re going to call it a “blow job.” In the kingdom of sexual slang, “blow job” reigns supreme; it’s the odd sex term that sits nearly unchallenged on its throne.

However ubiquitous, though, “blow job” is hilariously inapt. An act that rarely involves blowing and only occasional labour, “blow job” sounds like something created by a thirsty Marxist, a guy as alienated from his own pleasure as he is from his work. And as spectacularly as it fails to denote the physicality of the act, “blow job” also fails to capture both the physical act of fellatio and its joy. It’s a weird term, and, just shy of seventy years old, a relatively new one. Yet despite the youth of “blow job,” or perhaps because of it, it’s a potent term. Nothing, not even “cock sucking,” touches “blow job” for consistency and commonality.

Chelsea G. Summers – Sucking the Fun Out of Fellatio

In the depths of my mind

All my life, I’ve felt like I belong somewhere that only exits in the depths of my mind. A place that is impossible for others to discover.

Megan Grant – Solitude & the Sea

Smelling yourself on him…

I have smelled my own honey on his mouth.

Anaïs Nin – The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin 1931-1932

no intention of being stabbed…

It was the ultimate triumph of spin over reality – Octavian, now renamed Augustus, had seen the fate of Julius Caesar (his adoptive father), when he appeared to his contemporaries to be a dictator, almost a king. Augustus had no intention of being stabbed on the steps of any entertainment venue, so he cloaked his power with egalitarian names. He wasn’t a dictator; he didn’t have ideas above his station. He was simply princeps senatus – the chief man of the senate. He was primus inter pares – the first among equals; it would be almost 2,000 years before George Orwell’s pigs recognised the powerful truth behind this idea: some animals really were more equal than others. Augustus wasn’t trying to be king; he had no more power than any elected official might have. He just had the power of all the elected officials rolled into one: he became the first Roman emperor.

Natalie Haynes – The Ancient Guide to Modern Life

childhood incest

In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest.

Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men.

Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviours that couldn’t be denied — because they were simply too obvious — should be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who “seduce” adults into sexual encounters and of women whose “provocative” behaviour causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them.

I wish I could say that these theories have long since lost their influence, but I can’t. A psychologist who is currently one of the most influential professionals nationally in the field of custody disputes writes that women provoke men’s violence by “resisting their control” or by “attempting to leave.” She promotes the Oedipus complex theory, including the claim that girls wish for sexual contact with their fathers. In her writing she makes the observation that young girls are often involved in “mutually seductive” relationships with their violent fathers, and it is on the basis of such “research” that some courts have set their protocols. The Freudian legacy thus remains strong.

Lundy Bancroft – Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

enable the ghosts and fairies to step aside…

All Hallows Eve: People travelling on this night could easily be led astray by the fairies. To counteract this, the late wayfarer should carry a black-handled knife or have a steel needle stuck in his coat collar or sleeve. If by chance he was led astray, he might disguise himself by turning his coat inside-out, on which the fairies would no longer know him and divert their attentions elsewhere.

On this night, anybody throwing out water should call out Seachain! (beware!) or chughaibh an t-uisce! (water towards you!), to enable the ghosts and fairies to step aside and avoid being splashed.

[…] With all this unseen activity precautions had to be taken. In many places, crosses, less elaborate than those for St. Brighid’s Eve, were made and set up […] It was customary, too, on this Eve to weave a cross called a ‘Parshell” […] The ‘Parshell’ was fixed over the dwelling-house doorway on the inside, with the object of warding off ill-luck, sickness, and witchcraft for a twelvemonth. A new one was made on the following All Hallows Eve, and put in place of the old one, which was shifted to another part of the house, or to the cow-stable, the following words being used in removing it: ‘Fonstaren-sheehy’.

Infants and children were protected by sprinkling holy water on them, and by putting iron or a dead ember […] in the cradle […] In some places oatmeal and salt are put on the heads of the children to protect them from harm.

Kevin Danaher – The Year in Ireland

Congratulations…

Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing.

Muriel Spark – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Fairy tales

Fairy tales offer an especially potent mix of tools to refute, repair and rebuild, not just a particular story but how we conceive of story itself. They can be what Anna Reading, in a related context, calls a “restitutional assemblage” for redefining the concept of narrative, anchoring collective memory and effecting inter-generational justice. On the one hand, the poet can assume among the audience a general knowledge of the basic plot-line, themes and characters. On the other hand, that knowledge can swiftly be turned on its head or against itself; the plots are skeletal (their bones easily rearranged), the themes unclothed desiderata, the characters flat screens onto which one can project in many shapes and colours, from front or back.

