Eros The Bittersweet, Anne Carson

qualeasha wood, "bed rot," 2024, woven jacquard, glass seed beads, and machine embroidery

truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

what will it be, boss? the comfort of misery or the pain of change?

Maybe it’s better to have the terrible times first. I don’t know. Maybe then, you can have, if you live, a better life, a real life, because you had to fight so hard to get it away⸺you know?⸺from the mad dog who held it in his teeth. But then your life has all those tooth marks, too, all those tatters and all that blood.

James Baldwin  This morning, this evening, so soon  

hey guys is it over or are we back i think i lost track

Florentine Playing Cards. Francesco di Domenico, 1547.

Since I was very young, I’ve been terrified of my own potential to do evil. No vision or dream taught me. From experience, I recognized that people, like things, are fragile; that they are endlessly imbricated; that intention and effect often have no relation; that I, insofar as I knew myself, contained malice, and that other people did too, because I’d suffered theirs. At a young age, I vowed to be “unselfish,” my version of harm being equated with the primacy of the self. I’ve developed a more sophisticated morality, but that vow is deeply embedded. I do, in fact, seek to be good, despite the inevitability of failure. I don’t think this is just a hangover of childhood habit; in the Bible I have found truth as well as beauty, and in theologians like James Cone and Howard Thurman, among many others, I have found a vision of Christianity written by and for the oppressed. […] Do you see God everywhere? Now what will you do?

— Elisa Gonzalez, in “No Good Has Come: Marilynne Robinson’s testimony for the white church”

i'm tired of reading about women having unfulfilling sex with their male partners and religious guilt and how the internet is affecting our ability to connect with each other and ultraspecific references to name-brand products and disaffected writers writing disaffected prose about how disaffected they are and thinly-veiled elite university campuses and conspicuously nameless first-person protagonists and bargain bin nihilism and sparse utilitarian language and marriage plots and conflicted feelings about motherhood and metacommentary and vaguely liberal politics. i want to read just one beautiful sentence