August 1959

Be Near Me, Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Sunken alcove in the garden

SARA MRAD Botanical Alchemy Collection | Couture Fall/Winter 2025 if you want to support this blog consider donating to: ko-fi.com/fashionrunways

The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“i thirst for you. don’t walk away from me. tell me everything, even if you have to hurt me a little. no one in the world will love anything you do as much as i do. tell me about the you i love, the one who’s a little shivery. let yourself go. don’t force yourself on me, just because you don’t want to worry or help me. when you strip in front of me, i finally understand why i was born. i love you.”

— Maria Casarès to Albert Camus, Correspondance, January 14-15, 1950 [#131]

— triata mateer, honeybee

Freud said that we endlessly repeat past hurts, forever re-enacting the same patterns in a futile attempt to patch the un-healable wound. This, more than anything, is the terror of the personal, digital archive: not that it reveals some awful act from the past, some old self that no longer stands for us, but that it reminds us that who we are is in fact a repetition, a cycle, a circular relation of multiple selves to multiple injuries. It’s the self as a bundle of trauma, forever acting out the same tropes in the hopes that we might one day change.

Navneet Alang, "Terror of the Archive"

Michael Bazzett, from "Inside the Trojan Horse", The Echo-Chamber: Poems [transcript in ALT]