Above all, the time and place of the fairy tale are indeterminate: east of the sun and west of the moon, under the hill, at the back of the North Wind, in a forest clearing where Baba Yaga’s chicken-legged hut revolves. Fairy tales impose a linear narrative structure upon the timelessness of Faerie. The more literary the tales became the more Aristotelian the narrative, and the more divergent from the lived experience of many singers of tales and their audiences, those upon whom power was exercised, for whom the events of history as recorded in the chancelleries and courts were imposed. “Once upon a time” begs the question of what preceded the beginning and what follows the “happily ever after.” As the scholar Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi (also my mother) put it:

‘As a child, I loved fairy tales. But I was never satisfied with their endings. What, I wondered, did the characters do when “they all lived happily ever after?” I always wanted details to fill in the gaps created in my mind by those familiar, but obscuring, words. Even then, I dimly sensed that most adult women spent their lives in the non-delineated Happily Ever After, rather than the exciting time-space of story.’

Daniel Rabuzzi – On the Fairy Tales School of English-Language Poetry

Our truest, most essential selves

In America, our girlfriends teach us what love, trust, and desire are; they hold our hands as we navigate the Scylla of sex and the Charybdis of culture. With them we are our truest, most essential selves. We don’t have to be pretty, but we heap praise upon one another when we are. We don’t have to be nice, and we forgive each other when we aren’t. With our friends, our guard tumbles like acrobats, falls like leaves, and swirls in glittery, dusty eddies. That face we keep up in front of everyone else — family, lovers, husbands, or children — we let slide. Our friends see the frailties, the insecurities, the unattractive bits that we have to keep hidden from the rest of the world because — and this is the meat of the matter — it’s hard work to be a woman.

Chelsea G. Summers – A Certain Hunger

Eve

I am Eve. The first woman, virginal. Full of strange ways, like a swan in a bathtub. I enter the forest. The reeds bow, the trees come closer to look at me. The beasts listen to me. I speak their language. Not men's.

I'm a crow. They don't like me. I stand proud in my black dress of loneliness. I see everything, I remember everything. The faces, the women's hands, the men's voices. No one sees me.

I'm Penelope. I'm waiting for a man. Only one. I am a prisoner of love, tireless, I am a never-ending cycle, a snake biting its own tail, a woman chained to the arms of the one she loves.

I'm a whore in a brothel. I'm sex and hands. I chant: "Vice for virtue!" I'm dancing like a fire. I look in their eyes for what was never in the Blind Eye.

I am a child. I cry a lot. I'm playing at obeying you. I'm temperamental. I don't know what I want. Between my sheets, I invent worlds filled with chimeras and talking animals.

I'm Diane. I'm a warrior. I'm not afraid.

I'm not a woman, I'm a pond of tears. A shapeless thing hidden in a closet. The wind picks up. A mimosa. A shadow.

I am Redon's Closed Eyes. Shrouded in mystery. Blurred.

I'm mean. Selfish. Violent.

I'm tender. Gentle. Caressing.

One stone.

A will-o'-the-wisp.

And again. And again. And again.

Anon

Dreams…

Sometimes dreams move with such vivid symbolic intensity, with such glorious surprise and symmetry, they read like poems.

Dana Levin – Some Notes on Poetry: Divination, reverie, dream; The American Poetry Review (vol. 52 no. 2  March/April 2023)

we aren’t individuals

Implicit within that arrangement is the assumption that “Me” and “Nature” are discrete entities. But the emerging reality is immensely more complicated. “Me” is not some inalienable being that has to remind himself to plant a tulip once in a while before getting back to the real business of watching Alex Trebek. And “Nature” is not some elfin, rejuvenating spa that provides “Me” with a daily dose of fresh oxygen, mental health, and organic broccoli.

Increasingly, the science of microbiology is showing that we carry “Nature” with us everywhere we go. From the moment we emerge from our mothers, we are colonized, seized, and occupied by other entities. We are not, it turns out, walking cleanrooms that ought to be shuttled into Nature for forty-five minutes, then bustled inside and bathed in hand sanitizer.

In truth, no matter how far “Inside” we get, the “Outside” is always with us.

Witness: your skin harbours whole swarming civilizations. Your lips are a zoo teeming with well-fed creatures. In your mouth lives a microbiome so dense — fusospirochetes, Porphyromonas gingivalis, Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans — that if you decided to name one organism every second (You’re Barbara, You’re Bob, You’re Brenda), you’d likely need fifty lifetimes to name them all.

