عُـلا > Recent Status Updates

‘What if you never see her again?’
‘Then I’ll take a vow of celibacy and live in the mountains for the rest of my life.’ if he ain't like this, i don't want him.

”I seemed to be imprisoned in my own head, without the chance to test myself, and I was frustrated. There had been small alarming episodes, not normal impulses of depression, not a destructiveness expressed symbolically, but something more. Now these events have no before and after, they return to my mind in an order that is always different.”

”I seemed to be falling backward toward my mother, my grandmother, the chain of mute or angry women I came from.”

“I felt that I was suffocating, it seemed to me that I was betraying myself.” To be a mother.

"I taught myself to be present only if they wanted me present and to speak only if they asked me to speak. It was what they required of me and I gave it to them." i wonder if that is what our mothers truly think of..

”A woman’s body does a thousand different things, toils, runs, studies, fantasizes, invents, wearies, and meanwhile the breasts enlarge, the lips of the sex swell, the flesh throbs with a round life that is yours, your life, and yet pushes elsewhere, draws away from you although it inhabits your belly, joyful and weighty, felt as a greedy impulse & yet repellent, like an insect’s poison injected into a vein”

“you just have to listen—the unspoken says more than the spoken.”

“How I suffered for her and for myself, how ashamed I was to have come out of the belly of such an unhappy person.” ):

"we do not know our own souls, let alone souls of others."

"there is, let us confess it, an illness in the great confessional, a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals."

"but sympathy we cannot have, if her children, weighted as they already are with sorrow, were to take on them that burden too, adding in imagination other pains to their own, buildings would cease to rise; roads would peter out into grassy tracks; there would be an end of music and of paintings; one great sigh alone would rise to heaven, and the only attitudes for men and women would be those of horror and despair."

"it is not only a new language that we need, more primitive, more sensual, more obscene, but a new hierarchy of the passions love must be deposed in favor of a temperature of 104; jealousy gives place to the pangs of sciatica; sleeplessness play the part of villain, and the hero becomes a white liquid with a sweet taste, that mighty prince with the moths' eyes and the feathered feet, one of whose names is chloral."

"the merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her. but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor, and language at once runs dry. there is nothing ready made for him. he is forced to coin words himself, and, take his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sounds in another. so to crush them together had a brand new word in the end drops out."

"wrongly, however, for illness often takes on the disguise of love, and plays the same odd tricks. it invests certain faces with divinity, sets us to wait, hour after hour, with pricked ears for the creaking of a stair, wreathes the faces of the absent with a new significance, while the mind concocts a thousand legends and romances about them for which it has neither time nor taste and health."

"short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism."

"those greats war which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of the oncome of melancholia, are neglected."

"and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul escapes."

"how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul.. -, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down in the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers"

"if I was still available to be blamed for their rages, their sorrows, in spite of the different continents and the spacious sky that separated us."

"All this was prepared for me. All this was set in motion long ago. I live in someone else’s future. I stayed as long as I could, he said. Now look at the moon."

"It is too heavy, says the canvas. You lack restraint. I was sleeping in whiteness, drifts of snow, and you woke me and told me your dream, my blank face upturned, listening. You came to me while we were sleeping, we were both sleeping, and you asked me to hold this for you. I am holding this for you."

"Put yourself in the painting: you are responsible. Broadcast from a smeary place: you are responsible. Wearing your dead face, your man face, your real face: you are responsible."

"I lost the important parts and I set about restoring. Wanting to show and not being able."

"I stepped out so things could progress without me. The knot of the self: take it out. The knot of the self: what is the rope? The ability to nullify the self in favor of the landscape, or a lover, or a bowl of fruit. What happens when I no longer want to meet you?"

"Allegedly. When you paint an evil thing, do you invoke it or take away its power?"

"Give a man a weapon and you have a warrior. Put him on a horse and you have a hero."

"This is my hand over his face, which isn’t his face anymore, revising. I made a shape of the shape he made, subtracted what he shared with anyone else. There wasn’t much left but it felt like him, wild and scared. It was too much to bear. I put down the brush and looked at my hands."

"Inside himself he jumped a little. Why build a room you can live in? Why build a shed for your fears? The life of the body is a nightmare."