Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others. Although the situation must have had even then the approximate tragic stature of Scott Fitzgerald’s failure to become president of the P...

• Le Labo Another 13
• Byredo Black Saffron

CLEANING PIECE I

Write down a sad memory. Put it in a box. Burn the box and sprinkle the ashes in the field. You may give some ashes to a friend who shared the sadness.

CLEANING PIECE II

Make a numbered list of sadness in your life. Pile up stones corresponding to those numbers. Add a stone, each time there is sadness. Burn the list, and appreciate the mount of stones for its beauty.

Make a numbered list of happiness in your life. Pile up stones corresponding to those numbers. Add a stone, each time there is happiness. Compare the mount of stones to the one of sadness.

CLEANING PIECE III

Try to say nothing negative about anybody. a) for three days b) for forty-five days c) for three months

See what happens to your life.

CLEANING PIECE IV

• An Almost Made Up Poem - Charles Bukowski

I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny they are small, and the fountain is in France where you wrote me that last letter and I answered and never heard from you again. you used to write insane poems about ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you knew famous artists and most of them were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right, go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous because we’ never met. we got close once in New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never touched. so you went with the famous and wrote about the famous, and, of course, what you found out is that the famous are worried about their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed with them, who gives them that, and then awakens in the morning ...

• art is a guaranty of sanity - Louise Bourgeois

• Sun in: 12°55' Aquarius
• Moon in: 23°50' Scorpio
• Ascending/rising in: 22°09' Leo
• Midheaven/10th in: 5°00' Taurus

• exploring the distance between reality and art and imagination

• Audre Lorde argues throughout her work that we should not be protected from what hurts. We have to work and struggle not so much to feel hurt but to notice what causes hurt, which means unlearning what we have learned not to notice. We have to do this work if we are to produce critical understandings of how violence, as a relation of force and harm, is directed toward some bodies and not others - Sara Ahmed

• Love Sonnet XI - Pablo Neruda

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh, your hands the color of a savage harvest, hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails, I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body, the sovereign nose of your arrogant face, I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart, like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

• Having a Coke With You - Frank O'Hara

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly...

• Wild Geese - Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imaginati...

• For Grace, After a Party - Frank O Hara

You do not always know what I am feeling. Last night in the warm spring air while I was blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't interest me, it was love for you that set me afire,

and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of strangers my most tender feelings writhe and bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand, isn't there an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside the bed? And someone you love enters the room and says wouldn't you like the eggs a little

different today? And when they arrive they are just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather is holding.

• As yet — no particular friends — and I don’t want any — When I like them at all — I like them so much that it almost eats me up alive and I just want time to breathe — I feel almost smothered with the pulls of the past few weeks — maybe I should say months — I just want to get out where there is space and breath — and not like anybody and not be liked — Sometimes — very — very seldom — I wish there were more people like you and like me — I don’t know how alike we are — Are we alike at all —? I don’t know — Living is wonderful till it becomes almost torture — or it is torture till it seems to be great — I can’t help it — it’s hell and I like it - Georgia O’Keeffe

• Imagine her knowing the hiddenmost hungers of millions of men. Imagine her seeing deeper into those hungers than the people that had them, seeing the hatred and the wish for death behind the lust. Imagine her shaping herself in that complete image, keeping herself as aloof as marble. Yet imagine the hunger she might feel in answer to their hunger.

• 'I seduce myself with my hope' - Susan Sontag

• Mayakovsky - Frank O'Hara

1 My heart’s aflutter! I am standing in the bath tub crying. Mother, mother who am I? If he will just come back once and kiss me on the face his coarse hair brush my temple, it’s throbbing!

then I can put on my clothes I guess, and walk the streets.

2 I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist.

Words! be sick as I am sick, swoon, roll back your eyes, a pool,

and I’ll stare down at my wounded beauty which at best is only a talent for poetry.

Cannot please, cannot charm or win what a poet! and the clear water is thick

with bloody blows on its head. I embrace a cloud, but when I soared it rained.

3 That’s funny! there’s blood on my c...

• It is women who love horror. Gloat over it. Feed on it. Are nourished by it. Shudder and cling and cry out-and come back for more ― Bela Lugosi

• Obsession was initially a term of warfare. In Latin, obsessio indicated the first phase of a siege on a city, when the city was surrounded on all sides but its citadel remained intact. Obsessio was followed by possessio, when the attacker breached the walls and took the city from the inside. In Obsession: A History, Lennard Davis explains the way these two words were adapted to explain demonic possession in the third century: “In the case of obsession, that person was aware of being besieged by the devil since the demon did not have complete control, had not entered the city of the soul, and the victim could therefore attempt to resist.” Demonology was, for many centuries thereafter, the only language available for explaining obsession and other insanities. Obsession was understood as a torment of the soul and, often, a spiritual punishment. The...

• an uncanny feeling is produced 'when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality - Sigmund Freud

• The House - Warsan Shire

Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women; kitchen of lust,

bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy.

Sometimes the men - they come with keys,

and sometimes, the men - they come with hammers.

• Cicada - Hosho McCreesh

Sick of his own face,

sick of his skin, of the dark,

he crawls outside himself to sing–

a better poet than most.