feeling rather adulterous

in bed with one, thinking of another.

if I could just leave my body for the night

then we could be dancing
no more missing you while I am gone

(animal collective, in the flowers)

Deborah Mitford (16) to Unity Mitford (22 and friends with Hitler) [1936]

Dear Bird

Would you send me a letter with a German stamp & an Olympic Games stamp on it like you sent to Muv because Sex Hay longs for one. DON'T FORGET.

I've started a new National Movement & its slogan is FOOD & DIRT. That's what we stand for. There are 3 members. It started with Peter Ramsbotham & me & then Sex joined.

It's called Nourishilism.

It's a very swell movement.

Goodness the weather.

Jaky [the dachshund] sends his love.

Isn't it wicked about the bombing of the Alhambra. If only all the Spaniards could be converted to Nourishilism it would never have happened. THE BRUTES.

Well DON'T FORGET about the Olympic stamp.

Hail Food!

Hail Dirt!

Hail our leader Ramsbotham!

Yours in National Nourishilism, Dawly

in The Mitfords, Letters Between Six Sisters

just like that always going back to the perfect shape of your face I could stay here knowing you there a whole body tumultuously hiding behind bold letters while fingers slow down over my desire to sleep this day is not a day it is a story of heroes who open doors and cry I will tell you one day now come back to bed and make me some dreams you know you are my favourite narrator

The Three Oddest Words

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no non-being can hold.

by Wislawa Szymborska

feeling rather pleonastic

picture by baptist. via sabino

nothingbadmag.com

illustration: Ferry Gouw

It's happened to me once, twice, perhaps three times in my life to feel an unconditional devotion to someone. The other recipients have gone on their way. You remain. There is no substitute for this sort of sentiment & no mistaking it when it occurs. If it does nothing else, it shows up the inferior imitations.

I wish I could give you something. If anything comes out of this novel (or its successor), it's all yours - as is everything else I have if you would. I love you, I love you absolutely and unconditionally - thank God for being able to say this with the whole heart.

I feel reluctant to close this letter because I know that I shan't feel so frank later on. Not that my feelings will have altered, ça ne change pas, but I shall feel more acutely the futility at these sort of exclamations. At this moment I am, même malgré toi, in communication with you in a way which may not be repeated. If your letters to me could be slightly less impersonal I should be glad. Mais ça ne ce choisit pas. I have become used to write impersonally too, & this was a mistake. My dear, it happens to me so rarely to be able to write a letter so wholeheartedly - almost the last but one was a letter I wrote to you in 1946. I love you as much as then. More, because of the passage of time.

Forgive what in this letter is purely 'tiresome'. Accept what you can. If there is anything here which can give you pleasure or could in any bad moment give you comfort I should be very happy. I love you so deeply that I can't help feeling that it must 'touch' you somehow, even without your knowing it. Again, don't be distressed. There is so much I should like to have said to you, & may one day. I don't want to stop writing - I feel I'm leaving you again. My very very dear Queneau - 

I

Iris Murdoch writing to Raymond Queneau, August 24th, 1952

in Granta magazine, issue 111

drive-in saturday

 

She's uncertain if she likes him
But she knows she really loves him
It's a crash course for the ravers

It's a Drive-in Saturday

slowly unbutton your chest. one by one: the buttons, the skin, the bones you'll uncover transparent, transpired, transposable. slowly unbutton your chest and listen: it rains there all the time.

revisiting

she came back, and just like the ink fails at the first attempt on a white sheet of paper she hesitated in the first steps of her return. and how she wanted to tell him that that was life: to nestle your arms around someone else's arms. she came back with a pair of scissors in one hand and a clock in the other. a quarter past twelve. she counted nine curls in her hair, then eight, then seven, then six. she had half a day to tell the world - to tell him - that she too wanted a garden like from here to there and randomly spread seeds ignoring the seasons and that she loved winter as much as he did. she counted five, then four, then three. she had a quarter less. a quarter of an hour that could have been a quarter of a minute, of a second, a quarter that could have belonged to them both. she counted two and then one. she came back and said: one day I'll stop measuring time in days and hours and minutes and seconds. a day will be forever. or as long as I want it to be.

o amor é uma cidade a arranhar o céu cinzento

come on skinny love what happened here

picture where you'd like to go

Ayl was a happy inhabitant of the silence that reigns where all vibration is excluded; for her anything that looked likely to break the absolute visual neutrality was a harsh discord; beauty began for her only where the grayness had extinguished even the remotest desire to be anything other than gray. 

How could we understand each other? No thing in the world that lay before our eyes was sufficient do express what we felt for each other, but while I was in a fury to wrest unknown vibrations from things, she wanted to reduce everything to the colorless beyond their ultimate substance.

"Without Colors", Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino

pitcture via hermanas miranda