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

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…

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

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

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

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

Magical and mystical training

The whole and sole object of all true magical and mystical training is to become free from every kind of limitation    –    Aleister Crowley

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

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