Tag: quote

not like you

I saw them then. At the farthest corner where it was darkest. The sisters crouched together in each other’s arms. I saw their faces that were pale but smeared with something—dirt? blood? and I saw they were crying and they saw me, for a long time we looked at each other. “I’m an alive girl,” I whispered. “I’m an alive girl not like you.

—Not like you – Ghost Girls

I have been in a morbid state of mind since the spring. March, maybe, but definitely April.

At my day job, for instance, I discuss mutilated corpses and the best way to display them, the realistic way to portray a decapitation, or zombie women and their impossibly healthy-looking breasts (all of which is actually related to my work tasks, believe it or not, but I’m not at liberty to discuss specifics.)

And then there’s this. The writing. Every story I have in progress at the moment (for who can commit to just one?) includes death or disease in some way. Some are humorous, some are serious business, some focus on it and in others death is only a minor snag in a character’s path. There are ghosts, wastelands, churches, hospitals, accidents, murders… It’s a surprising list. I never would have guessed that I’d be writing such things, but then I never would have guessed that I’d be writing anything at all.

It’s occurred to me that perhaps I am trying to come to terms with the finite nature of life. I have witnessed and understand birth and creation (as far as a childless man can understand such things), and life as a struggle is ongoing. But death, now that’s something else, something I don’t know. I have never lost anyone close to me to death. They’ll tell me that’s good, appreciate the people in my life while they are here, and I’m trying by God, but what must it be like? To witness it, to experience it? No one wants to think about it because it’s generally a conversation killer, thus using my work as an outlet. Would it be better to contain it, keep it all to myself?

I’ve attended one funeral. I was seven and it was for my aunt’s child who passed away days after birth. The Father talked about things and my aunt cried while my brothers and I played near some headstones. The sky was appropriately gray. The slick and professionally tended grass was fun to run around on. The tiny white casket was adorned in flowers.

I know I’m going to lose someone, and not in the way that we all lose someone who we would like to believe is still out in the world somewhere. It’s going to be someone that I can never speak to again. Someone whose existence has ceased. I understand the inevitability of it. I might be the one to go, who knows? But I wonder what I’d think. I wonder if I’d allow myself to cry.

Can you imagine it, talking to the dead? What would you say? What could you possibly have to say?

a reason to write

pasithee:

I was on my knees and elbows, my forehead nearly kissing the duvet, and when he moved carefully out I turned my head up and over my shoulder and gave him a smile. I volunteer at a gallery, and I felt like I gave him the smile that I give visitors when they walk into the building if we make eye contact. He patted my hip fondly, reminiscent of the way you would pat a dog as it sat in your lap. I pushed the hair sticking to my forehead to the side.

Nearly all of the time boys take me from behind I fantasise about girls, replaying the familiar scenarios in my head that get me off. I don’t know when it started. It’s always been like this. I never tell them that I do.

I replied to this but I’ll just go ahead and reblog, too.

These sentences: “I volunteer at a gallery, and I felt like I gave him the smile that I give visitors when they walk into the building if we make eye contact. He patted my hip fondly, reminiscent of the way you would pat a dog as it sat in your lap.”

This here’s a reason to write. It’s providing a new perspective. The moments when the reader turns away from the screen, puts down the book, or simply looks away, for a moment or more, to reconcile the known point of view with the unfamiliar. It’s opening the reader’s eyes to the fact that everything is not understood nearly as completely as one would like to think.

a reason to write

pasithee:

I was on my knees and elbows, my forehead nearly kissing the duvet, and when he moved carefully out I turned my head up and over my shoulder and gave him a smile. I volunteer at a gallery, and I felt like I gave him the smile that I give visitors when they walk into the building if we make eye contact. He patted my hip fondly, reminiscent of the way you would pat a dog as it sat in your lap. I pushed the hair sticking to my forehead to the side.

Nearly all of the time boys take me from behind I fantasise about girls, replaying the familiar scenarios in my head that get me off. I don’t know when it started. It’s always been like this. I never tell them that I do.

I replied to this but I’ll just go ahead and reblog, too.

These sentences: “I volunteer at a gallery, and I felt like I gave him the smile that I give visitors when they walk into the building if we make eye contact. He patted my hip fondly, reminiscent of the way you would pat a dog as it sat in your lap.”

This here’s a reason to write. It’s providing a new perspective. The moments when the reader turns away from the screen, puts down the book, or simply looks away, for a moment or more, to reconcile the known point of view with the unfamiliar. It’s opening the reader’s eyes to the fact that everything is not understood nearly as completely as one would like to think.

on photography

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world – all these elements of erotic feeling are affirmed in the pleasure we take in photographs. But other, less liberating feelings are expressed as well. It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography (via invisiblestories) (via teachingliteracy) (via booklover)I have always admired photographers for their ability to capture a scene or a moment that somehow conveys the true meaning of what the eye is seeing. A photograph is permanent, something that’s on record and cannot be undone. For better or worse that photograph will be viewed and analyzed and it is always there even as the image in the mind fades away. I once thought, I might be a photographer. I might enjoy capturing moments.

Now I keep no photographs. The problem was they were always there, and I knew it in my mind, even as the memories began to fade.

on photography

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.
Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world – all these elements of erotic feeling are affirmed in the pleasure we take in photographs. But other, less liberating feelings are expressed as well. It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing.

