What do you think?
Rate this book
Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz
In these moments I hate language. I hate what words are like, I hate the idea of putting these preformed gestures on the tip of my tongue, or through my lips, or through the inside of my mouth, forming sounds to approximate something that's like a cyclone, or something that's like a flood, or something that's like a weather system that's out of control, that's dangerous, or alarming.... It just seems like sounds that have been uttered back and forth maybe now over centuries. And it always boils down to the same meaning within those sounds, unless you're more intense uttering them, or you precede them or accompany them with certain forms of violence.
—from The Weight of the Earth
Artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954—1992) was an important figure in the downtown New York art scene. His art was preoccupied with sex, death, violence, and the limitations of language. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Wojnarowicz began keeping audio journals, returning to a practice he'd begun in his youth. Weight of the Earth presents transcripts of these tapes, documenting Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.
In these taped diaries, Wojnarowicz talks about his frustrations with the art world, recounts his dreams, and describes his rage, fear, and confusion about his HIV diagnosis. Primarily spanning the years 1987-1989, recorded as Wojnarowicz took solitary road trips around the United States or ruminated in his New York loft, the audio journals are an intimate and affecting record of an artist facing death. By turns despairing, funny, exalted, and angry, this volume covers a period largely missing from Wojnarowicz's written journals, providing us with an essential new record of a singular American voice.
—from The Weight of the Earth
Artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954—1992) was an important figure in the downtown New York art scene. His art was preoccupied with sex, death, violence, and the limitations of language. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Wojnarowicz began keeping audio journals, returning to a practice he'd begun in his youth. Weight of the Earth presents transcripts of these tapes, documenting Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.
In these taped diaries, Wojnarowicz talks about his frustrations with the art world, recounts his dreams, and describes his rage, fear, and confusion about his HIV diagnosis. Primarily spanning the years 1987-1989, recorded as Wojnarowicz took solitary road trips around the United States or ruminated in his New York loft, the audio journals are an intimate and affecting record of an artist facing death. By turns despairing, funny, exalted, and angry, this volume covers a period largely missing from Wojnarowicz's written journals, providing us with an essential new record of a singular American voice.
181 pages, Paperback
First published March 2, 2018
50 people are currently reading
3829 people want to read
About the author
David Wojnarowicz
30 books335 followersDavid Wojnarowicz was a gay painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and activist who was prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s.
He was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, and later lived with his mother in New York City, where he attended the High School of Performing Arts for a brief period. From 1970 until 1973, after dropping out of school, he for a time lived on the streets of New York City and worked as a farmer on the Canadian border.
Upon returning to New York City, he saw a particularly prolific period for his artwork from the late 1970s through the 1980s. During this period, he made super-8 films, such as Heroin, began a photographic series of Arthur Rimbaud, did stencil work, played in a band called 3 Teens Kill 4, and exhibited his work in well-known East Village galleries.
In 1985, he was included in the Whitney Biennial, the so-called Graffiti Show. In the 1990s, he fought and successfully issued an injunction against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association on the grounds that Wojnarowicz's work had been copied and distorted in violation of the New York Artists' Authorship Rights Act.
Wojnarowicz died of AIDS on July 22, 1992. His personal papers are part of the Downtown Collection held by the Fales Library at New York University.
He was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, and later lived with his mother in New York City, where he attended the High School of Performing Arts for a brief period. From 1970 until 1973, after dropping out of school, he for a time lived on the streets of New York City and worked as a farmer on the Canadian border.
Upon returning to New York City, he saw a particularly prolific period for his artwork from the late 1970s through the 1980s. During this period, he made super-8 films, such as Heroin, began a photographic series of Arthur Rimbaud, did stencil work, played in a band called 3 Teens Kill 4, and exhibited his work in well-known East Village galleries.
In 1985, he was included in the Whitney Biennial, the so-called Graffiti Show. In the 1990s, he fought and successfully issued an injunction against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association on the grounds that Wojnarowicz's work had been copied and distorted in violation of the New York Artists' Authorship Rights Act.
Wojnarowicz died of AIDS on July 22, 1992. His personal papers are part of the Downtown Collection held by the Fales Library at New York University.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 93 reviews
February 4, 2026
When people look at you as a walking disease, a walking illness, a vessel of disease and death, they deny the very life that you carry. Writing would allow me to experience that living, in terms of words— in terms of getting all the thoughts that are boiling in the head of a person who can’t move, giving these thoughts access to movement. Despite the limitations of the body.
Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz ~~~ David Wojnarowicz
There is tremendous beauty in David Wojnarowicz's world. It is also a world of rage, loss and longing. All this is wrapped in his childhood ~~ a childhood enmeshed in violence he could never quite leave behind.
Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz is a book transcribed from audio tape journals, ranging from 1981, the time Wojnarowicz made Fuck You Faggot Fucker a collage work of two men making out on the map of North America, to 1989, when he finished his black and white photography pieces called The Weight of the Earth Part 1 and Part 2.
During his lifetime, Wojnarowicz made art that marries his inner world of sadness, anger, and loss with an external world of natural beauty and human destructiveness. His life was linked by abandonment and abuse as a child and, in later years, by the emotional and physical toll that HIV/AIDS exacted before he died at 37 in 1992.
In his teens, Wojnarowicz was selling his body to pay the rent and buy drugs. He began writing and making art at an early age and continued doing it feverishly for as long as he had the strength. Through drawings, photographs, collages, paintings, writings, music, and more, he doesn’t flinch from confronting homophobia and, with the onset of the AIDS epidemic, from calling out the hostile cultural climate, the invisibility and neglect of the queer community. The Wojnarowicz in Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz is the Wojnarowicz we mostly know: the artist as warrior.
Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz begins with a chronicle of a not-quite-relationship with a guy David meets in a park he doesn’t name. As Wojnarowicz starts getting to know this guy, he wonders: How can a complete stranger suddenly figure in your life so strong, to where you feel like you can’t possibly not explore a relationship with them? That if you were denied the chance to explore a relationship with them it would be terrible, that you’d be missing something that would probably change the course of your life or the direction of your thoughts.
These moments are especially revealing because they were recorded in real time, and transcribed in all their awkwardness. David has sex with this guy in the park and then as he starts to crave more intimacy. This is desire, sure, but more than that it is the desire for connection. David wants more. The other guy wants something else ~~ it may be more but it isn’t the more that David wants. He worries about being too much for this guy, about his art being too scary ~~ he thinks about throwing out anything that is too aggressive or upsetting, which is shocking to hear from someone whose whole body of work could be described in this way. He admits to thinking of throwing it away, so he doesn’t scare other people with his truth.
After Wojnarowicz's HIV diagnosis in 1988, he worries his sister will think he’s the wrong kind of gay, the slutty kind, and we see how he invoked and provoked these worlds in his work without shame, yet his own internal process was full of vulnerable ambivalence, a kind of double life.
In Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, his memoir from 1991, Wojnarowicz writes words can strip the power from a memory or an event. Words can cut the ropes of an experience. Breaking silence about an experience can break the chains of the code of silence. Post HIV diagnosis, Wojnarowicz is increasingly invested in manipulating language to tell a story, rather than letting the words assume authority over his space. Many of the recordings from 1988 to 1989 are retellings and analyses of dreams, & observations regarding the stories people have told themselves about his art. As he struggles in both his intellectual and artistic endeavors to the pre-invented world, he increasingly notices the unreliability of language in the face of experience. The recordings suggest an attempt to identify a way in which his words echo exclusively with the hum of his own thoughts, rather than mirror the world outside of his apartment, festering with mass deaths, intolerance, systematic muting of entire communities, and the sociosexual repression pushing men back into their homes.
In the winter of 1989, with so many of his friends gone, New York is just a city of death. He heads to Albuquerque to begin a ten-day road trip, seeking solace in the Southwest, whose deserts, mountains, and open sky he finds absolutely embracing and frightening.
Yeah, I’m alive, but … I could be dead another year from now. And I won’t see this road, and I won’t see the sunlight, and I won’t see these fast trucks driving by—the long, long road up ahead of me, and a long, long road in the rearview mirror.” Driving along, with whatever music is on the radio, he’s thinking of “people like Peter … just knowing that he’s never gonna hear this song.
Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz was a bittersweet read. You know what the outcome will be as does the author; by the end of the book as Wojnarowicz is ruminating more and more on death ~~ his death ~~ you feel his pain and even more so his fear as the inevitable outcome on his horizon
Wojnarowicz wishes it could stay like this for maybe a few years, or I just never moved out of this spot. I could just watch the light stay like this. And maybe somebody coming along and just putting their arms around me for a few minutes.
Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz ~~~ David Wojnarowicz
There is tremendous beauty in David Wojnarowicz's world. It is also a world of rage, loss and longing. All this is wrapped in his childhood ~~ a childhood enmeshed in violence he could never quite leave behind.
Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz is a book transcribed from audio tape journals, ranging from 1981, the time Wojnarowicz made Fuck You Faggot Fucker a collage work of two men making out on the map of North America, to 1989, when he finished his black and white photography pieces called The Weight of the Earth Part 1 and Part 2.
During his lifetime, Wojnarowicz made art that marries his inner world of sadness, anger, and loss with an external world of natural beauty and human destructiveness. His life was linked by abandonment and abuse as a child and, in later years, by the emotional and physical toll that HIV/AIDS exacted before he died at 37 in 1992.
In his teens, Wojnarowicz was selling his body to pay the rent and buy drugs. He began writing and making art at an early age and continued doing it feverishly for as long as he had the strength. Through drawings, photographs, collages, paintings, writings, music, and more, he doesn’t flinch from confronting homophobia and, with the onset of the AIDS epidemic, from calling out the hostile cultural climate, the invisibility and neglect of the queer community. The Wojnarowicz in Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz is the Wojnarowicz we mostly know: the artist as warrior.
Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz begins with a chronicle of a not-quite-relationship with a guy David meets in a park he doesn’t name. As Wojnarowicz starts getting to know this guy, he wonders: How can a complete stranger suddenly figure in your life so strong, to where you feel like you can’t possibly not explore a relationship with them? That if you were denied the chance to explore a relationship with them it would be terrible, that you’d be missing something that would probably change the course of your life or the direction of your thoughts.
These moments are especially revealing because they were recorded in real time, and transcribed in all their awkwardness. David has sex with this guy in the park and then as he starts to crave more intimacy. This is desire, sure, but more than that it is the desire for connection. David wants more. The other guy wants something else ~~ it may be more but it isn’t the more that David wants. He worries about being too much for this guy, about his art being too scary ~~ he thinks about throwing out anything that is too aggressive or upsetting, which is shocking to hear from someone whose whole body of work could be described in this way. He admits to thinking of throwing it away, so he doesn’t scare other people with his truth.
After Wojnarowicz's HIV diagnosis in 1988, he worries his sister will think he’s the wrong kind of gay, the slutty kind, and we see how he invoked and provoked these worlds in his work without shame, yet his own internal process was full of vulnerable ambivalence, a kind of double life.
In Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, his memoir from 1991, Wojnarowicz writes words can strip the power from a memory or an event. Words can cut the ropes of an experience. Breaking silence about an experience can break the chains of the code of silence. Post HIV diagnosis, Wojnarowicz is increasingly invested in manipulating language to tell a story, rather than letting the words assume authority over his space. Many of the recordings from 1988 to 1989 are retellings and analyses of dreams, & observations regarding the stories people have told themselves about his art. As he struggles in both his intellectual and artistic endeavors to the pre-invented world, he increasingly notices the unreliability of language in the face of experience. The recordings suggest an attempt to identify a way in which his words echo exclusively with the hum of his own thoughts, rather than mirror the world outside of his apartment, festering with mass deaths, intolerance, systematic muting of entire communities, and the sociosexual repression pushing men back into their homes.
In the winter of 1989, with so many of his friends gone, New York is just a city of death. He heads to Albuquerque to begin a ten-day road trip, seeking solace in the Southwest, whose deserts, mountains, and open sky he finds absolutely embracing and frightening.
Yeah, I’m alive, but … I could be dead another year from now. And I won’t see this road, and I won’t see the sunlight, and I won’t see these fast trucks driving by—the long, long road up ahead of me, and a long, long road in the rearview mirror.” Driving along, with whatever music is on the radio, he’s thinking of “people like Peter … just knowing that he’s never gonna hear this song.
Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz was a bittersweet read. You know what the outcome will be as does the author; by the end of the book as Wojnarowicz is ruminating more and more on death ~~ his death ~~ you feel his pain and even more so his fear as the inevitable outcome on his horizon
Wojnarowicz wishes it could stay like this for maybe a few years, or I just never moved out of this spot. I could just watch the light stay like this. And maybe somebody coming along and just putting their arms around me for a few minutes.
December 6, 2018
I am always a bit hesitant to read posthumously published journals. Such collections are obviously published for the profit of publishers, and I am never certain if the authors would be happy knowing their private words had become public.
With that said, David Wojnarowicz's tape journals are deeply enlightening, brilliant, and critical, and I am so happy I read this collection. Admittedly, a coherent theme to bind the various journals together is absent, leaving readers a bit befuddled as to how it all ties together, but the words themselves go deep.
At one point discussing the constraints of language and at another his feelings and desires for his lover, each tape is deeply philosophical and helped me understand the mind of this artist in such a distinct way. I entered this book knowing I love the work and writings of David Wojnarowicz, and I finished it with a deep respect for the questions his works are asking.
