“Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?”
— Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia
— Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia
❤5
“Absent from other people’s meaning, alien, accidental with respect to naive happiness, I owe a supreme, metaphysical lucidity to my depression. On the frontiers of life and death, occasionally I have the arrogant feeling of being witness to the meaninglessness of Being, of revealing the absurdity of bonds and beings.
My pain is the hidden side of my philosophy, its mute sister. In the same way Montaigne’s statement “To philosophize is to learn how to die” is inconceivable without the melancholy combination of sorrow and hatred — which came to a head in Heidegger’s care and the disclosure of our “being-for-death.” without a bent for melancholia there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play.”
— Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia
My pain is the hidden side of my philosophy, its mute sister. In the same way Montaigne’s statement “To philosophize is to learn how to die” is inconceivable without the melancholy combination of sorrow and hatred — which came to a head in Heidegger’s care and the disclosure of our “being-for-death.” without a bent for melancholia there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play.”
— Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia
❤5
Paolo Monti
Photograph of Michelangelo's Rondanini Pietà 1564, installed at Castello Sforzesco in Milan
Civico Archivio Fotografico, Milano
c. 1956
[x]
Photograph of Michelangelo's Rondanini Pietà 1564, installed at Castello Sforzesco in Milan
Civico Archivio Fotografico, Milano
c. 1956
[x]
❤6
The First Poem
Chased into silver,
Side by side:
The images.
To have them tell you …
A many-crested roof,
To cut the wind and the birds as they pass.
North
go the snow, the birds and the grass
(not much industry, there).
An aerial
arabesque or ear,
Strung in the wind.
Greetings,
Goodbye.
Tree tree tree and tree
This is the song:
No time, no time to see the green before it bursts open.
Again it was spring,
The bird tried to sing, but its voice was confusion,
confusion:
Helpless,
Grass.
And there was a house,
And in it, a man, a woman, a child and an old woman,
Nine holes
in the soul.
Paavo Haavikko, The First Poem, from Selected Poems (Penguin modern European poets) : Paavo Haavikko, Tomas Tranströmer, trans. Anselm Hollo
Chased into silver,
Side by side:
The images.
To have them tell you …
A many-crested roof,
To cut the wind and the birds as they pass.
North
go the snow, the birds and the grass
(not much industry, there).
An aerial
arabesque or ear,
Strung in the wind.
Greetings,
Goodbye.
Tree tree tree and tree
This is the song:
No time, no time to see the green before it bursts open.
Again it was spring,
The bird tried to sing, but its voice was confusion,
confusion:
Helpless,
Grass.
And there was a house,
And in it, a man, a woman, a child and an old woman,
Nine holes
in the soul.
Paavo Haavikko, The First Poem, from Selected Poems (Penguin modern European poets) : Paavo Haavikko, Tomas Tranströmer, trans. Anselm Hollo
❤7
“The house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams. Each one of its nooks and corners was a resting-place for daydreaming. And often the resting-place particularized the daydream. Our habits of a particular daydream were acquired there. The house, the bedroom, the garret in which we were alone, furnished the framework for an interminable dream, one that poetry alone, through the creation of a poetic work, could succeed in achieving completely. If we give their function of shelter for dreams to all of these places of retreat, we may say, as I pointed out in an earlier works that there exists for each one of us an oneiric house, a house of dream-memory, that is lost in the shadow of a beyond of the real past.”
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
❤8👍1
“[…] Here we find ourselves at a pivotal point around which reciprocal interpretations of dreams, through thought and thought through dreams, keep turning. But the word interpretation hardens this about-face unduly. In point of fact, we are in the unity of image and memory, in the functional composite of imagination and memory. The positivity of psychological history and geography cannot serve as a touchstone for determining the real being of our childhood, for childhood is certainly
greater than reality.”
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
greater than reality.”
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
❤9