When you climb out of bed in the morning, ten times more bacterial cells climb out of bed than do human cells. In your gut, coalitions of hundreds of different species compete for food in a dark, simmering biome alive with as many as 100 trillion microbes. Without them, you die. To even write that you are “you” and the microbes are “them” is, perhaps, a failure of pronouns.

Ultimately, we aren’t individuals; we are big permeable societies. In the ten minutes it takes to read this essay, for example, you’ll inhale about 8 billion dust particles — calcite, gypsum, flame retardant from your carpet, spores from nearby woods. Your next breath might contain slag wool, mica, viruses, pollen, and fragments of an aphid who lived and died three hundred miles away.

Even the brain you use to process these sentences, an organ we have long imagined as a perfectly sterile entity operating above the microbial fray, might be home to beings that aren’t strictly “you.” A 2013 study in Canada found proteobacteria and viruses inside multiple human brains, suggesting that even our minds might be occupied by microbial populations of great richness.

Anthony Doerr – The New You

Sex is a portal…

One thing is certain: sex is a powerful gateway. Sex is a portal, an opportunity to meet who we are on a spiritual level. Sex is our highway to different levels of consciousness. Sex is a way to connect to our deepest being and to the deepest part of each other. Sex is a way to journey back into love when we get lost. Sex has the capacity to take us beyond where we are, to heal us on so many levels. It is also a way to reclaim unconscious parts of ourselves. Sex is a healing balm of bliss and pleasure!

Ellie Wilde – Empowerment, Healing and Art with Ellie Wilde

being captured by the incredible

Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream — making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams […] No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence — that which makes its truth, its meaning — its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream — alone…

Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness

The Best Oral Sex of Her Life

You must start off in a teasing manner in the beginning. A slight lick of the tongue going up and down is good, licking the thighs at first and then slowly starting to move down, gaining intensity and speed.

Erin Stevens – The Best Oral Sex of Her Life: 7 Easy Steps

It all goes back to the dichotomy of animals as “wild” and humans as “civilized”…

While restraint is apparent to anyone in daily contact with animals, Western thought hardly recognizes the ability. Traditionally, animals are depicted as slaves of their emotions. It all goes back to the dichotomy of animals as “wild” and humans as “civilized”. Being wild implies being undisciplined, crazy even, without holding back. Being civilized, in contrast, refers to exercising the well-mannered restraint that humans are capable of under favourable circumstances. This dichotomy lurks behind almost every debate about what makes us human, so much so that when humans behave badly, we call them “animals.

Frans de Waal – Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

We don’t believe in the sanctity of life…?

I cannot understand anti-abortion arguments that centre on the sanctity of life. As a species we’ve fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don’t believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain and life-long poverty shows us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we’ve made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.

Caitlin Moran – How to Be a Woman

female desire mustn’t be seen…

The on-screen depiction of oral sex performed on women has consistently earned movies an NC-17 rating – Blue Valentine, Boys Don’t Cry, and Charlie Countryman are a few that come to mind. The same standard has certainly not been applied to on-screen blow jobs. I often think of 2013s Lovelace, a biopic about the star of the 1972 porn film Deep Throat. This was an entire movie dedicated to fellatio, and to extreme sexual violence, and even that was given a mild R. Sure, let the kids watch a porn star get repeatedly raped, but female desire? No, no, no.

Amanda Montell – Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

God-obsessed…

I am myself, ironically, an atheist. And like a certain sort of atheist, my poems are God-obsessed, priest-obsessed. Full of Marys, Christs and nuns.

Sylvia Plath, 21^st November 1962 letter to Michael Carey 

Female, half nude and nailed up

I’ve often thought of a female Christ. David told me there’s one in a church in Montreal. Mostly the world can’t take it. Because of people’s feelings about the delicacy of women and also because of what a meaningless display female suffering simply is. If you belittle us in school, treat us like slaves at home and finally, if you get a woman alone in bed just tell her she’s all wrong, no matter what sex you are… or maybe you just grab one on the street and fuck her real fast– in an alley, or in her own bed. I mean if that’s the way it usually goes for this girl what would be the point in seeing her half nude and nailed up? Where’s the contradiction? could that drive the culture for 2,000 years? No way. Female suffering must be hidden, or nothing can work. It’s a man’s world and a girl on a cross would be like seeing a dead animal in a trap. We like to eat them, or see them stuffed, we even like to wear them, but watch them suffer? Hear them wail? The complaining lines were expunged from Florence Nightingale’s book.

Eileen Myles – Cool for You