With that said, David Wojnarowicz's tape journals are deeply enlightening, brilliant, and critical, and I am so happy I read this collection. Admittedly, a coherent theme to bind the various journals together is absent, leaving readers a bit befuddled as to how it all ties together, but the words themselves go deep.
At one point discussing the constraints of language and at another his feelings and desires for his lover, each tape is deeply philosophical and helped me understand the mind of this artist in such a distinct way. I entered this book knowing I love the work and writings of David Wojnarowicz, and I finished it with a deep respect for the questions his works are asking.
May 24, 2024
This book reveals a whole other side of David I didn’t know—or maybe not. Actually, I did know it. (Don’t worry, I’m only half-serious. Of course, we love to think we can know a writer solely through their writing, but how can we possibly?) It’s so soft and gentle, with none of the spleneticism that usually characterizes what he wrote for publication (which I do also love). It puts to words so much of what I’ve felt the past few years, or maybe all my life—particularly the earlier entries from his twenties. (I wouldn’t recommend this, though, unless you’re already head-over-heels for him, but I guess you probably are, if you’re considering this.)
March 2, 2024
brutally honest, raw, sad. I devoured this over the timespan of a couple days. I can’t manage my thoughts but the way David speaks about his life, his art & his diagnosis is heartbreakingly grey and riddled with flowery prose and emotions…
February 25, 2021
The idea of transcribing and publishing David Wojnarowicz's tape journals feels sort of like scraping the bottom of the posthumous barrel in theory, but somehow this is still totally worthwhile and beautiful and insightful into Davey and the time he lived in. A good 30% of the entries are dream journaling, which, because he is who he is, is much more interesting and loaded with significance than you would expect, but still, you know, reading someone else's dream journal, so not terribly thrilling. But! Most of this is David grappling with the limits of language, thinking about his visual art and what he wants people to get out of it, and coming to terms with his death and the death of his closest friends from AIDS, and that portion of it (the majority really) is so rich and wonderful. Maybe more of an "if you're already a fan..." read rather than a great place to start with his work but way better than you would expect from reading a 40-year-old audio diary. I personally liked the excerpt about him watching Flipper.
February 17, 2023
READING VLOG
What it feels like to hear your friend's heart breaking, in a whisper, in the corner of a cafe where it's dark and quiet, where feelings come to walk on two legs, to learn a dance, to walk somewhere far from their birthright and call it home, call it part of the world.
This voice is in winds and brains, love and lust, in me and the aching cries of old bones and my vanity and insanity.
David, you old friend, fiend, I love you.
What it feels like to hear your friend's heart breaking, in a whisper, in the corner of a cafe where it's dark and quiet, where feelings come to walk on two legs, to learn a dance, to walk somewhere far from their birthright and call it home, call it part of the world.
This voice is in winds and brains, love and lust, in me and the aching cries of old bones and my vanity and insanity.
David, you old friend, fiend, I love you.
July 30, 2018
The parts are stronger than the whole. Wojnarowicz probably wouldn't have published these on his own, but having access to them as primary sources is interesting and enlightening. The section towards the end of him explaining his art and fighting against the "pre-invented existence" and the paragraphs recounting an encounter with a guy off the street are worth the price of admission. As is the intro essay by David Velasco.
August 27, 2018
I read this sitting alone on Riis Beach on a slightly cool, drizzly early August day when nobody else was there and it felt like the end of the world, or a world where everyone had vanished. I think that the particular setting I read these journals in complemented them perfectly. There's this tremendous sense of awe I have for good diarists, whose narratives of their own lives are cohesive, meaningful, contemplative--especially when the artists in question were really only taking notes for their own use, with no blogging culture to reference. David Wojnarowicz's journals were sporadic. He recorded on cassettes in the early 1980s, when he had just met Peter Hujar, and talked about boys he liked and relationships he had with people. He sounds like the voices of my friends, and the thread of ominous prescient statements about death and dread are things people I know would say, but when I imagine him talking to himself about buying dog food or having a dream or waiting around for a boy to phone him, it feels more melancholic. I can hear his voice as I read, and the crackle of tapes, and the traffic or birds. It's like a missive from past the edge of time.
The tape journals pick up again in the late 1980s, when David has had more success as an artist but has also seen many more people die. These later journals focus more and more on dreams and on narratives of David driving through the Southwestern United States. There are monologues about machines and God, and vivid recollections/recreations of sex dreams and death dreams and memories David had.
The tape journals pick up again in the late 1980s, when David has had more success as an artist but has also seen many more people die. These later journals focus more and more on dreams and on narratives of David driving through the Southwestern United States. There are monologues about machines and God, and vivid recollections/recreations of sex dreams and death dreams and memories David had.
September 4, 2022
Devastating and honest. David could pluck the most mundane of daily thoughts out of his head and turn it into poetry.
November 21, 2024
did the opposite of what a lot of other books have done for me lately by making me feel totally sane. i really need to get my hands on close to the knives just what a revelation i've loved his work for a long time so obviously he's an insane writer and that goes for his spoken word too. Ok last thing i started reading this before going out for a night out in berlin and it wasn't even a vibe shift i <3 intensity
— "...and in the last few years I've expressed less and less, until it's to the point where I hold these things—these sensations, these feelings, these observations—in. I'm afraid to tell people because it will sound depressing to them, although it's not really depressing to me, just serious."
— "...and in the last few years I've expressed less and less, until it's to the point where I hold these things—these sensations, these feelings, these observations—in. I'm afraid to tell people because it will sound depressing to them, although it's not really depressing to me, just serious."
March 1, 2025
I could elaborate some beautiful review for this book, but I don't think that's necessary.
David with this tapes, was so raw, descriptive and human, that I think I can say, he has kissed my heart.
The way sometimes it's so hard for me to describe what I am feeling was completly gone while reading this, because I connected so much with David, and I feel sometimes a lot of the feelings he once had. The way he can expresse himself though words is so beautiful and tangible. It's reality.
It was a really hard book to read, because It's honest; and it's not happy, it can be sometimes, but it's not. And if you can't put yourself in other people shoes I don't think this is for you.
Probably the best book I've read in months. Thank you David for this, I needed it.
David with this tapes, was so raw, descriptive and human, that I think I can say, he has kissed my heart.
The way sometimes it's so hard for me to describe what I am feeling was completly gone while reading this, because I connected so much with David, and I feel sometimes a lot of the feelings he once had. The way he can expresse himself though words is so beautiful and tangible. It's reality.
It was a really hard book to read, because It's honest; and it's not happy, it can be sometimes, but it's not. And if you can't put yourself in other people shoes I don't think this is for you.
Probably the best book I've read in months. Thank you David for this, I needed it.
May 1, 2025
would probably recommend this one only after reading Close to the Knives (& maybe also his biography Fire in the Belly) to get to know him and the people in his life first
April 11, 2025
4.8
Funny to find interest in someone else’s dreams when that seems to be a known bore. Maybe it’s just because it’s him. A lot of turtles, I wish he would have an answer for that one.
