read during the strange time (may to october) (Patreon)

healing...realizing i've not been editing my 'writing', i've been editing my essence...watching summer happen out the window...chewing the inside of my mouth....this is what i managed to focus on long enough to experience during the strange time. one of them was my favorite book ever. so it goes..i was open

meditations by marcus aurelius

completely unguarded account of the mind of the most powerful man in the world. totally fascinating. stoic king. marcus 'they can't kill my vibe' aurelius

adult children of emotionally immature parents by lindsay gibson

oh

this did help me structure some thoughts...i disliked the moments it leaned fully into the idea of victimization..hm

on the shortness of life by seneca

only thing that exists is the present moment...have you heard

imminent by luis elizondo

this book is about aliens and how they exist and are here, monitoring. let’s get that out of the way

published in august. luis elizondo used to work at the pentagon as the director of the advanced aerospace threat detection program. compelling, yes?

author is a trustworthy figure to me...bit of a midwestern everyman...quit his job and moved across the country with two young daughters in order to share this information...nasty smear campaigns....that to me suggests an extreme feeling of responsibility and, at the very least, clarity of thought....

it's, uh, worth a read. see what you think. made me feel really really strange. for three days after i read it i was walking around town being like 'no one here knows'. i was particularly dumbfounded by the chapter entitled 'orbs'

basically i do think this is an issue we're going to see publicly grappled with in our lifetimes (edit: or, today! author is speaking at a hearing literally today. livestreamed) which will also hopefully put the human exceptionalism thing to bed for good....wow! i don't know.....can't wait to see what happens

near to the wild heart by clarice lispector

how did she know all of this? how did she know all of this

‘There was a danger of establishing herself in suffering and organizing herself in it, which would also be a vice and a tranquilizer. What to do then? What to do to interrupt that path, grant herself an interval between her and herself, so that she could later find herself again, without danger, new and pure? What to do? The piano was deliberately attacked in strong, uniform scales. Exercises, she thought. Exercises . . . Yes, she discovered amused . . . Why not? Why not try to love? Why not try to live?’

‘This song is like a blue rose, she had said, well aware that only she could understand it.’

‘I slide from one truth to the next, always forgetting the first, always dissatisfied. Her life was made up of complete little lives, of whole, closed circles, which isolated themselves from one another. Except that at the end of each, instead of dying and beginning life on another plane, inorganic or lower organic, Joana started over on the same human plane. Just different fundamental notes. Or just different supplementary ones, and the basic ones forever the same?”

‘Moments so intense, red, condensed in themselves that they didn’t need past or future in order to exist. They brought a knowledge that didn’t serve as experience – a direct knowledge, more like sensation than perception. The truth then discovered was so much the truth that it couldn’t subsist except in its recipient, in the actual fact that had provoked it. So true, so fatal, that it only revolves around its matrix. Once the moment of life is over, the corresponding truth is also drained. I cannot mold it, make it inspire other instants the same as it. Nothing therefore binds me. Yet the justification of her short glory had no other value perhaps than to give her a certain pleasure in reasoning, such as: if a rock falls, the rock exists, the rock fell from a place, the rock . . . She was wrong so often.’

the passion according to g.h. by clarice lispector

have always felt an absence where my favorite book was supposed to be. now i've filled it. wonderful. i could probably read this one hundred times and in every reading find something new. gives and gives

hallucinogenic, euphoric, diabolical, in moments 'evil', in moments rapturously good, and extremely, extremely odd, I can't believe it exists, oh god, oh god, to write something like this

a piece of thing! a piece of thing

wonderful wonderful note in the back from the translator: 'A friend in Brazil told me of a young woman in Rio who'd read Clarice Lispector obsessively and was convinced–as I and legions of other Clarice devotees have been–that she and Clarice Lispector would have a life-changing connection if they met in person. She managed to get in touch with the writer, who kindly agreed to meet her. When the young woman arrived, Clarice sat and stared at her and said nothing until the woman finally fled the apartment.'

i underlined so much. just read it. here's some moments

'The roach with the white matter was looking at me. I don't know if it was seeing me, I don't know what a roach sees. But we were looking at each other, and also I don't know what a woman sees. But if its eyes weren't seeing me, its existence was existing me–in the primary world I had entered, beings exist others as a way of seeing one another. And in that world I was coming to know, there are several ways that mean seeing: one a looking at the other without seeing him, one possessing the other, one eating the other, one just being in a place and the other being there too: all that also means seeings The roach wasn't seeing me directly, it was with me. The roach wasn't seeing me with its eyes but with its body.''If my body is so weak that I can't face the sun without my eyes physically crying–how could I stop my heart from glittering in physically organic tears if in nakedness I felt the identity: the God? My heart that covered itself with a thousand cloaks. The great neutral reality of what I was living was overtaking me with its extreme objectivity. I was feeling incapable of being as real as the reality that was reaching me.'

'Will the man of the future understand us as we are today? He distractedly, with some distracted tenderness, will pet our head as we do with the dog that comes over to us and looks at us from within its darkness, with mute and afflicted eyes. He, the future man, would pet us, remotely understanding us, as I remotely would understand myself later, beneath the memory of the memory of the memory already lost of a time of pain, not knowing that our time of pain would pass just as a child is not a static child, it's a growing being.''The mystery of human destiny is that we are inevitable, but we have the freedom to carry out or not our inevitability: it depends on us to carry out our inevitable destiny. While inhuman beings, like the roach, carry out their own complete cycle, without ever erring because they do not choose. But it depends on me to freely become whatever I inevitably am. I am the mistress of my inevitability, and, if I decide not to carry it out, I shall remain outside my specifically living nature. But if I carry out my neutral and living nucleus, then, within my species, I shall be being specifically human.'

shame by annie ernaux

memory, family, class dynamics. sad

the errancy by jorie graham

poetry...and oooh...fragmentary, very 'beautiful', in some moments quite difficult, thematically relevant...talks of connection, the natural world, limits of articulation...i honestly feel like i need to read this again...i'm not sure i digested

let me know what you've read recently or are reading. almost back to my usual pre-move pace which is a relief. i'm excited to talk about where my curiosity's been lately....things are strange. talk to you soon

sav x