After a Death

Seeing that there’s no other way,
I turn his absence into a chair.
I can sit in it,
gaze out through the window.
I can do what I do best
and then go out into the world.
And I can return then with my useless love,
to rest,
because the chair is there.

Roo Borson

Breakfast

hibernating rattlesnakes

If I had my way we’d sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.

William S. Burroughs
Naked Lunch

that mass of pussy fur

My sweet darling … I do miss you darling one and I want to feel your soft cool face coming out of that mass of pussy fur like I did last night.

Rosamund Grosvenor
Letter to Vita Sackville-West, dated c. 1909.

 

[It is amusing to think that when Vita Sackville-West took up residence in Sissinghurst during 1932, her closest friends believed she had started to live a most chaste and celibate life with her homosexual husband and their two sons – when in fact for the next ten years she shared the tower with her lover, who was, of course, also her sister-in-law, Gwen St Levan.

 

But we shouldn’t be surprised by this. On Vita’s wedding day she had two bridesmaids, one of whom, Rosamund,  she was having an affair with at the time. The other, her new husband’s sister, she would have a long affair with 15 years later.

 

After the war, Vita, even in her 60s, could still amaze and seduce otherwise entirely heterosexual married women, perhaps because she seemed, as Virginia Woolf’s husband Leonard described her, ‘an animal at the height of its powers, a beautiful flower in full bloom’.]

a secret code

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there.

Jeanette Winterson
Written on the Body

not into the vagina

“Now, the penis is round, and the anus is round, while the vagina’s opening is long and narrow; clearly then Nature designed the penis to fit into the anus, not into the vagina.”

Ada Palmer
Too Like the Lightning

Language survives everything

English has a strange knack of doing well for itself, however much the old guard booms about threats to purity, the dangers of pollution. English did well out of the Danish and Norman invaders; it will continue to profit from the strange loan-forms and coinages of the mixed populations that — in both England and America — represent the new ethnological order. Whatever form of English ultimately prevails — the British or the American variety — it will still be a great and rich and perpetually growing language, the most catholic medium of communication that the world has ever seen.

Language survives everything — corruption, misuse, ignorance, ineptitude. Linking man to man in the dark, it brought man out of the dark. It is the human glory which antecedes all others. It merits not only our homage but our constant and intelligent study.

Anthony Burgess
Language Made Plain