Princess, the age of some people can only be measured by the level of rot in them. And by that measure I’m ancient.
—Tennessee Williams, from “Sweet Bird of Youth”, A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays

I have no use for noble souls; what I need is an accomplice.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, in The Flies

For Beauty’s nothing
but the beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear,
and why we adore it so is because it serenely
disdains to destroy us.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt of The First Elegy (tr. by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender)

“The discovery of the horror tale at an early age was fortuitous for me. This sort of tale serves, in many ways, the very same purpose as fairy tales did in our childhood. It operates as a theater of the mind in which internal conflicts are played out. In these tales we can parade the most reprehensible aspects of our being: cannibalism, incest, parricide. It allows us to discuss our anxieties and even to contemplate the experience of death in absolute safety.
And again, like a fairy tale, horror can serve as a liberating or repressive social tool, and it is always an accurate reflection of the social climate of its time and the place where it gets birthed.”
– Guillermo del Toro, “Haunted Castles, Dark Mirrors”

“Horror violates the taken-for-granted ‘natural’ order. It blurs boundaries and mixes categories that are usually regarded as discrete to create…’[im]purity and danger.’ The anomaly manifests itself as the monster: a force that is unnatural, deviant, and possibly malformed. The monster violates the boundaries of the body in a two-fold manner: through the use of violence against other bodies…and through the disruptive qualities of its own body. The monster’s body is marked by the disruption of categories; it embodies contradiction. The pallor of the vampire, the weirdly oxymoronic ‘living dead’ signifies death, yet the sated vampire’s veins surge with the blood of its victim. The monster disrupts the social order by dissolving the basis of its signifying system, its network of differences: me/not me, animate/inanimate, human/nonhuman, life/death. The monster’s body dissolves binary differences.
The monster signifies what Julia Kristeva calls the ‘abject,’ that which does not ‘respect borders, positions, rules’—‘the place where meaning collapses’. Danger is born of this confusion because it violates cultural categories. This is why the destruction of the monster is imperitave; it is only when the monster is truly dead and subject to decay that it ceases to threaten the social order. Disintegration promises to reduce the monster to an undifferentiated mass, one that no longer embodies difference and contradiction, for ‘where there is no differentiation, there is no defilement’.”
– Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing

“Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity, the extraordinary to the commonplace”
― Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings

"Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.”
― Edward Gorey

"I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don’t have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn’t play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn’t watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you’re forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you’re genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don’t speak, why you don’t move, why you’ve created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you’ve left your other parts one by one."
― Ingmar Bergman

“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”
— D.W. Winnicott, (7 April 1896 – 25 January 1971) English paediatrician and psychoanalyst

I don’t call it sleep anymore.
I’ll risk losing something new instead—

like you lost your rosen moon, shook it loose.

But sometimes when I get my horns in a thing—
a wonder, a grief or a line of her—it is a sticky and ruined
fruit to unfasten from,

despite my trembling.

Let me call my anxiety, desire, then
Let me call it, a garden.

Maybe this is what Lorca meant
when he said, verde que te quiero verde—

because when the shade of night comes,
I am a field of it, of any ready to flower in my chest.

My mind in the dark is una bestia, unfocused,
hot. And if not yoked to exhaustion

beneath the hip and plow of my lover,
then I am another night wandering the desire field—

bewildered in its low green glow,

belling the meadow between midnight and morning.
Insomnia is like Spring that way—surprising
and many petaled.

the kick and leap of gold grasshoppers at my brow.

I am struck in the witched hours of want—

I want her green life. Her inside me
in a green hour I can’t stop.
Green vein in her throat green wind in my mouth

green thorn in my eye. I want her like a river goes, bending.
Green moving green, moving.

Fast as that, this is how it happens—
soy una sonámbula.

And even though you said today you felt better,
and it is so late in this poem, is it okay to be clear,
to say, I don’t feel good,

until I can smell its sweet smoke,
leave this thrashed field, and be smooth.

-Natalie Diaz, “From the Desire Field”

Out of context Ori is best Ori.

ori's a gem

Oh, I almost forgot:

There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobody is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind,
My bones turn to dark emeralds.
— James Wright, from “The Jewel Poem”


What can you know about a person? They shift in the light. You can’t light up all sides at once.
— Richard Siken, Portrait of Fryderyk in shifting light


Indeed, each several liquor corresponded, so he held, in taste with the sound of a particular instrument. Dry curacao, for instance, was like the clarinet with its shrill, velvety note; kummel like the oboe, whose timbre is sonorous and nasal; crême de menthe and anisette like the flute, at one and the same time sweet and poignant, whining and soft. Then, to complete the orchestra, comes kirsch, blowing a wild trumpet blast; gin and whisky, deafening the palate with their harsh outbursts of comets and trombones; liqueur brandy, blaring with the overwhelming crash of the tubas, while the thunder peals of the cymbals and the big drum, beaten might and main, are reproduced in the mouth by the rakis of Chios and the mastics.
— Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature


“… Now that it is raining, that night voices irrupt,
the belly of night, blue inspiration. That everything
collapses into itself; heroes flee, silence bellows, the
closed is open, part is whole, the ambiguous ambiguous.
Now that I lose myself in cities I have not yet been,
perplexed by the accident of things, by existence
heedless of meaning and vast and multiple and empty
as a poem addressed to God. That these lines at the
edge of my body finally consume the nonexistent and
its joy, this elusive interregnum that is myself, that
shady corner of the illegible garden where the deceitful
lady does her writing. And everything happens so
slowly, terror and tension, that future lost like an
affliction, desire that has been a vice for years, everything
happens as if brought along by a visitor, a part of
myself larger than I, which has an unfulfilled dream
whose idea escapes her like a promise. And nothing is
wrong with that, everything must learn to lose, to
return to the realm of the unknown, even the most
enduring love, the one that does not recognize itself.
Now that songs do not matter, or matter to the degree
to which they fail (because beauty is revealed-solely-
in what falters), that I am alone, alone in the blind
house, I, the sensual bride of dusk, and someone
whispers in my ear the art of gardening… .”

- María Negroni, from “Letter to Sèvres,” Night Journey

^Nice, I've been saying that for years.