March 2012
85 posts
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“To rage and look upon you with contempt is to rage and be contemptuous of...”
– Gloria Anzaldua in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)
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February 2012
105 posts
2 tags
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THE ECSTACY. by John Donne
Where, like a pillow on a bed, A pregnant bank swell’d up, to rest The violet’s reclining head, Sat we two, one another’s best. Our hands were firmly cemented By a fast balm, which thence did spring ; Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread Our eyes upon one double string. So to engraft our hands, as yet Was all the...
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“No tribe has triumphed without a poet, and no poet has triumphed unless defeated...”
– Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence. Sinan Antoon’s translation for Archipelago Press.
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“There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over tree-tops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities.”
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves
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A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon?
Margaret Atwood
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“Ignorance splits people, creates prejudice. A misinformed people is a subjugated...”
– Gloria Anzaldua in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)
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“Tenderness, a sign of vulnerability, is so feared that it is showered on women with verbal abuse and blows. Men, even more than women, are fettered to gender roles. Women at least have had the guts to break out of bondage. Only gay men have had the courage to expose themselves to the woman inside them and to challenge the current masculinity. I’ve encountered a few scattered and...
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… though small against the black, small against the formless rocks, hell must break before I am lost; before I am lost, hell must open like a red rose for the dead to pass.
—H. D., from “Eurydice”
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“A sentence is a ghost of an idea.”
– Paul Valéry, Cahiers/Notebooks 4 (1897-99/2010)
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“Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
– Shakespeare, Macbeth, I, iv
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“… I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet. Soy un amasamiento, I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a create that questions the...
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“These numerous possibilities leave la mestiza floundering in uncharted seas. In perceiving conflicting information and points of view, she is subjected to a swamping of her psychological borders. She has discovered that she can’t hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries… . Rigidity means death. Only by remaining flexible is she able to stretch the psyche horizontally and vertically. La mestiza...
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“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old,...”
– Socrates
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“There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”
—Wendell Berry, from “How to Be a Poet” in Given
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“There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you...”
– Pablo Picasso (1881–1973, Spain/France)
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“But it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat, like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence. The counterstance refutes the dominant culture’s views and beliefs, and, for this, it is...
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“Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision.”
Gloria Anzaldua in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)
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“The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in our heads.”
Gloria Anzaldua in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)
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“True, the desire to read is an insatiable desire and you must read. Nevertheless, you must also think. Intellectual isolation loses value in an existence of books. I think I sent you some time ago a quotation from Henry James about living in a world of creation. A world of creation is one of the areas, and only one, of the world of thought and there is no passion like the passion of...
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“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in...”
– René Descartes
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“I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a...
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“Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibers, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe, and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that...
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The Place of the Solitaires
Let the place of the solitaires
Be a place of perpetual undulation.
Whether it be in mid-sea
On the dark, green water-wheel,
Or on the beaches,
There must be no cessation
Of motion, or of the noise of motion,
The renewal of noise
And manifold continuation;
And, most, of the motion of thought
And its restless iteration,
In the place of the solitaires,...
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“You cannot save people, you can only love them.”
– Anaïs Nin [February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977]
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From Wilhelm Reich’s “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” (1933):
“Fascist mentality is the mentality of the subjugated ‘little man’ who craves authority and rebels against it at the same time. It is not by accident that all fascist dictators stem from the milieu of the little reactionary man. The captains of industry and the feudal militarist make use of this social fact for their own purposes. A...
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“Change occurs among other people. It seems real when we can see it in other...”
– Todd Heatherton, in Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit
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A murmur of syllables, air and water, words with no weight: night unfolds and looks at me… Your shadow covers this page.
—Octavio Paz, As One Listens to the Rain
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The Mother of the Commander Michitsuna (10th century)
Have you any idea How long a night can last, spent Lying alone and sobbing? -Translation by Kenneth Rexroth
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“And the holy wilderness takes root, rich in promise. So rich it burns. For we lack Song to set the spirit loose. It would turn against itself, And be consumed, Godly fire cannot Bear captivity.”
—
Friedrich Holderlin, from ‘The Titans’ [Die Titanen], translated by Richard Sieburth.
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“I have been spared the fate
of those who love words
more than what they mean”
-Franz Wright, from “University of One”
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The unknown is an abstraction; the known, a desert; but what is half-known, half-seen, is the perfect breeding ground for desire and hallucination.
-Juan Jose Saer, The Witness
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We seek Nothing beyond reality. Within it, Everything, the spirit’s alchemicana Included, the spirit that goes roundabout And through included, not merely the visible, The solid, but the movable, the moment, The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints, The pattern of the heavens and high, night air. From Wallace Stevens’s “An Ordinary Evening...
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Let us no more contend, nor blame each other, blamed enough elsewhere, but strive, In offices of love, how we may lighten each other’s burden. - John Milton
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“I’m interested in the theater because I’m interested in communication with...”
– Stephen Sondheim, on life, writing, theater.
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