Bone Awl - Let Blood

Actually, there is only one way of finding satisfaction in the phantoms created by debauchery, and that is to accede to their very unreality. In choosing eroticism, Sade chose the make-believe. It was only in the imaginary that Sade could live with any certitude and without risk of disappointment. He repeated the idea throughout his work. “The pleasure of the senses is always regulated in accordance with the imagination. Man can aspire to felicity only by serving all the whims of his imagination.” It was by means of his imagination that he escaped from space, time, prison, the police, the void of absence, opaque presences, the conflicts of existence, death, life, and all contradictions. It was not murder that fulfilled Sade’s erotic nature: it was literature. 

–Simone de Beauvoir, “Must We Burn Sade?” (Trans. Annette Michelson)

“Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Destruction awaits anyone who, answering to his vocation and fulfilling it, exerts himself within history; only the man who sacrifices every gift and talent escapes: released from his humanity, he may lodge himself in Being. (...) One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.”

The Temptation to Exist, Emil Cioran

“Dans cette nuit opaque, je m’étais rendu ivre de lumière ; ainsi, de nouveau, Lazare n’était devant moi qu’un oiseau de mauvais augure, un oiseau sale et négligeable. Mes yeux ne se perdaient plus dans les étoiles qui luisaient au-dessus de moi réellement, mais dans dans le bleu du ciel de midi. Je les fermais pour me perdre dans ce bleu brillant : de gros insectes noirs en surgissaient comme des trombes en bourdonnant.”

J.G. Ballard: “Memories of the Space Age”

Robert E. Peary

AN INUIT MAN WARMS HIS WIFE'S FEET, 1890.

A Musician with a Bear Mask • Mistřice Carnival, Czech Republic, 1969. Photo by J. Večerka

“The colour is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstacy, the fantasy is death.”

— Susan Sontag. (via wine-loving-vagabond-blog)

The eggs of a spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) in a pool on Pigeon Mountain, Georgia, USA

by Alan Cressler

from inside a cave in the Ozarks in totality

l Joshua Kwekel l Ozark National Forest

« Quelqu'un qui voyage en moi me traverse. Je suis devenue sa maison. » Unica Zürn

Sádrová hlava (Plaster Head), Josef Sudek, 1945

Smultronställe (n.) / Swedish /

Literally “place of wild strawberries” a special place discovered, treasured, and returned to for solace and relaxation; A personal idyll free from stress or sadness.