Many places have a “forest that shouldn’t be entered.” Even people who are used to working in the mountains feel there is something there. They are suddenly overcome with fear and it becomes the custom to avoid certain places. These places exist. I don’t know what is there, but I think they are real. I’m not a believer in the occult, but the world is more than we can fathom with our five senses. This world doesn’t exist just for humans. So I think it’s all right to have such things. This is why I think it’s a mistake to think about nature from the idea of efficiency, that forests should be preserved because they are essential for human beings …
I am concerned, because for me the deep forest is connected in some way to the darkness deep in my heart. I feel that if it is erased, then the darkness inside my heart would also disappear, and my existence would grow shallow.
Hayao Miyazaki, “Totoro Was Not Made as a Nostalgia Piece”, Starting Point: 1979-1996 (via perkwunos)
“[I]n horror, people do come back, but they’re never the same. It’s a deep human fantasy. I sometimes want to squeeze my eyes shut and open them again, and find that my mother isn’t dead, though she’s been dead for eight or nine years now. In poetry classes in the 1980s I was taught Lacan’s theory that the separation from your mother marks your entry into the Symbolic Order. Language acts are about this tragic separation. Writing is always equally about loss and gaining. It gives you the world while you’re writing, but you’re writing about things that aren’t there. So it’s always about loss. I’m writing about my childhood now, and it’s like writing about death in the other direction, because that world is so unavailable.”
- Dodie Bellamy, The White Review, November 2016
“I heard a story once of a woman in the Sahara who, for years, carried a single page of Anna Karenina that she read over & over, the long combers of print repeating like the waves of the black maria. Language is something like this. A hard studying of cells under a microscope, cells on their way to becoming other things: a person, a book, a moon.”
— Aracelis Girmay, “The Black Maria,” from the black maria (via bostonpoetryslam)
“I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad. Only the privileged - those with homes and food and the luxury of time in a home - are touched, moved, sometimes changed by literature. For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy. What do stars look like on a clear cold winter night, when your children are hungry, are daily losing their very health; or when, alone, you look up from a heat grate? Of course in cities at night you can’t even see the stars.”
— Andre Dubus, “After Twenty Years”
“The point from which politics starts for me is hunger. Nothing less.”
—
John Berger, A Painter of Our Time: A Novel
“A great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when [Simone Weil] heard the news she had wept: these tears compelled my respect much more than her gifts as a philosopher. I envied her having a heart that could beat right across the world. I managed to get near her one day. I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry,’ she snapped.”
— Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
“No, no, I do not feel sorry for those who die of hunger. What I feel is rage.”
— Clarice Lispector, “Dies Irae”
“You and your friends fill your mouths with big words–Social Justice, Freedom, Revolution–and meanwhile people waste away, they fall ill, many of them die. Speeches don’t feed people. What the people need are fresh vegetables, and a good fish broth at least once a week. I’m only interested in the kinds of revolution that start off by getting people sat at the table.”
— José Eduardo Agualusa, A General Theory of Oblivion
“There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more.”
— Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
“Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.” - Bertolt Brecht
“My husband, photographer Michael Nye, once photographed in a West Bank Palestinian refugee camp for days, and was followed around by a little girl who wanted him to photograph her. Finally, he did — and she held up a stone with a poem etched into it. (This picture appears on the cover of my collection of poems, 19 Varieties of Gazelle — Poems of the Middle East). Through a translator, Michael understood that the poem was ‘her poem’ — that’s what she called it. We urged my dad to translate the verse, which sounded vaguely familiar, but without checking roundly enough, we quoted the translation on the book flap and said she had written the verse. Quickly, angry scholars wrote to me pointing out that the verse was from a famous Darwish poem. I felt terrible. I was meeting him for the first and last time the next week. Handing over the copy of the book sheepishly, I said: ‘Please forgive our mistake. If this book ever gets reprinted, I promise we will give the proper credit for the verse.’ He stared closely at the picture. Tears ran down his cheeks. ‘Don’t correct it,’ he said. ‘It is the goal of my life to write poems that are claimed by children.’”
— Naomi Shihab Nye, from her essay “Remembering Mahmoud Darwish”
ANNE CARSON
โThe Glass Essayโ from Glass, Irony, and God (1994);
personal photos, original edit
“Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism – to the blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea.”