I Just Think Blood’s Neat :]

Is it possible to develop a voice in writing with such coherence and quiet authority that I can do away with narrative structure? (Plot?) In the dream story, all that’s holding it together now is the voice, and maybe the imagery—holding it together against its own tendency to fragment, to fly apart. The pieces want to return to some other order—not with each other—but I compel them quite quietly to hold together my way.

from One Day I'll Remember This Diaries 1987–1995 by Helen Garner

did you let me die in your arms in the timeloop

— from Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

"[...] Revising the perceived sad ending of the entry, Geryon again borrows from “Red Meat,” this time its final fragment, writing, “All over the world the beautiful red breezes went on blowing hand/ in hand,” shifting away from self-centering and instead highlighting red’s continuance without him and its propensity for connection, despite Geryon’s own alienation. Redness is not exclusive to boys but can belong to breezes too."

— from Anne Carson: “Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros” by Kristi Maxwell

oh my favorite trope? two people who go through something so unique and agonizing and entirely beyond words that they have no choice but to create a bond that transcends all other types of love, thus acting as the sole point of understanding for the other person in a world that cannot fathom what they’ve been through

that pose was too cute, had to make it fitzier...

Sometimes when I am reading a Greek text I force myself to look up all the words in the dictionary, even the ones I think I know. It is surprising what you learn that way. Some of the words turn out to sound quite different than you thought. Sometimes the way they sound can make you ask questions you wouldn't otherwise ask. Lately I have begun to question the Greek word sophrosyne. I wonder about this concept of self-control and whether it really is, as the Greeks believed, an answer to most questions of human goodness and dilemmas of civility. I wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another human essence than self.

from "The Gender of Sound" by Anne Carson

Sketch

une passion pour jeanne d’arc, stella tennant by paolo roversi for vogue paris february 1994

doomed by the narrative but not to death. doomed to survive. doomed to stay alive inside the story. doomed to never escape the narrative, not even through death. you are allowed no exit. there is no way out for you and there never was. you couldn’t die if you wanted to. the narrative has a hold on you and it won’t let go. death is too sweet a doom for you. the story has something much worse in mind. there is no way out.