Nervous Awe And Apprehension Are Born Out Of Proximity And Attention. The Greater The Intimacy Between

“You / bring out the sea in me, so wade. / Wade in this.”

— Jasmine Reid, from “Instructions for the Moon,” Deus Ex Nigrum

‘Agamemnon,’ Aeschylus (translated by Anne Carson)

and how it's hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.

Ada Limón, Mowing

“I am the ocean; the earth; whatever dies for you.”

— Alice Notley, from In The Pines: Poems; “The Black Trailor (A Noir Fiction),” (via loveage-moondream)

The first rule of war is sympathy with the enemy.

Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us

I would count the number of times we had made love. I felt that each time something new had been added to our relationship but that somehow this very accumulation of touching and pleasure would eventually draw us apart. We were burning up a capital of desire. What we gained in physical intensity we lost in time.

Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

the poets are only the interpreters of the gods by whom they are severally possessed.

Plato, Ion tr. Benjamin Jowett

We live by the waters breaking out of the heart.

Anne Carson, Kinds of Water

i) robert browning / eurydice to orpheus (1864) ii) w.a. mozart / “parto, parto” (la clemenza di tito, 1791) iii) jessica waldoff / recognition in mozart’s operas (2006) iv) c.w. gluck / orfeo ed euridice (1762) v) catherine maxwell / the female sublime from milton to swinburne: bearing blindness (2001) vi) gerald griffin / the collegians (1829) film stills from portrait de la jeune fille en feu (sciamma, 2019)

her eyes are pure stars, and her fingers, if they touch you, freeze you to the bone.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando