“I Just Want To Be Kind In A World That Isn’t”

Comic-con portraits for TV Insider ↳ Photography by Maarten de Boer

Devin Kelly, from “All the Other Dogs Screaming” 

Vladimir Mayakovsky, Volodya: Selected Works; from ‘I love’, tr. George Reavey

i miss you more than i remember you

clementine von radics / c. c. aurel / miles johnston / ranata suzuki / clementine von radics / sue zhao / madeline miller / lily thula / salma deera / clementine von radics / shelby eileen / jedaleyjd via pinterest / holly warburton / mary oliver / mitski / sea wolf / nickie zimov / the mountain goats

November mood

this December i refuse to be sad this december i will wake up and read this rilke quote every morning because damn he’s right life has not forgotten me it holds me in its hand and will not let me fall

something else i've been thinking about lately is how much more alive houses are to people who experience domestic abuse. some things in the house are protectors - the door to your room that swings shut behind you without you pushing it, the stairs that always creak loud enough to let you know that someone's coming before they get there... whereas other things are alive with malice - the cabinets that slam and the dishes that break, the vacuum cleaner that always manages to sound angry and accusing. the whole house listens, and the whole house remembers, and everything takes sides.

“The role of the artist is exactly the same role, I think, as the role of the lover. If you love somebody, you honor at least two necessities at once. One of them is to recognize something very dangerous, or very difficult. Many people cannot recognize it at all, that you may also be loved; love is like a mirror. In any case, if you do love somebody, you honor the necessity endlessly, and being at the mercy of that love, you try to correct the person whom you love. Now, that’s a two-way street. You’ve also got to be corrected. As I said, the people produce the artist, and it’s true. The artist also produces the people. And that’s a very violent and terrifying act of love. The role of the artist and the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see. Insofar as that is true, in that effort, I become conscious of the things that I don’t see. And I will not see without you, and vice versa, you will not see without me. No one wants to see more than he sees. You have to be driven to see what you see. The only way you can get through it is to accept that two-way street which I call love. You can call it a poem, you can call it whatever you like. That’s how people grow up. An artist is here not to give you answers but to ask you questions.”

— James Baldwin, “The Black Scholar Interviews James Baldwin,” Conversations with James Baldwin (edited by Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt)

I was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it.

I don’t know what I’m saying. I guess what I mean is that sometimes I don’t know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was. Can you hear me yet? Can you read me?

—Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous