Empress Elizabeth of Austria by Franz Xavier Winterhalter, 1865
Empress Elizabeth of Austria by Franz Xavier Winterhalter, 1865
“I read a passage in an ancient poem, and I seem to understand my own heart.”— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ (via beautyofsillence)
Virginia Woolf, from The Complete Works; “Jacob’s Room” wr. c. 1922
[ Text ID: with a slip of the moon in her hair, ]
creation (hand of god)
there’s a poem on my tongue
that longs to be written down
for far too long i have been silent
my tongue growing heavy with words unsaid
there’s an aching in my thighs
and a hole where my heart should be
love used to seem so foreign to me
i realize now she was in my arms all along
i’m sick of these lovely things
always
slipping
through
my
fingers
now i will reject pride
these marks of youth disappear
torn through with a dagger like teeth
smitten by my angelic light
searing through my own hand of god.
there is a sort of
righteous violence
in being reborn
i will be grateful for phantom pains
scorching like flames
flames to purge the rot
a house burns down
surrounded by a white picket fence
and from the ashes rises a shining light
this is what it means
to transmute fury
this is what it means
to leak sunlight like blood
like a blade, i cut through sin
i will make room for the new
cultivating change
in my own garden of Eden
and change will come
oh, change will come
i will be here ready when it does
c.s.l.
The Decorating Book, 1981
…and here it was Christmas Day, so I put on big boots and coat and went out to do some snow standing. Not since childhood! I had forgot how astounding it is. I went to the middle of a woods. Fir trees, the teachers of this, all around. Minus twenty degrees in the wind but inside the trees is no wind. The world subtracts itself in layers. Outer sounds like traffic and shoveling vanish. Inner sounds become audible, cracks, sighs, caresses, twigs, birdbreath, toenails of squirrel. The fir trees move hugely. The white is perfectly curved, stunned with itself. Puffs of ice fog and some gold things float up. Shadows rake their motionlessness across the snow with a vibration of other shadows moving crosswise on them, shadow on shadow, in precise velocities. It is very cold, then that, too, begins to subtract itself, the body chills on its surface but the core is hot and it is possible to disconnect the surface, withdraw to the core, where a ravishing peace flows in, so ravishing I am unembarrassed to use the word ravishing, and it is not a peace of separation from the senses but the washing-through peace of looking, listening, feeling, at the very core of snow, at the very core of the care of snow.
—Anne Carson, “Merry Christmas from Hegel”, Float
table at Pink Palace, Northridge, California home built in 1968
what you don’t get is science exists because people can love. medicine exists because people love each other enough to want each other to live long healthy lives. astronomy exists because someone loved the stars and the planets enough to track them through their ever changing position in the darkest night. science exists because humans are curious little creatures and we want to know the world around us and understand it like it does us. we know stars and planets worlds away, we’ve sent cameras worlds away, all because we love the universe, and we also put love in those satellites!! we sent the sound of a 100 languages, lovely messages, the sound of rain and a laugh, all out there just in case there’s someone in the universe looking for us like we do them, and so that they know that they were never alone, and we sent them the most simple loving things we could find.
science exists because people can love
Self-Portrait with Magic Scene (detail, ca.1635-7) Pieter van Laer