this is my inspirationlog; none of these snippets are mine unless they're tagged so. ♥ livejournal twitter facebook
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Maiden’s Hair - discretion
Lily (Eucharis) - maiden charms
Mountain Laurel - ambition
White Poppy - sleep, my antidote
Clematis - mental beauty, art
Moschatel - weak but winning
Lily of the Valley - return of happiness
Butterfly Weed - let me go
Pyrus Japonica - fairies’ fire
Asphodel - my regrets follow you to the grave
White Rose (dried) - death preferable to loss of innocence
Witch Hazel - a spell
French Honeysuckle - rustic beauty
Henbane - imperfection
Laburnum - forsaken, pensive beauty
Weeping Willow - mourning
Dead leaves - sadness
Locust Tree (green) - affection beyond the grave
Camellia (pink) - longing
Gerbera - innocence
Lobelia - malevolence
Amaryllis - pride, splendid beauty
Persimmon - bury me amid nature’s beauties
Carnation (green) - secret symbol of the followers of Oscar Wilde
Helenium - tears
Larkspur - lightness, levity
Hawthorn - hope
Auricula - painting
Queen Anne’s Lace - fantasy
Eglantine - a wound to heal
(Source: rosythumbelina)
Georg Baselitz, The Gleaner, 1978
From the Guggenheim:
The dark of night laps at the edges of The Gleaner (1978), a fire burns on the upper left, and a sunlike shape hovers beneath the lone figure. Yet Georg Baselitz’s monumental, somber work was painted during a decade of well-being in Germany, when the generation of the wirtschaftswunder—the economic miracle—was interrupted in its relentless quest for stable prosperity only by the occasional political scandal or terrorist attack. How does this image, so clearly a representation of an existentialist condition, address the complex issues facing postwar German art and society?
The key lies in the orientation of the gleaner, searching for sustenance in a barren landscape: the figure is depicted upside down. Baselitz has used this device consistently since 1969–70, his intention being, in part, to subvert the criteria for viewing paintings. To this end, Baselitz inverts, and thus negates, the subjects of his work. He cites but does not pay homage to the mythic protagonists that, as in Wagner’s epic operas, have so often been the focus of German art and culture. For Baselitz, the individual is the locus of redemption and the cause for despair. He has painted a great number of his antiheroes in guises ranging from military costumes to stark nudity.
“ Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. ”
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (via kosdetermination)
“ Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together. ”
Anais Nin (via kari-shma)
There once was a young person name Red Riding Hood who lived with her mother on the edge of a large wood. One day her mother asked her to take a basket of fresh fruit and mineral water to her grandmother’s house – not because this was womyn’s work, mind you, but because the deed was generous and helped engender a feeling of community. Furthermore, her grandmother was not sick, but rather was in full physical and mental health and was fully capable of taking care of herself as a mature adult.
So Red Riding Hood set off with her basket through the woods. Many people believed that the forest was a foreboding and dangerous place and never set foot in it. Red Riding Hood, however, was confident enough in her own budding sexuality that such obvious Freudian imagery did not intimidate her. On the way to Grandma’s house, Red Riding Hood was accosted by a wolf. who asked her what was in her basket. She replied, “Some healthful snacks for my grandmother, who is certainly capable of taking care of herself as a mature adult.”
The wolf said, “You know, my dear, it isn’t safe for a little girl to walk through these woods alone.”
Red Riding Hood said, “I find your sexist remark offensive in the extreme, but I will ignore it because of your traditional status as an outcast from society, the stress of which has caused you to develop your own, entirely valid, worldview. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must be on my way.”
Red Riding Hood walked on along the main path. But, because his status outside society had freed him from slavish adherence to linear, Western-style thought, the wolf knew a quicker route to Grandma’s house. He burst into the house and ate Grandma, an entirely valid course of action for a carnivore such as himself. Then, unhampered by rigid, traditionalist notions of what was masculine or feminine, he put on Grandma’s nightclothes and crawled into bed.
Red Riding Hood entered the cottage and said, “Grandma, I have brought you some fat free, sodium-free snacks to salute you in your role of a wise and nurturing matriarch.”
From the bed, the wolf said softly, “Come closer, child, so that I might see you.”
Red Riding Hood said, “Oh, I forgot you are as optically challenged as a bat. Grandma, what big eyes you have!”
“They have seen much, and forgiven much, my dear.”
“Grandma, what a big nose you have, only relatively, of course, and certainly attractive in its own way.”
“It has smelled much, and forgiven much, my dear.”
“Grandma, what big teeth you have!”
