Shell Inscribed with the Cartouche of Senwosret I, Egyptian Art
Rogers Fund, 1923 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Medium: Shell
(via camgirls-project)
‘IN PARIS we eat brains every night. My husband likes the vaporous, fishy mousse of them. They are a kind of seafood, he thinks, locked tightly in the skull, like shelled creatures in the dark caves of the ocean, sprung suddenly free and killed by light; they’ve grown clammy with shelter, fortressed vulnerability, dreamy nights. Me, I’m eating for a flashback…
We sit beside people who show us wallet pictures of their children. “Sont-ils si mignons!” I say. My husband constructs remarks in his own patois. We, us, have no little ones. He doesn’t know French. But he studied Spanish once, and now, with a sad robustness, speaks of our childlessness to the couple next to us. “But,” he adds, thinking fondly of our cat, “we do have a large gato at home." "Gâteau means ‘cake,’” I whisper. “You’ve just told them we have a large cake at home.” I don’t know why he always strikes up conversations with the people next to us. But he strikes them up, thinking it friendly and polite rather than oafish and irritating, which is what I think.
Afterward we always go to the same chocolatier for whiskey truffles. One feels the captured storm in these, a warm storm under the tongue. "What aggrandizement are we in again?“ my husband asks."What 'aggrandizement’?” I say. “I don’t know, but I think we’re in one of the biggies.” My husband pronounces tirez as if it were Spanish, père as if it were pier. The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing. We touch each other’s sleeves. We say, “Look at that!,” wanting our eyes to merge, our minds to be one. We are in Paris, with its impeccable marzipan and light, its whiffs of sewage and police state. With my sore hip and his fallen arches (“fallen archness,” Daniel calls it), we walk the quais, stand on all the bridges in the misty rain, and look out on this pretty place, secretly imagining being married to other people–right here in River City!–and sometimes not, sometimes simply wondering, silently or aloud, what will become of the world.’
‘WHEN I WAS a child, I tried hard for a time to split my voice. I wanted to make chords, to splinter my throat into harmonies–floreted as a field, which is how I saw it. It seemed like something one should be able to do. With concentration and a muscular push of air, I felt, I might be able to people myself, unleash the crowd in my voice box, give birth, set free all the moods and nuances, all the lovely and mystical inhabitants of my mind’s speech. Afternoons, by myself, I would go beyond the garden and the currant bushes, past the lavender-crowned chives and slender asparagus, past the sunflowers knocked bent by deer or an unseasonal frost, past the gully grass to the meadow far behind our house. Or I’d go down the road to the empty lot near the Naval Reserve where in winter the village plow and dump truck unloaded snow and where in summer sometimes the boys played ball. I would look out upon the wildflowers, the mulch of swamp and leaves, the spring moss greening on the rocks, or the boulderous mountains of street-black snow, whatever season it happened to be–my mittens clotted with ice, or my hands grimy with marsh mud–and from the back of my larynx I’d send part of my voice out toward the horizon and part of it straight up toward the sky. There must have been pain in me. I wanted to howl and fly and break apart.’
‘One of the many results of this for me was a tin ear for languages. My brain worked stiffly, regrouped and improvised sounds. For a while I believed Sandra Dee was not only an actress but one of the French days of the week. I sang “Frère Jacques” with the bewildering line, “Sonny, lay my Tina.” Knowing that a foreign tongue was often tense marital code, off-limits to the kinder, all forbidden chirp and wind, belonging to the guests, I grew sullen, and vaguely deaf, resentful in a way that was at the time inexplicable to myself’
‘ In the moonlight the sky seemed wild, bright, and marbled like the sea. People alone, trapped, country people, all looked at the sky, I knew. It was the way out somehow, that sky, but it was also the steady, changeless witness to the after and before of one’s decisions – it witnessed all the deaths that took people away to other worlds – and so people had a tendency to talk to it.’
‘my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing; It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew.’
“All the lying and coffee it takes to get anything done at all,” he says, have exhausted him…“Well, you’re fighting the good fight,” I say. “I’m crying the food cry,” He sighs.
‘Passing cafes and restaurants, I walk through the bright glance of men in love, who, looking briefly away from the lover across from them in order to more perfectly form a sentence, unwittingly cast their gaze across my path like a light. And so, momentarily, to have accidentally caught their desire, swimming across the current of it like that, passing through, I feel loved, in a warm and random way, wandering through it, as if it were a rainbow, that old trick of light, or a place in a pool where someone has peed. There is a sweet, silent rot to it.’
‘even now, on the outskirts of Paris, Africans in bright ski pants work the toxic jobs, the factories and power plants, how Paris is built and running on the backs of these people, on the back of abominable history. The Nazis, well: Everyone knows about the Nazis. There is no place to put such facts, not properly. There is only one’s own monumental horror, one’s worthless moral vanity- which can do nothing. The bad news of the world. life most bad news, has no place to go. You tack it to the bulletin board part of your heart. You say look, you say see. That is all.’
‘You didn’t give back to the same people who gave to you… You didn’t give it back to the same people at all. You gave it to differnet peoples. And they, in turn, gave it to somebody else entirely. Not you. That was the sloppy economy of gift and love.’
‘I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do!”
detail from The Last Judgement and the Mass of Saint Gregory
Master of the Artés Family (active by 1500).
(Source: maryjblige, via maygrey)
“A wound gives off its own light
surgeons says.