I enjoyed all his occurring and reoccurring thoughts!!
Funny to find interest in someone else’s dreams when that seems to be a known bore. Maybe it’s just because it’s him. A lot of turtles, I wish he would have an answer for that one.
I enjoyed all his occurring and reoccurring thoughts!!
February 17, 2022
"I don't have a terrific amount of hope about the future of things, but at the same time, that doesn't disregard the idea of pleasure, of beauty, of subtlety. I mean, it's in the subtle things that I find hope. It's in my dreams I find hope. It's in the moments I witness on the street, in interactions between people, that I find hope. And I also believe that on some level, it's a day-to-day job, that the government has to exert the control that it does. And that it's a terrific job, it's an enormous job, and when people put themselves on the line in their work--whether it's music or writing or photography or painting or whatever, in terms of culture with a capital C -- that they apply a tiny amount of pressure against a system that would love to overstep the boundaries of itself. The system of control would willingly jump into fascism if there wasn't enough pressure on the throat." (123)
"My favorite part was outside of Tucson to the north. There were these big dust devils, and these big whirling columns of sand and dust and wind that would suddenly spring up across the plains. And the motion of it--it's hard to put into words-- was like a breeze, but an enormous one made of red, red-orange, and just revolving and twisting and turning inside out. And then suddenly it just vanishes." (172)
"My favorite part was outside of Tucson to the north. There were these big dust devils, and these big whirling columns of sand and dust and wind that would suddenly spring up across the plains. And the motion of it--it's hard to put into words-- was like a breeze, but an enormous one made of red, red-orange, and just revolving and twisting and turning inside out. And then suddenly it just vanishes." (172)
August 21, 2022
A breathtaking sad, beautiful, hopeful, and distraught portrait of an artist in his own words. To read such raw verse from an artist dealing with so many heavy complications in his short time in something truly special and infallible. It’s not often, at least for me, that i get a glimpse of someone’s psyche in this brusque a manner. In these tapes David is so unabashedly himself in some moments and deeply self conscious of every thought he has in others. Uniquely human and visceral.
“In these moments I hate language. I hate what words are like,
I hate the idea of putting these preformed gestures on the tip
of my tongue or through my lips or through the inside of my
mouth, forming sounds to approximate something that's like a
cyclone, or something that's like a flood, or something that's
like a weather system that's out of control, that's dangerous,
that's alarming. I hate language in this moment because it
seems like so much bullshit. It just seems like sounds that have
been uttered back and forth now over centuries. And it always
boils down to the same meaning within those sounds, unless
you're more intense in uttering them, or you precede them or
accompany them with certain forms of violence.”
“In these moments I hate language. I hate what words are like,
I hate the idea of putting these preformed gestures on the tip
of my tongue or through my lips or through the inside of my
mouth, forming sounds to approximate something that's like a
cyclone, or something that's like a flood, or something that's
like a weather system that's out of control, that's dangerous,
that's alarming. I hate language in this moment because it
seems like so much bullshit. It just seems like sounds that have
been uttered back and forth now over centuries. And it always
boils down to the same meaning within those sounds, unless
you're more intense in uttering them, or you precede them or
accompany them with certain forms of violence.”
August 17, 2024
gosh what do i even say. this was the first time i’ve read this type of format in terms of it being words transcribed from a tape; and because of the context surrounding this book it just makes it that much more real. the sexual aspect of this book is kinda crazy but those were just the vibes at the time(80s)! overall i just can’t imagine being in his shoes and having this disease(aids), watching the people around you fall sick and helpless, only to get it yourself and live knowing you have a death sentence. He has a way of taking something simple and viewing it in such a stunning way. so beautiful, raw, infuriating, gentle, and cruel.
January 10, 2024
Mixed feelings as I hated getting through the dreams narrative but appreciated the rawness of the tapes and the elaboration on pre-invented existence for Marion.
Highlights:
Then some guy came up to me, some very pretty boy, very handsome-model-like—not really the kind of guy I'd be interested in. Like Jesse says, I like ugly people or people with some sense of derangement, and that's something I've always felt. Not necessarily deranged, but somebody who's off in some way, somebody who's interesting, who has character, through lack of beauty or whatever. Somebody who's beautiful in a way that's not classically beautiful.
***
"After a while you just stop falling in love and just become irritated"- it becomes like an irritation. I can understand that, in a real strange way, in an offhand way, you just get exasperated when you start feeling intense feelings for somebody, and you always ask yourself why you were ever looking for these things in the first place. And why you feel that this is the important thing in your life, when you've lived your whole life before you ever met this person. How can they figure in it that strongly? How can a complete stranger suddenly figure in your life so strong, to where you feel like you can't possibly not explore a relationship with them? That if you were denied the chance to explore a relationship with them, it would be terrible, that you'd be missing something that would probably change the course of your life or the direction of your thoughts.
***
He wanted to know when we were going to get together. I said that I might take tomorrow night off, and it's like, I can take tomorrow night off. I probably could, easily, but it's like, why am I doing that? I need the money. I need to work. And I just suddenly feel that it doesn't matter if I take the night off or if I see him tomorrow night. That if I'm going to see him, if it's going to be something that were going to explore at all, it'll be sometime in the future. I don't have to rearrange my work schedule for this person. I don't really even know if he will even think to appreciate that. And why should he?
***
Last night I was standing around at five or six in the morning, looking through the portfolio, looking at my photographs, looking at different things, just leafing through boxes, and I was really startled. It was the first time that I sat down and looked at these drawings—I mean really looked at them—in ages and ages, since I did them. And I realized that they are good, and that there's absolutely no reason to deny them or correct them or throw them away or bury them. I mean, they're my life, and they're things that I've put together from images in the outside world, the world outside this room. And I don't owe it to anybody to distort that, just for their comfort. And that my responsibility to them is nothing more than being the person who created them.
***
… suddenly feeling like I was seeing through Peter's eyes. All those months of him being ill and never knowing exactly what he felt, never knowing what was going on inside his mind other than the times he would talk about it. Suddenly I just felt that I had his eyes and I'm looking at the whole place, and everything just made me nauseous— every surface, every extension of the outside. I just felt a lot of fear about the whole violence of that moment.
***
I think that's one of the greatest things that she gives me she doesn't make any American kind of judgments about what I do. It's more acceptance of what I do. And I realize that's what I love about when people make things: I love that they just do it, and I love that it even occurs to them to make something. And the only times that I've ever said that I hated something was when I thought that the people involved were surrounded by so much hype and ridiculousness, and politicking and schmoozing, and socializing and whatever, that all that was what made up their work, rather than any real blood. Or if I just got to know the person and couldn't stand them. I mean, I could begrudgingly like their work, but generally if it was work that was not very well formed or hadn't quite crossed the line of having veins running through it, or blood running into it, I could dismiss it because I thought they were so ridiculous.
