when john berger said that the small things we do for each other are ‘commas of care’ and thinking now of every book that has been recommended to me and every song i’ve loved that has been shared with me and every movie i’ve watched because someone dear adored it and each one of those is a stitch in time, bright and gleaming, in whatever the pattern is of our own little lived-in tapestry of lives, and a placeholder for love bc when i come back to all these things, i come back to the love that gave them to me first, commas of care that let you pause and go on.
this is beautiful and also, your posts and compilations are so much this
“I don’t remember how to say home in my first language, or lonely, or light I remember only delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you, and shab bekheir, goodnight.”
Kaveh Akbar, ‘Do You Speak Persian?’
“I can’t speak my own language - Iesu, All those good words; And I outside them.”
R.S. Thomas, ‘Welsh’
“It’s an ancient story from yesterday evening called “Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,” called “Loss of the Homeplace and the Defilement of the Beloved,” called “I Want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs”.”
Li-Young Lee, ‘Immigrant Blues’
“The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don’t belong to English though I belong nowhere else.”
“You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw - but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of - something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clapclap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it - tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”
some time ago i read good omens and thought “great book, but what if crowley were gay, a great writer, and somewhat sexually involved with aziraphale?” and, me being me, i wrote a poem on this concept entitled “What If An Angel And A Demon Fell In Love? Wouldn’t That Be Nifty?” and today it won me a hundred fucking dollars in a poetry contest. so take that neil gaiman
Oh lover, you’re a triumph, an undone calamity As flagrantly forbidden as the fruit up Eden’s tree I’m coiled like a caliphate; your hand crawls up my thigh The only of the seven sins you never can deny
You’ll never say you love me, though; you can’t admit you care You won’t admit you love me like the drowning love the air You claim that I am nothing but the pride before the fall And maybe I have fallen, but I love you, after all
For I’m a devil; I can raise, then raze, than radiate I am a devil; I bleed black as ichor soaked in hate I am a devil; I deal in the secret side of pain Renunciation of salvation, dreamers down the drain.
And you’re an angel; you protect and guard all wondrous things You are an angel; you can rest the wide world on your wings You are an angel; you give the ineffable a voice You’re absolutes and absolution; I’m the thrill of choice.
Oh, lover, you are swords and crowns, crucifictitious tears, You’re covenants and convents and ecclesiastic years, Evangelist, avenger, Jonah in the wailing wall Pour plagues into the populace and kill the first sons, all
You want to say you love me like all demons love despair I want to say I love you like all angels love their prayer Oh lover, I’ll prostrate myself and never cut my hair, Oh lover, I have loved you since before the stars were there
You are an angel; you can lead the righteous in attack I am a devil; I can lead the wretched fighting back, I live to love you; it cleaves like a comet ’cross my soul You incarnation of creation I cannot control Though I cannot be holy, when I’m with you, I am whole.
I never hated my freckles actually. It’s funny, I’m in good spirits about my freckles always, I always have been. But there are times when a kid will look at me and go, “What is wrong with your face? Do you have like chicken pox? What are the dots on your face?” I never really, you know… You just gotta laugh it off, ’cause these are going to be here forever. It’s not like I can get rid of them, or want to get rid of them. Just got to love what you got.
Papercraft commission of the Golden Trio and their patronuses, which was an absolute delight to work on! I’d never actually done the HP kids in paper before (save for a very tiny Hermione years ago), so it was a treat to finally make them. Plus I got to try out a new technique with the patronuses, which are made from several layers of transparent paper for a slightly ghostly effect. Delightful!!
“Harry screamed, so loudly that he felt his throat might tear, and for a second he wanted to rush at Dumbledore and break him too; shatter that calm old face, shake him, hurt him, make him feel some tiny part of the horror inside Harry.”