If all the lamps in the house were turned out
you could dress this wound
by what shines from it.”
“Demeter’s victory
over Hades
does not consist in her daughter’s arrival from down below,
it’s the world in bloom –
cabbages lures lambs broom sex milk money!
These kill death.”
“Ray calls up from the stairs.
She looks up from her work, deep
In the pleasure of it as he can see, something about her Blinds him.
He’s out she says.
Together
they watch stray drops of this fact condense on the air between them. Some call it love
but those two whose souls knit at that moment
as the soul of Jonathan was nit with the soul of David
did not love one another.
How much simpler that would have been.”
“she had seeing scars on her eyes from trying to look hard enough at every stone of every sidewalk in the city, every window of every passing bus, every pane of every shop or office block or telephone booth to wing from it a glimpse of the husband with someone else if such a glimpse was to be had of such a fact was to be faced she wanted it over with”
“XVIII. DO YOU SEE IT AS A ROOM OR A SPONGE OR A CARELESS SLEEVE WIPING OUT HALF THE BLACKBOARD BY MISTAKE OR A BURGUNDY MARK STAMPED ON THE BOTTLES OF OUR MINDS WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THIS DANCE CALLED MEMORY?”
“In the effort to find one’s way among the contents of memory
(Aristotle emphasizes)
a principal of association is helpful -
’’passing rapidly from one step to the next,
lor instance from milk to white,
from white to air,
from air to damp, after which one recollects autumn supposing one is trying to
recollect that season.” Or supposing,
fair reader, you are trying to recollect not autumn but freedom,
a principal of freedom the existed between two people, small and savage
as principals go - but what are the rules for this? As he says, folly may come into fashion. Pass then rapidly
from one step to the next,
for instance from nipple to hard,
from hard to hotel room,
from hotel room to a phrase found in a letter he wrote in a taxi one day he passed his wife walking on the other side of the street and she did not see him, she was - so ingenious are the arrangements of the state of flux we call our moral history are they not almost as neat as mathematical propositions except written on water - on her way to the courthouse to file papers for divorce, a phrase like how you tasted between your legs. After which by means of this wholly divine faculty, the ’’memory
of words and things,”
one recollects
freedom. Is it I? cries the soul rushing up. Little soul, poor vague animal: beware this invention ’’always useful for learning and life”
“He was not wrong that sad anthropologist who told us the primary function of writing is to enslave human beings. Intellectual and aesthetic uses came later.”
“Omens are for example hearing someone say victory as they pass you in the street
or to be staring
at the little sulfur lamps in the grass
all around the edge of the hotel garden
just as they come on. They come on at dusk.”
“His calf muscles for instance were huge. Like a ballet dancer’s. She thought about it walking beside him. Or a bicycle courier…You’re strong Ray. He nodded. What makes you so strong. He thought about it. Lust he said. You mean like Vincent van Gogh. Lust for life. No he said. Like a bee. Pollen she said. He laughed.”
“AND KNEELING AT THE EDGE OF THE TRANSPARENT SEA I SHALL SHAPE FOR MYSELF A NEW HEART FROM SALT AND MUD”
“IMPURE AS I AM (FOODSTAINS AND SHAME AND ALL) SO TOO MY CONCLUSION WHICH AT THE DOOR SCENT YOU AND HESITATE To get them out of her the wife tries making a list of words she never got to say, How have you been. Fancy seeing you here. I had given up hope I grew desperate why did you take so long. Bloodless monster! had I never seen or known your kindness what I have been. But words are a strange docile wheat are they not, they bend to the ground.”
“To say Beauty is Truth and stop. Rather than to eat it. Rather than to want to eat it. This was my pure early thought. I overlooked one thing.That the beautiful when I encountered it would turn out to be prior - inside my own heart, already eaten…Words, wheat, conditions, gold, more than thirty years of it fizzing around in me–thereI lay it to rest.You smile. I thinkyou are going to mention againthose illuminated manuscripts from medieval times where the scribehas made an error in copyingso the illuminator encloses the errorin a circlet of roses and flameswhich a saucy little devil is trying to tug off the side of the page.After all the heart is not a small stoneto be rolled this way and that.The mind is not a boxto be shut fast.And yet is is!
Terracotta figure of Aphrodite within a cockle-shell, 2nd Century BC
(Source: mini-girlz, via camgirls-project)
1. Statuette; Egypt; ca. 1295–1070 B.C.
2. Figurine of a Seated Woman; Egypt; ca. 3450–3200 B.C.
3. Female Figure; Mexico; ca. 1500–600 B.C.
4. Nude standing female; Mesopotamia; ca. 2000–1750 B.C.
5. Nude female figure; Levant; ca. 2000-1000 B.C.
6. Double-headed figure; Ecuador; 2300–2200 B.C.
7. Statuette; Egypt; ca. 1550–1295 B.C.
8. Standing Female Clay Figure; Japan; ca. 1000–300 B.C.
(Source: ampersandandand, via stabilizedpulse)
The incredible embroidered jackets of Brazilian outsider artist Bispo Do Rosario. Through a myriad of materials and objects (including embroidery, jackets, furniture like sculptures, models and flags) Bispo tried to explain the world to God, whom he thought – much like a parent of a teenager – did not understand his human creation anymore. Do Rosario spent the majority of his life in a mental institution but was given full freedom to express his creative sides.
(via stabilizedpulse)