sioltach
“I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle,
people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone
else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the
person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when
she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pickup truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these
brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy,
these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,”
“Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”
Danusha Laméris, Small Kindness
firstfullmoon
“Sometimes I think it’s possible to live with anything. That we’re wired to survive-survive-survive, to grip onto the gnarliest thread until life is pried from our bones. Other times I think it’s not possible to live at all. Not at all.”
— Ellena Savage, from “Yellow City,” in Blueberries: Essays Concerning Understanding
leohtttbriar
Limestone, in particular, has long been a geology of burial–in part because it is so common globally, in part because its erosive tendencies create so many natural crypts into which bodies may be laid, and in part because limestone is itself, geologically speaking, a cemetery. Limestone is usually formed of the compressed bodies of marine organisms–crinoids and coccolithophores, ammonites, belemnites and foraminifera–that died in waters of ancient seas and then settled in their trillions on those seabeds.
Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Robert Macfarlane
la-mia
“I said support them in taking accountability for their actions. I’m not able to actually force anybody into taking accountability. It has to be a voluntary process through which somebody decides to do that. You can never actually make anybody accountable. People have to be accountable.”
— Mariame Kaba, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us
draculasdaughter
Language itself is a revenant – that is, a ghost that walks again by repeating and being repeatable. It is older than the speaker, and it will live long after the speaker has died, thus indicating a future to come that is a repetition of the past and the present but still different. Language speaks the speaker, as if ghosts of past generations possesses them in order for them to express themselves to ghosts of the present as well as those of the future.
— Line Henriksen, “Spread the Word”: Creepypasta, Hauntology, and an Ethics of the Curse, 2018.
womenintheirwebs
“In a public space, ideally, you are a citizen with agency; in a faux public space, you are either a consumer or a threat to the design of the place.”
— Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (via readingsandnotes)
funeral
“It is a tradition in the literature of the doppelgänger…that while the doppelgänger serves a distinct psychological purpose, it soon becomes a menace, a constant, invasive reminder of one’s own shortcomings. The protagonist is driven to kill the doppelganger as a means of survival. But as Otto Rank points out, to kill the double is essentially suicide – what he refers to as ‘the strange paradox of the suicide who voluntarily seeks death in order to free himself of the intolerable thanatophobia’ […] The suicidal murder of the double is also underscored by a sense of the liebestod, or love-death, a marriage between the ego and its shadow-self though mutual obliteration.”
— Kier-La Janisse, House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films
footnoteinhistory
“The addicts [in Vancouver] started to insist on being at every meeting where drug policy was discussed. They took a slogan from the movement of psychiatric patients who were fighting to be treated decently: ‘Nothing about us, without us.’ Their message was: We’re here. We’re human. We’re alive. Don’t talk about us as if we are nothing. They began, haltingly, to find a new language to talk about themselves as addicts. We have certain unalienable rights: to stay alive, to stay healthy, to be treated as people. You are taking those rights away from us. We will claim them back.”
“Since Henry Smith Williams was broken, anybody opposing the drug war had entered the debate in a defensive crouch. They had preemptively pleaded—no, no, we are not in favor of drug use, no, no, we are not bad people, no, no, we are not like those dirty junkies. VANDU [Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users] was different. For the first time, they were putting prohibitionists on the defensive. They were saying: You are the people waging a war. Here are the people you are killing. What are they dying for? Tell us.”
–Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Bloomsbury, 2015)
transpondster
