Sekhmet

“The Sephiroth are also imagined as ten shells or casings around the innermost core of En Soph, the formless and ineffable centre of all being.

The Cabbalists called meditation on this Nothing-in-Everything, extrapolating from a verse in the Song of Solomon (6, 11), "Going down into the garden of nuts".

Shakespeare refers to this when he has Hamlet say, "O God! I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself a king of infinite space".

And Joyce in Finnegans Wake:

"Mark Time's Finist Joke.

Putting Allspace in a Notshall".

Image: Sephiroth scroll, Poland, 19th century.

From “Alchemy & Mysticism” by Alexander Roob (2011).

by choosing to stay in the cycle they broke the cycle btw. because the cycle relies on the unwillingness of its participants. “every time you find yourself here it’s because [your outie] chose to come back.” almost every time their outies brought them there it was against their will. but the outies weren’t going to bring them back this time. so they simply didn’t leave.

Emily Dickinson

I have two groups of comfort shows: the ones that completely destroy me emotionally, and the ones that are just super light hearted comedies and slice of lifes. The second category makes sense as a comfort show but it's just ironic that the shows that have me bawling all the way through, somehow, bring me some comfort.

Will Graham not being scared of Hannibal, but so, so scared of loving Hannibal, being loved by Hannibal, wanting a life with Hannibal and what surrendering to that means about him. Gouging my eyes out btw.

I think Ian and Poppy had to kiss eventually. Not in a rooting for the romance kind of way but their relationship is so knotted up, they are neither platonic or romantic but a secret confused murky third thing. They know how to fight, they can argue and bicker and torture each other - we've seen how they hate other characters with Poppy and her sister's relationship or how Ian's relationship with his son. Hatred is comfortable for them, they understand it. They don't understand love though. Neither were ever shown kind and safe love (Ian's mother's love was shaped by her illness and Poppy's father's love was shaped by her mother, it was the most kind love they know but respectively, it's slightly tainted). They both see love as a tangible physical thing rather than one that can exist in the same vocal medium as their hatred can. They love each other, they hate each other. They don't know how to express it other than furthering blurring the lines.

I’ll stop goncharov posting soon but can I just say how fascinating it is to me that the genre we picked was cold war mafia movie? because if you had asked the internet a month ago what kind of film tumblr would invent, if tumblr were to invent a film, the answers would have been way more woke. a queer coming of age romance or a sexy heist with a super diverse cast or live action infinity train or whatever.

instead, the hive mind, the collective, latched on to something with much narrower boundaries, with stricter rules. no cold war mafia movie would have “good gay rep” or “a happy ending”, like you might expect tumblr to want. we want, we made, something rife with hidden truths, deception and manipulation, suppressed and sublimated emotions. it’s a movie rife with symbolism and suggestion, a text that needs to be unpicked and puzzled over, not one that spoonfeeds us a morally pure protagonist.

the website famous for our shithouse reading comprehension made this complex metatext about methods of interpreting an ambiguous artwork and that’s given me more hope for humanity than I’ve gotten from the internet in a long goddamn time

So what I do is I read books that came out this year exclusively in print and I read decades-old classic literature in my emails.

Mainly I do this in order to defy god’s will.

guys guys i finally watched Goncharov so here's a quick thing