The intent is what's different, and so I never really see myself as a photographer, I don't see myself as a filmmaker, I don't see myself as an artist. And yet I know I'm an artist—I know that I'm compelled to make things; it's a compulsion to make things to make sense of my life, and it makes me feel relieved about the experience of living or the experience of this world-the experience of all this pre-invented shit.
***
But I think the tension for me was to be very promiscuous but not talk about it, not want my family to know. I remember Pat once saying to me, "You'll never get AIDs," or something. Or, no, I don't even know if it was that, if she actually said those words, but it was something about "one of those people who went around having sex with everybody." I remember I didn't correct her. I mean, how do you begin? And it's like, now I should've, so she would have some understanding of "those people."
***
It was way in the future, and the sense that so many people that I know had died was in the air. Somewhere in there, I couldn't tell if it was me who was dying, if I had died, or if everybody that I ... I don't know, it was just like everyone I loved died. And somehow I was alone, although at some point I think Tom was there, and then there were other people who I cared about, but in moments they weren't there.
***
Basically, people who remain very connected to themselves and what they do, and they're not going to jump for the money— they're not going to jump for this or jump for that. They're going to constantly break things down, no matter where they're at, at what point, how many years go by. It's like they're always going to break it down and make sure they're going to maintain a personal connection to what they're making. And it's not, you know, they'll never lift their skirts, it's that sort of thing.
***
If I start out with the idea that we're born into a completely pre-invented existence, where everything is regulated-all movements regulated by people who exert control, whether that's stopping at a traffic light and not crossing the street when the light is red, or it's going into an army to fight a war that we really have no understanding of and no need for, other than we're fighting a war for people in power, or for the people who control the people in power. So if I start out with the idea that this is what were born into, were born into something that's invented before were even conceived-as in fucking, or as in birth.
this is an important thing in my work—I cut right through time, the same way I cut through borders when I rip up a map. If I paint on maps, usually they're ripped up, and my reasons for ripping them up are to remove borders.
In playing with the machine, I'm playing with a fossil of what was once considered the most important invention, or the most important ideas, in terms of freeing people-and obviously it was not used for freeing people. They worked people to death with machines or replaced them. So that people are replaceable, or they're more insignificant, and with the microchip they become even more insignificant. It's not ever going to be used to free people from slavery to a certain system. It's more to make them feel more vulnerable and less needed, so that they won't question as much as they might've in the day of the machine.
There's no longer real culture. I can turn on the TV and find myself six thousand miles under the ocean; or turn a station and then suddenly I'm in China, walking the Great Wall; or turn the station and suddenly I'm in the Amazon, watching a rainforest get cut down. The way telecommunications has blown through the cultures of different countries, I believe it's like were on a fast train that becomes a faster train, that becomes a plane, that becomes a missile. Which means, in terms of speed, that eventually we won't have to go anywhere at all because everything's the same. It becomes the same after a while, and there will be no need for movement.
If I were a violent person, I would run out into the street and buy guns and go into the nation's capital and start annihilating the people who I believe are responsible for this pre-invented existence. But the originators of this existence are long dead. It's like a machine that runs itself that can't stop. The way things are set in motion, the machine of the society continues running long after groups of people have tried to pull out the plug. In some sense it's like a mirror of a computer: It can just run by itself, think by itself, but it has only a certain idea of actions. Police enforce it, schools enforce it, government officials enforce it. Even the stupidity of large populations enforces it.
***
And coming out here and living in remoteness, or desolation, isn't particularly what I want, but it's something that I wish I could do. And something tells me I can't, because the people that one is surrounded by out here—at least the sense I have from Albuquerque or some of the cities I've passed through-are just as fucking desperate as in New York. It's like the desperation of a nation or of a society, of an illusory tribe; it's just this grappling with something that is totally pre-invented, and were all rushing toward it, and were all moving toward it. And it just amazes me that some people find it easy or that some people find it pleasurable. I don't think I do, in the long run.
***
I'm sitting on the curve of the earth and watching the light slowly dissipate. A few silhouetted cactuses and a bunch of bees trying to drink some water that's sitting in a drinking fountain. A couple of them were jerks. They fell in and drowned, but I pulled a few out that were still struggling around. A few trees, just waving slowly. It's just a real gentle moment. I'm here by myself and I don't mind. I kind of wish it could just stay like this for maybe a few years, or I just never moved out of this spot. I could just watch the light stay like this. And maybe somebody coming along and just putting their arms around me for a few minutes.
Highlights:
Then some guy came up to me, some very pretty boy, very handsome-model-like—not really the kind of guy I'd be interested in. Like Jesse says, I like ugly people or people with some sense of derangement, and that's something I've always felt. Not necessarily deranged, but somebody who's off in some way, somebody who's interesting, who has character, through lack of beauty or whatever. Somebody who's beautiful in a way that's not classically beautiful.
***
"After a while you just stop falling in love and just become irritated"- it becomes like an irritation. I can understand that, in a real strange way, in an offhand way, you just get exasperated when you start feeling intense feelings for somebody, and you always ask yourself why you were ever looking for these things in the first place. And why you feel that this is the important thing in your life, when you've lived your whole life before you ever met this person. How can they figure in it that strongly? How can a complete stranger suddenly figure in your life so strong, to where you feel like you can't possibly not explore a relationship with them? That if you were denied the chance to explore a relationship with them, it would be terrible, that you'd be missing something that would probably change the course of your life or the direction of your thoughts.
***
He wanted to know when we were going to get together. I said that I might take tomorrow night off, and it's like, I can take tomorrow night off. I probably could, easily, but it's like, why am I doing that? I need the money. I need to work. And I just suddenly feel that it doesn't matter if I take the night off or if I see him tomorrow night. That if I'm going to see him, if it's going to be something that were going to explore at all, it'll be sometime in the future. I don't have to rearrange my work schedule for this person. I don't really even know if he will even think to appreciate that. And why should he?
***
Last night I was standing around at five or six in the morning, looking through the portfolio, looking at my photographs, looking at different things, just leafing through boxes, and I was really startled. It was the first time that I sat down and looked at these drawings—I mean really looked at them—in ages and ages, since I did them. And I realized that they are good, and that there's absolutely no reason to deny them or correct them or throw them away or bury them. I mean, they're my life, and they're things that I've put together from images in the outside world, the world outside this room. And I don't owe it to anybody to distort that, just for their comfort. And that my responsibility to them is nothing more than being the person who created them.
***
… suddenly feeling like I was seeing through Peter's eyes. All those months of him being ill and never knowing exactly what he felt, never knowing what was going on inside his mind other than the times he would talk about it. Suddenly I just felt that I had his eyes and I'm looking at the whole place, and everything just made me nauseous— every surface, every extension of the outside. I just felt a lot of fear about the whole violence of that moment.
