“i Thirst For You. Don’t Walk Away From Me. Tell Me Everything, Even If You Have To Hurt Me A Little.

Martha Gellhorn, from a letter to William Walton featured in The Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

Michael Bazzett, from "Inside the Trojan Horse", The Echo-Chamber: Poems [transcript in ALT]

Anaïs Nin, from a diary entry featured in Trapeze: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1947-1955

Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

D. H. Lawrence, from The Complete Novels and Writings of D. H. Lawrence

1. Flame Nebula / 2. Orion Nebula

“The Flame Nebula sits on the eastern hip of Orion the Hunter, a constellation most easily visible in the northern hemisphere during winter evenings. The constellation of Orion is prominent in the evening sky throughout the world from about December through April of each year.” 🌌 WISE, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer.

he was saying we are in uncharted territory w AI and i said ya bc no one resisted it and he said well maybe there is no time and i said there is no time bc no one resisted. and i asked, do you know the rosenbergs? he said, yes they were executed, and i read him this excerpt from their last letter to their children: "Your lives must teach you, too, that good cannot flourish in the midst of evil; that freedom and all the things that go to make up a truly satisfying and worthwhile life, must sometime be purchased very dearly. Be comforted then that we were serene and understood with the deepest kind of understanding, that civilization had not as yet progressed to the point where life did not have to be lost for the sake of life; and that we were comforted in the sure knowledge that others would carry on after us." and i said that is what i mean, human civilization cannot progress when there has been so much oppression and not enough resistance and maybe we accept AI simply bc we are dumb. maybe humans are simply dumb and there is nothing more to it. but what about my capacity for reflection? AI has none, he agreed. what about my capacity to metabolize the external through the lens of my past experiences which, in turn, produces perspective? what abt all the labour that went into my loving you? what abt those sleepless nights? what abt the depths of my soul?

idk who will read this and idc. at least it is for no one or someone and not chatgpt. at least it's not spat out back at me. at least i'm revisiting a younger version of myself on tumblr as a grown woman. and then i remembered my ex best friend who thought she is not stupid bc she accepted the world is ending but we will hv so much fun together, at least. we will play and travel and laugh. and why pretend everything is fine, but on the other hand, why be sad about it? anyways. alice notley laughed at the question that poets sublimate. she said poets suffer and they write about how they perceive things after suffering. she said, i have never sublimated. in the office today i looked outside and my eyes welled w tears to see all my accomplishments manifest after so much pain. i felt all this gratitude, this is what i dreamed of - it's happening, it's rly happening. and then you said let's go out and look at the cherry blossoms and i said ok. the world is ending and i still suffer deeply and i still love deeply and what a beauteous thing.

April 5, 1915 Letters to Felice by Franz Kafka First published : 1973

“I said nothing to the woman I loved but gathered love’s adjectives into a suitcase and fled from all languages.”

— Nizar Qabbani, from “Language”

Freud said that we endlessly repeat past hurts, forever re-enacting the same patterns in a futile attempt to patch the un-healable wound. This, more than anything, is the terror of the personal, digital archive: not that it reveals some awful act from the past, some old self that no longer stands for us, but that it reminds us that who we are is in fact a repetition, a cycle, a circular relation of multiple selves to multiple injuries. It’s the self as a bundle of trauma, forever acting out the same tropes in the hopes that we might one day change.

Navneet Alang, "Terror of the Archive"