— Susan Sontag, On Photography (via invisiblestories) (via teachingliteracy) (via booklover)I have always admired photographers for their ability to capture a scene or a moment that somehow conveys the true meaning of what the eye is seeing. A photograph is permanent, something that’s on record and cannot be undone. For better or worse that photograph will be viewed and analyzed and it is always there even as the image in the mind fades away. I once thought, I might be a photographer. I might enjoy capturing moments.

Now I keep no photographs. The problem was they were always there, and I knew it in my mind, even as the memories began to fade.

a bright wall in a dark room.: The Prestige (2006)

By all accounts, these two gentleman should be world class magicians because they are world class charlatans; charismatic charmers that can fool any audience into believing what they see, but in the face of the machine, they are the fools.  The quest for dominance is so all consuming that each man begins to believe his own lies, and the lies of the other until there is nothing left but delusions of grandeur and the shattered bits of the lives they sacrificed for those delusions.

In case you’re not aware, A Bright Wall in a Dark Room covers excellent films. They provide an answer when the question on everyone’s lips is, “What should we watch tonight?” Recently I found myself skimming their archives to see if they’d covered some of my favorite films and was muchly troubled by the absence of what I believe is Christopher Nolan’s best film to date: The Prestige. I was so troubled by it, in fact, that as I watched the film again just yesterday I thought to myself, “I’m going to request this. I need to request this.” And so it became today and as I mentally prepared my arguments I was surprised to see that my request had come to pass. Was it coincidence? Had I willed it so? Was it meant to be? Questions, pondering… It was all difficult to comprehend.

I’m afraid you must pardon me. It is just very rare to see… real magic.

a bright wall in a dark room.: The Prestige (2006)

By all accounts, these two gentleman should be world class magicians because they are world class charlatans; charismatic charmers that can fool any audience into believing what they see, but in the face of the machine, they are the fools.  The quest for dominance is so all consuming that each man begins to believe his own lies, and the lies of the other until there is nothing left but delusions of grandeur and the shattered bits of the lives they sacrificed for those delusions.

In case you’re not aware, A Bright Wall in a Dark Room covers excellent films. They provide an answer when the question on everyone’s lips is, “What should we watch tonight?” Recently I found myself skimming their archives to see if they’d covered some of my favorite films and was muchly troubled by the absence of what I believe is Christopher Nolan’s best film to date: The Prestige. I was so troubled by it, in fact, that as I watched the film again just yesterday I thought to myself, “I’m going to request this. I need to request this.” And so it became today and as I mentally prepared my arguments I was surprised to see that my request had come to pass. Was it coincidence? Had I willed it so? Was it meant to be? Questions, pondering… It was all difficult to comprehend.

I’m afraid you must pardon me. It is just very rare to see… real magic.

to the clueless boy who is taking advantage of a wonderful girl

She’s obviously in love with you.

Everyone can tell. She lived two dorms down from mine last summer and though I’d never met you, I knew every detail of your face, of your personality. She spoke of you so often that I could recite the exact way you mispronounced ‘literally’, I could list off…

This is how we remember that girl who was sweet on us in seventh grade. She had the cutest dimple, the nicest little ass. Then that lanky quiet girl, toward the end of high school. She was real nice, helped with homework, said “Hi!” so excitedly. In college, oh brother. You know? That one girl over in Los Cerritos. What was her name? Kind of dark skin, frizzly hair? She had some nice lips on her, man. She found us at that party one time, she hung on like an ornament. She laughed at everything, smiled wide. She wanted us, but she wasn’t that redhead. The one in the shorts. She wasn’t her. That one girl, Mark’s assistant. The temp in the skirts, batty eyes? Yea, that wasn’t her. The thrift store girl, long dresses, lots of bracelets. Freckles? That wasn’t her. All of them, those girls, what was their name? They weren’t Her.

This is how we gather memories to discuss in old age.

This is how we fight the weight of regret.

to the clueless boy who is taking advantage of a wonderful girl

She’s obviously in love with you.

Everyone can tell. She lived two dorms down from mine last summer and though I’d never met you, I knew every detail of your face, of your personality. She spoke of you so often that I could recite the exact way you mispronounced ‘literally’, I could list off…

This is how we remember that girl who was sweet on us in seventh grade. She had the cutest dimple, the nicest little ass. Then that lanky quiet girl, toward the end of high school. She was real nice, helped with homework, said “Hi!” so excitedly. In college, oh brother. You know? That one girl over in Los Cerritos. What was her name? Kind of dark skin, frizzly hair? She had some nice lips on her, man. She found us at that party one time, she hung on like an ornament. She laughed at everything, smiled wide. She wanted us, but she wasn’t that redhead. The one in the shorts. She wasn’t her. That one girl, Mark’s assistant. The temp in the skirts, batty eyes? Yea, that wasn’t her. The thrift store girl, long dresses, lots of bracelets. Freckles? That wasn’t her. All of them, those girls, what was their name? They weren’t Her.

This is how we gather memories to discuss in old age.

This is how we fight the weight of regret.

The words that never were are not easily forgotten

Self-censorship is a form of self-expression. The things we erase matter just as much as the things we write; the act of deleting matters just as much as its opposite. To choose not to speak at all is a way of expressing oneself. Whether or not this is healthy is another matter. Is it a creative act? Righteous protest? Passive aggression? An expression of one’s self, a self that—it just so happens—may not be so terribly brave after all?
— fictionalhistories