***
I think that's one of the greatest things that she gives me she doesn't make any American kind of judgments about what I do. It's more acceptance of what I do. And I realize that's what I love about when people make things: I love that they just do it, and I love that it even occurs to them to make something. And the only times that I've ever said that I hated something was when I thought that the people involved were surrounded by so much hype and ridiculousness, and politicking and schmoozing, and socializing and whatever, that all that was what made up their work, rather than any real blood. Or if I just got to know the person and couldn't stand them. I mean, I could begrudgingly like their work, but generally if it was work that was not very well formed or hadn't quite crossed the line of having veins running through it, or blood running into it, I could dismiss it because I thought they were so ridiculous.
The intent is what's different, and so I never really see myself as a photographer, I don't see myself as a filmmaker, I don't see myself as an artist. And yet I know I'm an artist—I know that I'm compelled to make things; it's a compulsion to make things to make sense of my life, and it makes me feel relieved about the experience of living or the experience of this world-the experience of all this pre-invented shit.
***
But I think the tension for me was to be very promiscuous but not talk about it, not want my family to know. I remember Pat once saying to me, "You'll never get AIDs," or something. Or, no, I don't even know if it was that, if she actually said those words, but it was something about "one of those people who went around having sex with everybody." I remember I didn't correct her. I mean, how do you begin? And it's like, now I should've, so she would have some understanding of "those people."
***
It was way in the future, and the sense that so many people that I know had died was in the air. Somewhere in there, I couldn't tell if it was me who was dying, if I had died, or if everybody that I ... I don't know, it was just like everyone I loved died. And somehow I was alone, although at some point I think Tom was there, and then there were other people who I cared about, but in moments they weren't there.
***
Basically, people who remain very connected to themselves and what they do, and they're not going to jump for the money— they're not going to jump for this or jump for that. They're going to constantly break things down, no matter where they're at, at what point, how many years go by. It's like they're always going to break it down and make sure they're going to maintain a personal connection to what they're making. And it's not, you know, they'll never lift their skirts, it's that sort of thing.
***
If I start out with the idea that we're born into a completely pre-invented existence, where everything is regulated-all movements regulated by people who exert control, whether that's stopping at a traffic light and not crossing the street when the light is red, or it's going into an army to fight a war that we really have no understanding of and no need for, other than we're fighting a war for people in power, or for the people who control the people in power. So if I start out with the idea that this is what were born into, were born into something that's invented before were even conceived-as in fucking, or as in birth.
this is an important thing in my work—I cut right through time, the same way I cut through borders when I rip up a map. If I paint on maps, usually they're ripped up, and my reasons for ripping them up are to remove borders.
In playing with the machine, I'm playing with a fossil of what was once considered the most important invention, or the most important ideas, in terms of freeing people-and obviously it was not used for freeing people. They worked people to death with machines or replaced them. So that people are replaceable, or they're more insignificant, and with the microchip they become even more insignificant. It's not ever going to be used to free people from slavery to a certain system. It's more to make them feel more vulnerable and less needed, so that they won't question as much as they might've in the day of the machine.
There's no longer real culture. I can turn on the TV and find myself six thousand miles under the ocean; or turn a station and then suddenly I'm in China, walking the Great Wall; or turn the station and suddenly I'm in the Amazon, watching a rainforest get cut down. The way telecommunications has blown through the cultures of different countries, I believe it's like were on a fast train that becomes a faster train, that becomes a plane, that becomes a missile. Which means, in terms of speed, that eventually we won't have to go anywhere at all because everything's the same. It becomes the same after a while, and there will be no need for movement.
If I were a violent person, I would run out into the street and buy guns and go into the nation's capital and start annihilating the people who I believe are responsible for this pre-invented existence. But the originators of this existence are long dead. It's like a machine that runs itself that can't stop. The way things are set in motion, the machine of the society continues running long after groups of people have tried to pull out the plug. In some sense it's like a mirror of a computer: It can just run by itself, think by itself, but it has only a certain idea of actions. Police enforce it, schools enforce it, government officials enforce it. Even the stupidity of large populations enforces it.
***
And coming out here and living in remoteness, or desolation, isn't particularly what I want, but it's something that I wish I could do. And something tells me I can't, because the people that one is surrounded by out here—at least the sense I have from Albuquerque or some of the cities I've passed through-are just as fucking desperate as in New York. It's like the desperation of a nation or of a society, of an illusory tribe; it's just this grappling with something that is totally pre-invented, and were all rushing toward it, and were all moving toward it. And it just amazes me that some people find it easy or that some people find it pleasurable. I don't think I do, in the long run.
***
I'm sitting on the curve of the earth and watching the light slowly dissipate. A few silhouetted cactuses and a bunch of bees trying to drink some water that's sitting in a drinking fountain. A couple of them were jerks. They fell in and drowned, but I pulled a few out that were still struggling around. A few trees, just waving slowly. It's just a real gentle moment. I'm here by myself and I don't mind. I kind of wish it could just stay like this for maybe a few years, or I just never moved out of this spot. I could just watch the light stay like this. And maybe somebody coming along and just putting their arms around me for a few minutes.
July 6, 2022
Thank you for the opportunity to be in your head for a little while, David.
December 27, 2024
oh david :( you mean so much to me.
this book was so beautiful. i read it entirely in his voice. so heartbreaking, so human.
this book was so beautiful. i read it entirely in his voice. so heartbreaking, so human.
October 7, 2023
Beautiful and very sad.
October 1, 2020
This is three different books to three different people.
#1 - If you're obsessed with David Wojnarowicz and his work and want to feel closer to him, I would give this book a 4. It flutters between dream state, the reckoning of life and the drollness of desire.
#2 - If you're a pseudo fan, like I am (I know some of his work and enjoy it, but am not obsessed with him) you'd likely give it a three or a two. This is, simply for me, because they are exactly what they are - transcribed journals of David talking freeform. I'm stunned at his ability to talk free-form to himself and retain his thread, it's not something I could do. However, because they're simply thoughts - they float in and out, wandering through consciousness as pure thought does. However, is this something I needed to read? No. I'm wondering how we would have felt knowing these are published. It's clear he's a brilliant mind, but I find it a bit grotesque that this has been released in a somewhat cannibalistic attempt to offer fans of his a morsel more of this incredible artist who lived a tragically short life.
#3 - If you have no idea who David is, you'd probably never pick them up to begin with - but I think I'd give it the same rating.
Simply, I feel we're somewhat lucky to enter the mind of this fascinating artist, but it really does seem a bit sinister to sell his wandering thoughts. It shows how much we canonize and revel in the myths of certain artists, elevating their art even further.
There were moments I felt I could be pulled into, but then he'd go off describing another dream. Those parts truly bored me, and made this book hard to finish. Though for a 2 star rating, it is still a book I'd pick up from time to time. I think I'm giving it so low of a rating because there were flashes of beauty in it, and I was frustratingly disappointed to not be able to enter them fully, because suddenly he'd start talking about another dream.