The wolf said, “I am happy with who I am and what I am,” and leaped out of bed. He grabbed Red Riding Hood in his claws, intent on devouring her. Red Riding Hood screamed, not out of alarm at the wolf’s apparent tendency toward cross dressing, but because of his willful invasion of her personal space.
Her screams were heard by a passing woodchopperperson (or log-fuel technician, as he preferred to be called). When he burst into the cottage, he saw the melee and tried to intervene. But as he raised his ax, Red Riding Hood and the wolf both stopped.
“And just what do you think you’re doing?” asked Red Riding Hood.
The woodchopper-person blinked and tried to answer, but no words came to him.
“Bursting in here like a Neanderthal, trusting your weapon to do your thinking for you!” she exclaimed. “Sexist! Speciesist! How dare you assume that womyn and wolves can’t solve their own problems without a man’s help!”
When she heard Red Riding Hood’s impassioned speech, Grandma jumped out of the wolf’s mouth, seized the woodchopperperson’s ax, and cut his head off. After this ordeal, Red Riding Hood, Grandma, and the wolf felt a certain commonality of purpose. They decided to set up an alternative household based on mutual respect and cooperation, and they lived together in the woods happily ever after.
*
This is ingenious!
About a year ago, I had the chance to attend a symposium hosted by Fountain House, a wonderful mental health charity. The honoree was Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, who spoke powerfully and unsentimentally about her experiences with bipolar disorder and the stigma she faced in going public with these struggles. (I recommend her memoir, An Unquiet Mind, to anyone.)
Dr. Jamison made one point that has really stuck with me. ”It’s only untreated people you see,” she pointed out. The “face” of mental illness is the schizophrenic man on the subway; the woman talking to herself on a street corner, the violent criminal. But here’s the thing: for every one of those people, there are probably a thousand living healthy, productive lives thanks to care and medication. The success rate is high. And yet, such is the stigma attached to mental illness that all these success stories will stay hidden and invisible, thereby perpetuating the fiction that mental illness is essentially untreatable.
Of course, there are degrees of illness, and I am not even going to get into the systemic problems with our health care. What I do want to talk about is the bravery of people like Dr. Jamison who, against the advice of colleagues, have gone public with their experiences. It’s only through people talking openly that these stigmas will begin to be erased - that we can realize how much medical technology has developed, and that there’s no shame in getting help or treatment.
My own struggles have been small by comparison, and my voice is a small one, but I too have dealt with the debilitating effects of manic-depression, and more to the point, the shame and sense of failure that went with it. But I am here to say that, thanks to good care and (yes) good drugs, I am happy, productive, well, and live a life filled with functional relationships and good friends. It makes some people uncomfortable to hear about such things, but I think it’s important.
Jamison quoted from her memoir in the talk I heard:
“I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one’s work, and give final meaning and color to one’s loves and friendships.”
Unknown language found stamped in ancient clay tablet
In deciphering the tablet seen above, John MacGinnis of the University of Cambridge found that many of the names on the list are not from any currently known ancient language. “One or two are actually Assyrian and a few more may belong to other known languages of the period, such as Luwian or Hurrian,” he says, “but the great majority belong to a previously unidentified language.”
» via New Scientist
“ My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated. ”
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978)
“ There is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave—under the deep deep sea,
Or in the wide desert where no life is found,
Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;
No voice is hush’d—no life treads silently,
But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free,
That never spoke, over the idle ground:
But in green ruins, in the desolate walls
Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,
Though the dun fox, or wild hyena, calls,
And owls, that flit continually between,
Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan,
There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone. ”
Thomas Hood, Silence (via fetishofsilence)
“ The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. ”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (via beautyisanillusion)
(Source: creatingaquietmind)
“ Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. ”
Hellen Keller (via cinderellainrubbershoes)
“ No matter how much we learn, the vision science offers — of ourselves and of the universe — will always be incomplete and consequently imperfect. Stories of gods, angels and rainbow horses will persist in the gaps. ”
Maud Newton, “My Son Went to Heaven and All I Got Was a No. 1 Bestseller” (via millionsmillions)
“[Here is] a profound conviction: that the neglected education of my fellow creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore; and that women in particular, are rendered weak and wretched by a variety of concurring causes, originating from one hasty conclusion. The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove, that their minds are not in a healthy state; for, like the flowers that are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity. One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men, who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than rational wives; and the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their FASCINATING graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists—I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them, that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt. ”
Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792
(via fetishofsilence)
An amazing, insightful view of gender politics and structures of patriarchal society. Even more profound for its relevance over 300 years later.
