Secret Belief

Take your time to read the quote below and put your prejudices on pause. Skip lesbian. Pause on womon and womyn. Skip the last name of the author. She claims that all individual homo sapiens of the female gender have a secret belief. The belief that she is on the edge of madness and is losing control. Almost every woman!

 

 

Question:  Why is it kept secret? Why be on guard? (Is the claim still valid after 44 years?) Please lose control! Show me your temper, appetite, sexuality, feelings, ambition, secret fantasies, and mind. I'll be in a womanlike listening and questioning mode; and not in a manlike problem solving one. And if you want I'll not even ask questions.

P.S. Source: Elana Dykewomon, 'Notes for a Magazine'. In: Sinister Wisdom. A Journal for the Lesbian Imagination in the Arts and Politics. Number 36 (Winter 1988/89), 'Surviving Psychiatric Assault & Creating Emotional Well-Being in Our Communities'. Copy: here.

Metaphysical Optimism

The past 2,500 years (rounded) of western culture summarized by Pouwel Slurink in 'Can Evolution Explain Evil?' (2020):
 

"In this sense, Darwinism puts an end to the ‘metaphysical optimism’ of Parmenides, Pythagoras, Plato, Aquinas, Leibniz, Voltaire, Hegel ... For Platonism, evil comes from a domain in which the perfection of the world has not penetrated or is not properly understood. For Christianity, it results from bad decisions. For Enlightenment thinkers, it result from bad thinking. For Darwinism, ‘evil’ is a somewhat subjective, umbrella term for the many forms of misery that organisms undergo because they are the product of a partly inherently cruel chance process."

P.S. Mount Sarmiento, Chile in the distance, and a sight of HMS Beagle. Drawing made in 1834 by Conrad Martens (1801-1878).. Source: here.

Tell Me About Tomorrow

P.S. This song from Levante can be found: here. The source of the picture: here.

To Seduce with Words

What is love and when does it come - if ever?

Jacques Audiard, in NRC 27-4-2022 (discussion about movie 'Les Olympiades' from 2022): in times of Tinder, the discourse of love is differently than for the generations before. In the movie 'Ma nuit chez Maud' (1969) two people talk all night about love, it doesn't come to sex, they seduce each other with words. For the Tinder generation it is very common to have sex on the first meeting. The question then is: where and when does love begin? Earlier in the prelude to the first sex, now sometime after.

 

Smell of Rain

And 

... taking a long walk,

... drinking a glass of water and consider it not ordinary,

... reading a book 

... - there must be so much more.
 

P.S. The quote is from Brooke Hampton: here. And the picture is from Alessandro Puccinelli: here.

The First Kiss

Did you know that the cover of the album 'The First of A Million Kisses' (1988) is from Elliott Erwitt? And was made in 1955?

 

The original of this picture is even more beautiful.

P.S. Here the original can be found as picture 23 of 23.

Written Over (Not Erased)

What a beautiful book: Edmund de Waal, ‘The Hare With Amber Eyes. A Hidden Inheritance’ (Vintage, 2011). Art, family history, history of the world, and wealth acquired and taken away woven together. With taste. A book that hurts. Just read it.

Page 258-259:

"So, on 12th August 1938, Ephrussi and Co. is taken off the business register [in Vienna, Austria]. In the records it says, singularly, ERASED. Three months later the name is changed to Bankhaus CA Steinhausser. Under its new name it is revalued, and under its new Gentile ownership is worth six times as much as under Jewish ownership.
There is no longer a Palais Ephrussi and there is no longer an Ephrussi Bank in Vienna. The Ephrussi family has been cleansed from the city.
It is on this visit that I go to the Jewish archive in Vienna, the one seized by Eichmann, to check up on the details of a marriage. I look through a ledger to find Viktor, and there is an official red stamp cross his first name. It reads 'Israel'. An edict decreed that all Jews had to take new names. Someone has gone through every single name in the lists of Viennese Jews and stamped them: 'Israel' for the men, 'Sara' for the women.
I am wrong. The family is not erased, but written over. And, finally, it is this that makes me cry."

Page 347:

"There are the places in memory you do not wish to go with others. In the 1960s, my grandmother Elisabeth, (...), burnt the hundreds of letters and notes she had received from her poetic grandmother Evelina.
Not 'Who would be interested? 'But 'Don't come near this. This is private.'
(...) There is something about that burning of all those letters that gives me pause: why should everything be made clear and be brought into the light? Why keep things, archive your intimacies? Why not let thirty years of shared conversation go spiralling in ash up into the air of Tunbridge Wells? Just because you have it does not mean you have to pass it on. Losing things can sometimes gain you a space in which to live."

P.S. There is an exhibition of The Ephrussis at the Jewish Museum in Vienna, Austria. Review from the pinklookbook: here.

Trinity

 

Summer Letter

 Another poem from Salome Benidze (source: here):

When an octopus is such a creature of the sea. The taste of salt.

As One Who Had to Come

"Vieste do fim do mundo
Num barco vagabundo
Vieste como quem tinha que vir
Para contar histórias e verdades
Vontades e carinhos
Promessas e mentiras
De quem de porto em porto
Amar se faz
Vieste de repente
De olhar tão meigo e quente
Bebeste a celebrar
À volta tua
Tomaste-me em teus braços
Em marinheiros laços
Tocaste no meu corpo
Uma canção que em vil magia
Me fez tua"

P.S. Part of the song 'Vieste Do Fim Do Mundo' from Gisela João. I love this video (here): the movements, the play with light and shades, and its lyrics.