Abs Are Cancelled. We All About Soft Tummies Now

The Paper Haunt

Gerrit van Honthorst - Saint Sebastian

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

I bestow upon thee; concept playlists

•classical music to sip tea to while contemplating philosophy and the next marble bust you’ll buy

•stealing books from the Oxford library with friends you never thought you’d find, in the snow, yelling about Ovid, lighting candles

•folky music for sitting on your front porch in the lazy evening sun, surrounded by your closest friends, gazing at a wheat field and singing along with a guitar in your arms

•feeling listless; like you’re walking the world alone, wandering with no destination, held in the arms of the earth and happy with that

•songs to sing LOUD in the car on a road trip going nowhere in particular

•staring out the window of a quaint coffee shop, watching the raindrops cling to the glass and thinking of all the poetry you’re going to write for that lover you left behind

•looking back on a long relationship and realizing all the ups and downs you’ve had as one, suddenly seeing it all in slow motion like a silent film

•laying back on your bed, smiling uncontrollably, thinking of all the beautiful, bucolic times you’re going to have in the sun with that person you can’t stop thinking of

•a rock in your rib-cage, sobbing on the floor, feeling empty; things are coming to an end and you can’t bear to see them go

•the first day of summer – sprawling yourself in the green & vivacious grass, heart shaped sunglasses perched on your nose; youth in all its glory

•songs that bring back days of your old glory, reliving your childhood and your golden days, tracing over the old scars and remembering how you got them

•the smell of old books, melancholy, songs that are so potent with a sort of wild and tragic longing that they’re almost dangerous

•looking out a car window; letting your eyes cling to weeping trees and then letting them snap back again. feeling self centered and tragical.

•literally just songs that remind me of Oscar Wilde and Bosie Douglas

•stuff that i’m listening to right now! always changing, songs that i’m playing on repeat

Source.

– @jstor, quietly blowing my mind with keywords (x)

go to florence. look in the eyes of michelangelo’s david, chiseled in stone but softer than rosemary. they say he wore a crown of gold once before it was taken from his head. he is planted in stone but his eyes are too human for your liking; they beg you, put it back.

the antinous mondragone, the marble smooth and cold like winter ink. you remember it was unpacked with lipstick marks on its cheek; someone at the louvre with lips smeared cherry red had made herself hadrian and kissed it. you remember thinking, who could blame her?

sappho and erinna in the garden at mytilene, captured by simeon solomon. it’s been a while since you’ve cried at a painting. you’ve gone to museums armed with ways to analyze what you’re seeing; you know what clouds are saying, you know the language of flowers. but you looked at the painting of those two women clouded in their embrace and didn’t even realize you were crying until you looked at your notes in your lap and the pen was smudged with tears.

the universality of love. it hasn’t changed: two boys swathed in light, two girls in a garden teeming with flowers, a gaze from across a room. in the statues and paintings we are captured in our gentle, tender humanity, in the places where we think no one is looking, where we are allowed to feel vulnerable. where we are finally able to say, look, this is me, this is you, this is everything that love should be. i want to make you feel it.

i had an interesting dream last night.

i was listening to someone tell a wonderful story set in a fantasy world with magic and talking animals. the world was full of rich colors and vibrant plants that overtook any man made buildings. i don’t remember exactly what the story was about, only that although the main character had known sadness and hardship they were able to overcome and live happily and truly.

i woke up feeling hopeful for the future.

When Anaïs Nin said “I don’t want worship. I want understanding,” and when George Orwell said “Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood,” and when Marina Tsvetaeva said “In my early childhood, for as long as I can remember, I thought that I wanted to be loved. Now I know and tell everyone: I don’t need love, I need understanding.”