#1 - If you're obsessed with David Wojnarowicz and his work and want to feel closer to him, I would give this book a 4. It flutters between dream state, the reckoning of life and the drollness of desire.
#2 - If you're a pseudo fan, like I am (I know some of his work and enjoy it, but am not obsessed with him) you'd likely give it a three or a two. This is, simply for me, because they are exactly what they are - transcribed journals of David talking freeform. I'm stunned at his ability to talk free-form to himself and retain his thread, it's not something I could do. However, because they're simply thoughts - they float in and out, wandering through consciousness as pure thought does. However, is this something I needed to read? No. I'm wondering how we would have felt knowing these are published. It's clear he's a brilliant mind, but I find it a bit grotesque that this has been released in a somewhat cannibalistic attempt to offer fans of his a morsel more of this incredible artist who lived a tragically short life.
#3 - If you have no idea who David is, you'd probably never pick them up to begin with - but I think I'd give it the same rating.
Simply, I feel we're somewhat lucky to enter the mind of this fascinating artist, but it really does seem a bit sinister to sell his wandering thoughts. It shows how much we canonize and revel in the myths of certain artists, elevating their art even further.
There were moments I felt I could be pulled into, but then he'd go off describing another dream. Those parts truly bored me, and made this book hard to finish. Though for a 2 star rating, it is still a book I'd pick up from time to time. I think I'm giving it so low of a rating because there were flashes of beauty in it, and I was frustratingly disappointed to not be able to enter them fully, because suddenly he'd start talking about another dream.
March 3, 2025
«And in moments like this, with the sky the way it is, just mountains in the distance, I’m sitting on the curve of the earth and watching the light slowly dissipate. A few silhouetted cactuses and a bunch of bees trying to drink some water that’s sitting in a drinking fountain. A couple of them were jerks. They fell in and drowned, but I pulled a few out that were still struggling around. A few trees, just waving slowly. It’s just a real gentle moment. I’m here by myself and I don’t mind. I kind of wish I could stay like this for maybe a few years, or I just never moved out of this spot. I could just watch the light stay like this. And maybe somebody coming along and just putting their arms around me for a few minutes.»
January 28, 2023
As soon as I finished this book I wanted to read it again for the very first time. There are only a few books in life that you read where you feel the author might have dug around your own mind before putting pen to paper. In this book, a transcription of David Wojnarowicz’s audio diaries, he details his thoughts on life, death, what comes after, his current intense relationships and everything therein. It’s top 5 books for me, I read it years ago and I still haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
October 28, 2024
Weight of the Earth hits me so hard! David just shoved his face underneath my shirt and kissed my heart.
June 21, 2023
"I've seen green rolling mountains under a burning sky. I've seen oceans and oceans of water. I've seen the whale die. Time walks around side roads. And I've driven a whole day and I hardly remember what I've seen. But I know the faces of the people I love. I know the faces of the people I love. I know the wet and air make it rain. I know the sky ahead of this car. Walking over mountains."
"In these moments I hate language. I hate what words are like. I hate the idea of putting these preformed gestures on the tip of my tongue or through my lips of through the inside of my mouth, forming sounds to approximate something that's like a cyclone, or something that's like a flood, or something that's like a weather system that's out of control, that's dangerous, that's alarming."
"I just saw everything, and I drank in everything as I moved through the streets. I always want that element of my life."
"It's something really hard to define. It's like sensations I feel that I don't express to people, and in the last few years I've expressed less and less, until it's to the point where I hold these things—these sensations, these feelings, these observations—in. I'm afraid to tell people because it will sound depressing to them, although it's not really depressing to me, just serious."
"It's in the light–even when I'm walking down the street, I can see it just in the light, the slant of light and day, and movement of cars and movement of people, and the sense of myself walking around in any environment."
"I'm working under different emotional things at once: things concerning family, things concerning friends, things concerning myself in the world, things concerning lovers, things concerning sex, things concerning drugs, things concerning living, things concerning travel, things concerning failures, things concerning success. And it's so many things at once, I can't maintain the proper mental and physical distance to retrace my steps to some point in the past where I jumped off, and which I need to connect with again so I can start living more fully, more excitedly, more romantically, more dreamily."
"Looking at one of these guys, I realize I could write an entire novel just on the color of his pants alone."
invigorating, blistering, devastating, affirming. david wojnarowicz makes me feel my pulse a little stronger. and that these are transcribed voice memos, too - that life poured out of him with such searing lucidity is just breathtaking. what a beautiful thing it is when you read someone who offers form and sentence to your deepest held sensibilities, dreams, fears, outlooks, suspicions and feelings about it all
"In these moments I hate language. I hate what words are like. I hate the idea of putting these preformed gestures on the tip of my tongue or through my lips of through the inside of my mouth, forming sounds to approximate something that's like a cyclone, or something that's like a flood, or something that's like a weather system that's out of control, that's dangerous, that's alarming."
"I just saw everything, and I drank in everything as I moved through the streets. I always want that element of my life."
"It's something really hard to define. It's like sensations I feel that I don't express to people, and in the last few years I've expressed less and less, until it's to the point where I hold these things—these sensations, these feelings, these observations—in. I'm afraid to tell people because it will sound depressing to them, although it's not really depressing to me, just serious."
"It's in the light–even when I'm walking down the street, I can see it just in the light, the slant of light and day, and movement of cars and movement of people, and the sense of myself walking around in any environment."
"I'm working under different emotional things at once: things concerning family, things concerning friends, things concerning myself in the world, things concerning lovers, things concerning sex, things concerning drugs, things concerning living, things concerning travel, things concerning failures, things concerning success. And it's so many things at once, I can't maintain the proper mental and physical distance to retrace my steps to some point in the past where I jumped off, and which I need to connect with again so I can start living more fully, more excitedly, more romantically, more dreamily."
"Looking at one of these guys, I realize I could write an entire novel just on the color of his pants alone."
invigorating, blistering, devastating, affirming. david wojnarowicz makes me feel my pulse a little stronger. and that these are transcribed voice memos, too - that life poured out of him with such searing lucidity is just breathtaking. what a beautiful thing it is when you read someone who offers form and sentence to your deepest held sensibilities, dreams, fears, outlooks, suspicions and feelings about it all
July 1, 2025
inevitably, when i enter a bookstore, i wind up in the queer section, and inevitably, there, i find a stack of memoirs and collections that feature those who died in the aids crisis. for a long time when i looked at these books i would feel nothing but dread. i would pick one up, stare at the picture of the young man on the back or the front or the centerfold, all too aware that he was dead and i very well could have been too if i had been born just forty years earlier, and put it back down and move on. it made me too uncomfortable to contend with the reality that the only thing separating me from that dead man was a daily pill that i’m lucky enough to have access to. i don’t really know what it is about the weight of the earth that broke through that discomfort and compelled me to actually buy the book and read it, but i’m glad i did — the least i can do for those who came before me is to read their stories. wojnarowicz’s tapes are so well articulated that it’s difficult to believe these are transcripts and not carefully drafted prose. seeing him grapple with the fact that he is dying, and all his friends are dying, and there is nothing he can do to change either of those things, is really quite haunting — but it’s the tapes that come before his aids diagnosis that i find even sadder. here is a man who doesn’t know if he can ever be loved in the way he wants or be known to another in the way he wants, and when he gets anywhere close to it he doesn’t know how to communicate how he feels. in a way what he worries about in those early tapes is very ordinary — art, and boys, and boys who make art, and many other things in between — but it still manages to be profound. i wish he could have lived a very long life worrying about similarly ordinary yet profound things.
