A dead body touched with the Odour of Sanctity can’t just smell ok. It has to possess the mysterious presence of a supernaturally pleasant odour. The scents can be brief or persistent, attached to the body, grave, water the body was bathed in, or objects the person touched.  In the case of St. Padre Pio, his spectral scent of roses and pipe tobacco visited people after his death and was considered a sign of his saintly intercession. All Odours of Sanctities are described as sweet, with notes of honey, butter, roses, violets, frankincense, myrrh, pipe tobacco, jasmine, and lilies being the most frequently reported accompaniments. The scent is also always culturally specific and deeply intertwined with symbolism. (...) One of the most popular of the fragrant saints, St. Therese of Lisieux smelt of lilies, violets and roses upon her deathbed. Her most often attributed quotes is, “The splendour of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not rob the little violet of its scent…If every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness”. It also should be noted that during Therese’s lifetime violet absolute was synthesized, making a material that was once the most expensive fragrance component in the world, affordable for all and the de rigueur fragrance of respectable women. To the Victorian palette, violets represented chastity, modesty, and feminine virtue. Lilies and roses also have a long association with Jesus and Mary. Therese’s Odour of Sanctity creates an olfactive tableau of Therese, the respectable modest female, alongside the Virgin Mary and Jesus.  Before 1875 however, the scent of violets would not have been readily identifiable to the general population, and no Odour of Sanctity is associated with violets in any primary sources before that time. There is also an active association between Osmogenesia and Stigmata, with the floral odour emanated from the wounds. Stigmatic Osmogenesia in every case is reported as the smell of roses, which again is deeply symbolic with the wounds of Christ. While there is no way of knowing just how many people the Odour of Sanctity was associated with, in the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods ascetic mystics make up a large population of those afflicted with this post-mortem perfume. In particularly female mystics that lived cloistered lives. These women’s bodies suffered through harsh asceticism and self-inflicted mortification. Yet through the isolation, hardship, poverty, and virginity, these mystics sought to control their bodies and transform them into sacred vessels. It, therefore, makes sense from their perspective that, if successful, the discarded vessels of these perfected souls should already be touched by a whiff of Paradise. The association of the Odour of Sanctity with cloistered women parallels the profane eroticism of the earthly woman with the chaste eroticism of the sacred woman; while the worldly woman’s corpse corrupts by its nature and stinks, so the heavenly woman’s body remains pure and fragrant. However, the conversation is still about a woman’s body.

Nuri McBride, The Odour of Sanctity: When the Dead Smell Divine

I know love by the roadkill it makes of its distractions 

- C.T. Salazar, The boy Elijah raised remembers his last night alive.

Did you know anyone can be a graveyard if you dig deep enough? Did you know at the edge of every scalpel there is a prayer? Imagine this simple vivisection: I make an incision from chin to collar bone. I drop a small white pearl down my throat & like a song a hive of writhing bees spills out.

- Brandon Melendez, Alprazolam.

but do not ask me about my father. Instead, here is a shovel & plot of dirt to dig & fill. Here is my grandfather’s belt, bent leather & eagle-head buckle. Here is the dog shot for tearing a piece out of my cousin’s arm. Here is a gun. Choke chain.  Chain-link fence. Here is a flagpole whittled to a point at both ends. Here is a careless country & its careful bombs. Here is a mirror. Mortar. Fireworks & singed grass. Here is a man & a man with their shovels, each digging a hole, hoping to bury the other.

- Brandon Melendez, I'm Ready to Talk About Rage.

My father was for the longest time a plastic smile locked under the bed. Before that, he was whatever came out of my mother’s mouth. He was I’ll tell you when you’re older. He was winding smoke, a secret name. That fucking Turk. He was foreign word, distant country. I gave myself up to her hands which also fathered; they shaped me into flinch. Into hesitant crouch, expectant bruise. Into locked door, CIA black site- my body unknown and denied to any but the basest men. I said beat my father into me please, but he couldn’t be found. And when he was, I wished he remained lost. He blamed himself for the men I want.

- Omar Sakr, to be a son.

do your hands hurt from holding them against your father ’s antlers does our slow death have a flag we could burn

- C.T. Salazar, O Ye Cattle Thieves.

Bruce LaBruce - Hustler White (1996)

Blanchot, from “Literature and The Right to Death” (full text here)

Anne Carson, from “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent” by Anne Carson, A Public Space, Issue 7 / 2008 (full text here)

Susan Sontag from “The Aesthetics of Silence”

Rembrandt, Self Portrait with Beret and Turned-Up Collar, 1659 Francis Bacon, Self Portrait, 1973. 

Anne Carson, from Nox

Louise Gluck from Proofs & Theories

Anne Carson, from “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent” by Anne Carson, A Public Space, Issue 7 / 2008 (full text here)

Creation Ritual

[1] You start writing, first thing in the morning, on the balcony, drinking mushroom tea. Sit up straight. 1 page minimum. Or write until you start crying. You sense apprehension and that's when you must keep going. You feel the fear and do it anyway. The fear of being seen too clearly. You are learning to love your unoccupied time.

[2] A page of writing is not enough. How to turn it into something tangible? You work within the rules in order deform them slightly. They will find this refreshing. If it made you cry then it will make somebody else cry. But they need a little encouragement. To build rapport before they let you in the door. Something familiar followed by something entirely new.

[3] And now is the time to read, reflect. Look up at the clouds for a while. How does the new information feel? Maybe go out into the street. What does this new world look like? Test out your hypothesis. Not just whether it's true or false, but how? And why?

[4] Once internalised, you must write again. This time from a place of deep understanding. If it changed your life then it will change somebody else's life. Not every thread will reach this point. But the ones that do, they have longevity. Ideas are cheap, but real solutions linger.

[5] Now it's your choice, do you want to share it with the world? Do you want them to be better too? At the cost of your vulnerability? Your ego? Your pride? The truth is, it doesn't exist until you let it free, to enter into a relationship with the world. Until then, it's just another secret part of you.

“A Little Closer Though, If You Can, for What Got Lost Here”, by Carl Phillips

“maybe all nerve is; the search-and-rescue map wildflowers / make of a field in summer…”

“People talk a lot about the sex in my book and to be honest it’s usually so banal or offhand I kind of forget it’s there until I end up having to read it aloud to a room full of children and distinguished arts patrons. When people talk about my book being provocative, it’s funny to me, because it’s really a trojan horse of sentimentality. I feel like I’ve put a leather jacket on over a Laura Ashley pyjama set and got away with it.”

— Hera Lindsay Bird, interviewed by Lisa Allardice for The Guardian

thinking about the prophets as god’s body count

Sex Without Love

by Sharon Olds

How do they do it, the ones who make love without love? Beautiful as dancers, gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice, fingers hooked inside each other’s bodies, faces red as steak, wine, wet as the children at birth whose mothers are going to give them away. How do they come to the come to the come to the God come to the still waters, and not love the one who came there with them, light rising slowly as steam off their joined skin? These are the true religious, the purists, the pros, the ones who will not accept a false Messiah, love the priest instead of the God. They do not mistake the lover for their own pleasure, they are like great runners: they know they are alone with the road surface, the cold, the wind, the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio- vascular health — just factors, like the partner in the bed, and not the truth, which is the single body alone in the universe against its own best time.

Would every moment of happiness carry this weight tucked inside of it?

— Leslie Jamison, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story (Little Brown and Company, February 20, 2024)

[reading another academic text about early medieval ireland] yeah i know an audience that would love this.