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It’s not that the past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on the past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. – Only dialectical images are genuine images…and the place where one encounters them is language.

—Walter Benjamin, ‘Awakening’, The Arcades Project tr. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin

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when clarice lispector said: I thought that, in adding up everything I understood, I loved. I didn’t know that, adding up everything you don’t understand is the way to truly love —

and walter benjamin said: the only way to know someone is to love them without hope —

and d.h. lawrence said: there is a beyond in you, in me, which is further than love, beyond the scope, as [some] stars are beyond the scope of vision and also said I deliver myself over to the unknown, in coming to you, I am without reserves or defences, stripped entirely, into the unknown —

and when rilke said that love is this: two solitudes that protect and touch and greet each other—

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The tender, unearthly magic of the Spring has crept into my heart. I hear the song of birds, I smell new odors, see new colorings, and the softness of the air melts me. And I feel. Oh, God, how deeply I feel, and grieve and rejoice. More than ever in my life before, more than all I felt during childhood, and that was a great deal, more than all I felt during girlhood, which I thought nothing could surpass; I stand on the threshold of the world itself, and a new life has taken hold of me.

Anaïs Nin, from a diary entry dated 27 March 1922 featured in The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1920-23

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rentmeatimemachine · 1 month

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after before (2017) dir. athina rachel tsangari

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Emily Dickinson, from The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson

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some of my favorite poems and excerpts by mahmoud darwish lately 🤍

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rentmeatimemachine · 1 month

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Emily Dickinson, from The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson

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Part of me will always be stuck in that apartment

Amanda Grace//Louise Glück//Paisley Rekdal//Taylor Swift//unknown source//Amanda Grace//Susan Sontag//Emilie Autumn

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solitary confinement; a web-weaving

“The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities."

— Gilles Deleuze, from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“We’re always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, from Crime and Punishment

“A name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world. Losing it meant losing my ties to all those things too.”

— Laila Lalami, from The Moor’s Account

“feeling abandoned inside the darkest room of myself, knowing that all the openings are open but none are mine …”

— Subeir Hammad, from The Neverfield

“Everyone talks about alienation. But the worst alienation is not to be dispossessed by the other but to be dispossessed of the other, that is to say to have to produce the other in his absence, and thus to be continuously referred back to oneself and to one’s image.

— Jean Baudrillard, from Plastic Surgery for the Other

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”

— Sylvia Plath, from The Bell Jar

“Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.”

— Giorgio Agamben, from Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy

“Madness as a defense against terror. Madness as a defense against grief.”

— Susan Sontag, from As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh

“I’m waiting. No one is going to come, but still I wait. No one even knows I’m here, but I’m waiting all the same.”

— Han Kang, from The Vegetarian

“No man who is alive can live without some goal and a striving towards it. If a man loses his goal and his hope, the resulting misery will often turn him into a monster…”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from Notes from the House of the Dead

“You know at school you do tenses? There’s the past, the present, future. Well here, there is only one tense. There is not future. The past and the present are the same thing.”

— Spencer (2021), directed by Pablo Larraín

“Nothing seemed really real. Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds. I didn’t talk to myself in my head. There wasn’t much to say. This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was my dream.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh, from My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.”

— Jean Baudrillard, from Simulacra and Simulation

“Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action... in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.”

— Michel Foucault, from Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison

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Language, Translation, And Love Within Words

Antar Abdullah (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) 💬 Ken Liu (Translator's Postface to The Three Body Problem) 💬 Lauren Collins (Love in Translation) 💬 Jhumpa Lahiri (Translating Myself and Others) 💬 Gabrielle Ciarann Roniyah Baer (Learning a New Language)

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— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

by Jack Gilbert

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would finally explain why the couples on their tombs are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records. But what if they are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor. Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script is not language but a map. What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

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rentmeatimemachine · 1 month

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Can you do a web about the crossing of foreign languages, like two people of different translations meeting and communicating despite the barrier? Just generally linguistics I suppose.