August 28, 2021
"Somehow I've got to crack out of this pressure or this self-consciousness - or this eye that's inside me staring at myself. I want to lose myself in distances or landscape or movement. I want to fuck somebody, I want to take off somebody's clothes, I want to lie down in sand, I want to lie down in dirt, I want to lie down with this other person. I want to lie down and roll around and lick them from the beginning of their feet all the way up their legs, up their sides, up into their armpits, up into their neck, up into their mouth. I want to stick my tongue in. I want to fuck somebody. And I want to do this in landscape, I want to do this somewhere in the hills, I want to do this somewhere by a river. I want to swim underwater; I want to suck somebody's dick underwater. I want to roll around in a way that pulls me completely from inside myself, something like turning the skin backwards so that everything's revealed, or everything is pumping outwards - so that it's not all contained in one little spot in the back of my fucking head when I'm sitting in a room full of strangers. Just trying to find some simple gesture of language to reach and touch somebody, to reach and touch myself and know that I'm fucking living and that I'm alive and that I'm not in a dead world going on a dead-end road."
May 28, 2024
this book spoke to the deepest recesses of my soul. i'm so lucky i got to read this right now, in this moment of my life.
"And all I can see right now is that I'm on automatic; it's just dead language tumbling from my lips, and this dead language doesn't even touch what I'm sensing or what I've been feeling the last twenty-four hours--what it felt like to get into bed last night and what the night feels like. How much I hate to fucking sleep, how much I hate to close my eyes, how much I hate to lie down, how much I hate the silence, how much I hate the aloneness. How much--even when I'm with all these people--I'm so fucking alone that it's like carrying a seed of something, and I don't know what it is, and I don't know what my thoughts really are...I want to roll around in a way that pulls me completely from inside myself, something like turning the skin backwards so that everything's revealed, or everything is pumping outwards--so that it's not all contained in one little spot in the back of my fucking head when I'm sitting in a room full of strangers. Just trying to find some simple gesture of language to reach and touch somebody, to reach and touch myself and know that I'm fucking living and that I'm alive and I'm not in a dead world going on a dead-end road."
"And all I can see right now is that I'm on automatic; it's just dead language tumbling from my lips, and this dead language doesn't even touch what I'm sensing or what I've been feeling the last twenty-four hours--what it felt like to get into bed last night and what the night feels like. How much I hate to fucking sleep, how much I hate to close my eyes, how much I hate to lie down, how much I hate the silence, how much I hate the aloneness. How much--even when I'm with all these people--I'm so fucking alone that it's like carrying a seed of something, and I don't know what it is, and I don't know what my thoughts really are...I want to roll around in a way that pulls me completely from inside myself, something like turning the skin backwards so that everything's revealed, or everything is pumping outwards--so that it's not all contained in one little spot in the back of my fucking head when I'm sitting in a room full of strangers. Just trying to find some simple gesture of language to reach and touch somebody, to reach and touch myself and know that I'm fucking living and that I'm alive and I'm not in a dead world going on a dead-end road."
June 25, 2025
Broke my Heart a Million times over
“It gives you a kind of strength, loving somebody or wanting to love somebody. Desiring somebody and having part of that desire fulfilled— it gives you a kind of strength to do just about anything” (42)
“Sometimes I just want to be by myself, and sometimes I love people so much” (70)
“Whenever we discover what we are, we cease becoming that…. Once you have the cognizance of what you are, your totality, then you cease to exist. That’s an interesting idea” (85)
"In the cheap-film world there are hundreds of shadows" (92)
"It's like, I'm so far inside myself, and I've been this way for a long time now--it's going on a few years. But I feel so far away inside myself that I can't come out to talk. It's like I'm lying down somewhere inside. It's almost as if I'm in this body vehicle, and I'm lying down, and this vehicle keeps moving. And sometimes it feels desperate and sometimes it feels calm; sometimes I'm attached to it and sometimes I'm not" (173)
“It gives you a kind of strength, loving somebody or wanting to love somebody. Desiring somebody and having part of that desire fulfilled— it gives you a kind of strength to do just about anything” (42)
“Sometimes I just want to be by myself, and sometimes I love people so much” (70)
“Whenever we discover what we are, we cease becoming that…. Once you have the cognizance of what you are, your totality, then you cease to exist. That’s an interesting idea” (85)
"In the cheap-film world there are hundreds of shadows" (92)
"It's like, I'm so far inside myself, and I've been this way for a long time now--it's going on a few years. But I feel so far away inside myself that I can't come out to talk. It's like I'm lying down somewhere inside. It's almost as if I'm in this body vehicle, and I'm lying down, and this vehicle keeps moving. And sometimes it feels desperate and sometimes it feels calm; sometimes I'm attached to it and sometimes I'm not" (173)
December 2, 2020
beautiful soul, very insightful
i have to bump it down a little bit for a few reasons. one is that i don't think this is something that he would've wanted published or the general public to have access to, one of the central issues he has in this book is that he gets self-conscious talking into the recorder because the thought of someone being able to hear it freaks him out. two, since it is just him talking and saying things here and there about various things, and a lot about dreams, i found myself getting distracted or lost at some points, especially towards the end. Maybe that was just me, but imagine just outletting your thoughts, it's pretty hard to digest them through words on paper as opposed to hearing them.
with that being said, arthur rimbaud in new york will forever be one of my favorite works and i'm glad that i did read this book
i have to bump it down a little bit for a few reasons. one is that i don't think this is something that he would've wanted published or the general public to have access to, one of the central issues he has in this book is that he gets self-conscious talking into the recorder because the thought of someone being able to hear it freaks him out. two, since it is just him talking and saying things here and there about various things, and a lot about dreams, i found myself getting distracted or lost at some points, especially towards the end. Maybe that was just me, but imagine just outletting your thoughts, it's pretty hard to digest them through words on paper as opposed to hearing them.
with that being said, arthur rimbaud in new york will forever be one of my favorite works and i'm glad that i did read this book
Displaying 1 - 30 of 93 reviews