Clarice Lispector, From Água Viva; Translated By Stefan Tobler

he was saying we are in uncharted territory w AI and i said ya bc no one resisted it and he said well maybe there is no time and i said there is no time bc no one resisted. and i asked, do you know the rosenbergs? he said, yes they were executed, and i read him this excerpt from their last letter to their children: "Your lives must teach you, too, that good cannot flourish in the midst of evil; that freedom and all the things that go to make up a truly satisfying and worthwhile life, must sometime be purchased very dearly. Be comforted then that we were serene and understood with the deepest kind of understanding, that civilization had not as yet progressed to the point where life did not have to be lost for the sake of life; and that we were comforted in the sure knowledge that others would carry on after us." and i said that is what i mean, human civilization cannot progress when there has been so much oppression and not enough resistance and maybe we accept AI simply bc we are dumb. maybe humans are simply dumb and there is nothing more to it. but what about my capacity for reflection? AI has none, he agreed. what about my capacity to metabolize the external through the lens of my past experiences which, in turn, produces perspective? what abt all the labour that went into my loving you? what abt those sleepless nights? what abt the depths of my soul?

idk who will read this and idc. at least it is for no one or someone and not chatgpt. at least it's not spat out back at me. at least i'm revisiting a younger version of myself on tumblr as a grown woman. and then i remembered my ex best friend who thought she is not stupid bc she accepted the world is ending but we will hv so much fun together, at least. we will play and travel and laugh. and why pretend everything is fine, but on the other hand, why be sad about it? anyways. alice notley laughed at the question that poets sublimate. she said poets suffer and they write about how they perceive things after suffering. she said, i have never sublimated. in the office today i looked outside and my eyes welled w tears to see all my accomplishments manifest after so much pain. i felt all this gratitude, this is what i dreamed of - it's happening, it's rly happening. and then you said let's go out and look at the cherry blossoms and i said ok. the world is ending and i still suffer deeply and i still love deeply and what a beauteous thing.

omg...

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

Yohji Yamamoto: Leather Hand Bags Hand-Painted by Junji Ito, Only 2 In Existence

Natalie Díaz, from "American Arithmetic", Postcolonial Love Poem

Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry written c. April 1929, featured in Selected Diaries

Sylvia Plath, from a letter featured in The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol. 1: 1940-1956

I looked at my mother because I was a version of my mother. I looked away from my mother because I was a version of my mother. I was me, but I was also her—my mother, and I understood this all too well.

— Nora Lange, "Dog Star", pub. The Rupture (#120)

musings on april

Sylvia Plath (Leon Dabo), Edna St. Vincent Millay, E. E. Cummings, Naguib Mahfouz (Edgar Degas), E. E. Cummings (Édouard Manet), Rabindranath Tagore, T. S. Eliot (Edgar Degas), F. Scott Fitzgerald (Alphonse Osbert)

August 1959

Afterthoughts on the Lovers

By Lisel Mueller

Franz Kafka, from a letter to Milena Jesenka featured in "Letters to Milena,"