I Like
Strip, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts
Anonymous Gift, 1879 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
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Strip, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts
Anonymous Gift, 1879 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
...
im ready 2 see this tall 17 year old who looks like he finished the entire whey protein shake factory for breakfast get hurt for 6 minutes
I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough
to make every hour holy.
I am too small in the world, and yet not tiny enough
just to stand before you like a thing,
dark and shrewd.
I want my will, and I want to be with my will
as it moves towards deed;
and in those quiet, somehow hesitating times,
when something is approaching,
I want to be with those who are wise
or else alone.
I want always to be a mirror that reflects your whole being,
and never to be too blind or too old
to hold your heavy, swaying image.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere do I want to remain folded,
because where I am bent and folded, there I am lie.
And I want my meaning
true for you. I want to describe myself
like a painting that I studied
closely for a long, long time,
like a word I finally understood,
like the pitcher of water I use every day ,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that carried me
through the deadliest storm of all.
Man is this Night, this empty nothing that, in its simplicity, contains everything: an unending wealth of illusions and images which he remains unaware of—or which no longer exist. It is this Night, Nature’s interior, that exists here—pure self—in phantasmagorical imagery, where it is night everywhere… where, here, shoots a bloody head and, there, suddenly, another white shape—only to disappear all the same. We see this Night whenever we look into another’s eye—into a night that becomes utterly terrifying—wherein, truly, we find the Night of the World suspended.
Milan, I am heartened by your doggedly experimental approach to making these things, and I think your insticts are great in that domain - you seem drawn to genuinely new and interesting experiences - but I am going to keep pushing you to experiment *towards* some particular idea, rather than experimenting for its own sake. Your work will benefit from getting a clearer idea of what you want it to do, and from evaluating it as you go, to make sure you’re getting closer to your aims.
Healing and Freedom come from non-proliferation of our thoughts. Non-proliferation means we have the wisdom in our lives to pause and re-arrive in the present moment. We then can respond with intelligence instead of a kind of fear-based reaction.
The world was spinning like the most delicately tinted of bubbles, all light It was the mind of humanity that I saw, but this was not at all to be separated from the animal mind which married and fused with it everywhere. Nor was it a question of higher or lower… I watched a pulsing swirl of all being, continually changing, moving, dancing, a controlled impelled dance, held within its limits by its nature, and part of this necessity was the locking together of the inner pattern in light with me other world of stone, leaf, flesh and ordinary light…
And on this map or plan that showed how myriads of ridiculously self-important identities were reduced to a few, was another, different, but, in some places, matching pattern, of a stronger, rarer light (or sound) that varied and pulsed and changed like the rest but connected direct, made a link and a bridge, a feeding channel, between the outer (or inner, according to how one looked at it) web of thought or feeling, the pulsating bubble of subtle surrounding color, and the solid earthy watery globe of Man. Not only a link or a bridge merely, since this strand of humanity was open like so many vessels open to the rain, but part of the shimmering web of fluid joyful being, which was why the scurrying, hurrying, scrabbling, fighting, restless, hating, wanting little patches of humanity, the crusts of lichen or fungi growing here and mere on the globe, the sea’s children, were, in spite of their distance from the outer shimmering web, nevertheless linked with it always, since at every moment the glittering tension of singing light flooded into them, into the earthy globe, beating on its own delicious pulse of joy and creation.
When human beings found out about death
They sent the dog to Chukwu with a message:
They wanted to be let back to the house of life.
They didn’t want to end up lost forever
Like burnt wood disappearing into smoke
And ashes that get blown away to nothing.
Instead, they saw their souls in a flock at twilight
Cawing and headed back for the same old roosts
(The dog was meant to tell all this to Chukwu).
But death and human beings took second place
When he trotted off the path and started barking
At another dog in broad daylight just barking
Back at him from the far bank of a river.
And that was how the toad reached Chukwu first,
The toad who’d overheard in the beginning
What the dog was meant to tell. ‘Human beings’ he said,
(And here the toad was trusted absolutely),
'Human beings want death to last forever.’
Then Chukwu saw the people’s souls in birds
Coming towards him like black spots off the sunset
To where there were no roosts or nests or trees
And his mind reddened and darkened all at once
And nothing that the dog would tell him later
Could change that vision. Great chiefs and great loves
Obliterating light, the toad in mud,
The dog crying out all night behind the corpse house.
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore
And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it
It came and went too unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Returning like an animal at the house,
A courier blast that there and then
Lapsed ordinary. But not ever
After. And not now.
I always knew this would happen. If we should replace grand, universal narratives with small, local narratives, as Lyotard says, why shouldn’t these metanarratives be about Hyperborean Aryans from Atlantis?
Lo! I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold;
Grey hairs and golden leaves cry out
The year and I are old.
In youth I sought the prince of men,
Captain in cosmic wars,
Our Titan, even the weeds would show
Defiant, to the stars.
But now a great thing in the street
Seems any human nod,
Where shift in strange democracy
The million masks of God.
In youth I sought the golden flower
Hidden in wood or wold,
But I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold.