Thirst

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Another [[morning]] and I wake with thirst for the [[goodness]] I do not have.

ἦμος δ᾽ ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος [[Ἠώς->thirst2]] (set: $counter to 1) (live: 1s)[ {(if: $counter > 0)[(set: $counter to it - 1)](else:)[]} {(if: $counter is 0)[<audio src="https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_q5dmfahL1I1rx78qpo1.mp3" autoplay>(stop:)] } ]

τέλειον δή τι φαίνεται καὶ αὔταρκες ἡ [[εὐδαιμονία->thirst2]], τῶν πρακτῶν οὖσα τέλος. (set: $counter to 1) (live: 1s)[ {(if: $counter > 0)[(set: $counter to it - 1)](else:)[]} {(if: $counter is 0)[<audio src="https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_q5chdtJVn71rx78qpo1.mp3" autoplay>(stop:)] } ]

Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. I walk out to the [[pond]] and all the way God has given us such beautiful [[lessons]].

"we're blowing like dust in the sky and that's fine all things turn to rust by and by and that's fine and metal creaks overhead the air in the dome tastes of lead the wind cuts across the seabed and [[that's fine->thirst3]]" - Jack de Quidt, The Sermon of Sister Rust (set: $counter to 1) (live: 1s)[ {(if: $counter > 0)[(set: $counter to it - 1)](else:)[]} {(if: $counter is 0)[<audio src="https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_q5dmg2H9yo1rx78qpo1.mp3" autoplay>(stop:)] } ]

"Didn't I do it for you? Why don't I do it for you? Why won't you do it for me? When all I do is [[for you->thirst3]]?" - FKA twigs, cellophane (set: $counter to 1) (live: 1s)[ {(if: $counter > 0)[(set: $counter to it - 1)](else:)[]} {(if: $counter is 0)[<audio src="https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_q5chhlEqBF1rx78qpo1.mp3" autoplay>(stop:)] } ]

Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, I was never a quick [[scholar]] but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your [[mercy]], a little more [[time]].

"I Suddenly [[Dont Understand Anything->thirst4]] And Am Currently Casting Sincere Doubt On The Laughable Insinuation That I Or Anyone Else Ever Actually Did For Even A Single Moment" - Kanaya Maryam, Homestuck (set: $counter to 1) (live: 1s)[ {(if: $counter > 0)[(set: $counter to it - 1)](else:)[]} {(if: $counter is 0)[<audio src="https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_q5dmh6BCTL1rx78qpo1.mp3" autoplay>(stop:)] } ]

"But seeing her made me realize. Asuka didn't just refuse to be president. She couldn't do it." "I wonder." "It probably takes a lot of courage to take charge of the club in the state it was in. Asuka's smart, so she thought it through and decided she couldn't take it on." "Does that mean I'm stupid?" "Oh, I guess." "You guess?" "No, it means you had [[courage->thirst4]]." - Nakaseko Kaori and Ogasawara Haruka, Hibike! Euphonium (set: $counter to 2) (live: 1s)[ {(if: $counter > 0)[(set: $counter to it - 1)](else:)[]} {(if: $counter is 0)[<audio src="https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_q5chjhwY9Z1rx78qpo1.mp3" autoplay>(stop:)] } ]

"You're waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you don't know for sure. But it doesn't matter, because we'll be [[together->thirst4]]." - Mal, Inception (set: $counter to 1) (live: 1s)[ {(if: $counter > 0)[(set: $counter to it - 1)](else:)[]} {(if: $counter is 0)[<audio src="https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_q5dmhlXDih1rx78qpo1.mp3" autoplay>(stop:)] } ]

Do not stand at my grave and weep I am not there. I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds that blow. I am the diamond glints on snow. I am the sunlight on ripened grain. I am the gentle autumn rain. When you awaken in the morning's hush I am the swift uplifting rush Of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the soft stars that shine at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there. [[I did not die->thirst5]]. - Mary Elizabeth Frye, Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep (set: $counter to 2) (live: 1s)[ {(if: $counter > 0)[(set: $counter to it - 1)](else:)[]} {(if: $counter is 0)[<audio src="https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_q5cgrtP6zx1rx78qpo1.mp3" autoplay>(stop:)] } ]

Sweet mother, I cannot weave – slender Aphrodite has [[overcome->thirst5]] me with longing for a girl. - Sappho, from Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works, tr. Diane Rayor (set: $counter to 2) (live: 1s)[ {(if: $counter > 0)[(set: $counter to it - 1)](else:)[]} {(if: $counter is 0)[<audio src="https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_q5chg0c37u1rx78qpo1.mp3" autoplay>(stop:)] } ]

Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart. Who knows what will [[finally]] happen or where I will be sent, yet [[already]] I have given a great many things away,

While they reached the spot on the beach with the placard driven into the sand, they stopped. Kaito shed his clothes quickly, keeping only his shirt and underwear. He gave Lea to key to his apartment, told her she could do whatever she liked with it. He touched her cheek with his finger. "Thank you, Lea," he said. Then he turned away from her and walked into the sea. <center>[-]</center> She turned to Anja. Anja nodded. Lea gripped the handle of the knife in the heel of her right hand. With one heavy motion, she slammed the heel of her left hand into it, and the knife sank deep and fast. The heart beat once, twice, then a third time, weakly. Then it stopped, and there was [[silence->thirst6]]. - Rachel Heng, Suicide Club (set: $counter to 2) (live: 1s)[ {(if: $counter > 0)[(set: $counter to it - 1)](else:)[]} {(if: $counter is 0)[<audio src="https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_q5ch98KsbK1rx78qpo1.mp3" autoplay>(stop:)] } ]

Anonymous asked: What's your take on non-binary/agender gender identities? I think those identities represent one of the most important realizations it’s possible for a person to have. I’ll tell you a story— In 1877 a critic called John Ruskin wrote a throwaway line about art. He put it in a preface to one of his books about Venice. He said that nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts: the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and in the book of their art. He said that all were worth reading but that the last was the only one worth trusting. This is a profound statement. If you accept that the word ‘nation’ means ‘the course of events pursued by a group of like-minded people,’ then it becomes clear that Ruskin is really talking about kinds of thinking. He is making the case that human persons can think in several different modes, only one of which we would recognize as the rational style of thought (the one that leaps to mind when somebody says “I’m thinking.”) Ruskin is saying that national deeds–wars or enslavements or internments of suspect races–are the product of one type of thought (one that imagines the world in terms of domination, power, and control) while the things a nation writes into its law, its ethics, or its philosophy are the product of another. The law is probably as close as you can get to rational thought crystallized in ordinary language. The law is our longest-running attempt to convert reality into an orderly simulation wherein all possible situations can be assigned a moral quantity. As this is achieved, it is thought, the law will crunch its moral numbers and recommend to us a course of optimal justice. (It hasn’t panned out.) So national deeds are the lizard brain at work and, when we drop the fluttering world into our jar to render its convulsions orderly and still, that’s good old rationality trying its hand at writing on water. These two styles of thought represent the two great tragedies of human nature: 1. The visceral, unbounded joy of cruelty–the license and encouragement to act that the pleasure taken in cruelty seems to give; and 2. its twin, the bloodless seduction of abstract ideas. It goes without saying that the world we live in, its wars, its scientific domination of nature, its gleeful hypertrophy of destruction, its Kafkan puzzle palaces, its determination to find the one, best way of living and its attempts to pave that way with laws and the bodies of dissenters, all of it exposes modern life as the product of the first tragedy multiplied by the second. But Ruskin sees something special in art: he imagines it as a kind of thinking that the other, tragic styles cannot corrupt or ensnare. Indeed, most of what great art has in common is its ability to produce a satisfaction that does not rely on domination and a clarity that eludes the ability of language to explain. We happen to live in a Kissingerian world of cruelty and power over which a checkerboard tablecloth has been thrown. Most people take this prospect to mean that if you aren’t playing your life like a weird, unbounded game of chess you ought to be beating people up for their stuff. These terrible mistakes are precisely why it is so important to see art as a way of thinking and not simply another match on the tablecloth or struggle for dominance beneath it. Art, as Ruskin wants it to be seen, is a co-equal portal of creation through which it is possible to glimpse a world that is something other than the vigorous hybrid of cleverness and sadism. This distinction takes on a new urgency: Right now, in the shared cultural space that most of us call the world, good old postmodernity is pushing the continents of human possibility back together. This new pangea explains, as the continent of Serious Things collides with and overlaps the one named Diversion, why our Batmen must be laughably self-serious and our Presidents taken seriously in the very same moment we recognize them as their own perfect parody. This compression was never a decision. It was always and only easier and cheaper to compress the several planes of experience back into a single sheet. It’s what you might call the vigorous hybrid’s endgame: All news, all entertainment, all politics, all the cotton candy and all of the bullets will be indiscriminately fed into the press and a new, universal medium of human existence stamped from these. The seething homogeneity of this medium is the reason we cannot take Trump’s abominable past seriously, why we cannot maintain outrage at his deputized cocklords as their knives hunt for the heart of liberal democracy, and why those who love him do so as he does all this and more. In this flattened world art becomes a means of carrying forward a vision of the future, or, if art falls wholly into the service of the malice and order producing this satanic unity, it becomes the perfect representation of life without parole. Naive though it sounds–and even as so many other things that feel worthwhile seem to die on our lips–in this flattened world art will become more important than at any point in the last thirty thousand years. And not just because the dry caves of the surviving elite may soon be our only subjects for decoration. Art's example as an independent mode of thought allows us to see still other ways of thinking. Love, for instance, has its own order and virtuosities. People in love quickly find that it is as much a test of skill as anything else. Love reveals itself as a series of disintegrating stages. To have a true talent for love you must ascend through these even as the basis of former affection begins to dissolve. In this way, people who are skilled at loving maintain the ability as love is crushed out of others by the contractions of a cooling lust, or sterilized by the debilities of cynicism, or unmasked as simply another–mutual–exercise in power and cruelty. Your body contains and articulates yet another organization of thought. I think the gender each of us ends up with (if any) is a reflection of how well, or badly, we are able to eavesdrop on the inner logic of our bodies. In this it has something in common with the talent for love–or art: A person who can understand what their body thinks is by definition one who also knows that rationality and power cannot and do not exhaust the possibilities of life. Moreover, a person who has struggled with him or herself in order to hear their self is a person who will fight for others. And theirs is now the logic of self-knowledge, a logic for which the intense seductions of silence under autocracy and fascism have [[already->thirst6]] been vanquished, by listening. - lazenby, Infinity To Dine (set: $counter to 2) (live: 1s)[ {(if: $counter > 0)[(set: $counter to it - 1)](else:)[]} {(if: $counter is 0)[<audio src="https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_q5ch98KsbK1rx78qpo1.mp3" autoplay>(stop:)] } ]

Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart. Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the [[prayers]] which, with this thirst, I am slowy learning. - Mary Oliver, Thirst

Prior Walter, Angels in America: "The fountain’s not flowing now, they turn it off in the winter, ice in the pipes. But in the summer it’s a sight to see. I want to be around to see it. I plan to be. I hope to be. This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: [[More Life]]." (set: $counter to 1) (live: 1s)[ {(if: $counter > 0)[(set: $counter to it - 1)](else:)[]} {(if: $counter is 0)[<audio src="https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_q5dmgk2efP1rx78qpo1.mp3" autoplay>(stop:)] } ]

Another morning and I wake with [[thirst]]

(set: $counter to 4) <center>(t8n: "dissolve")[The Great Work Begins.]</center> (live: 1s)[ (set: $counter to it - 1) (if: $counter is 0)[(go-to: "pre end")] ]

<center>[Thank you for reading.]</center>

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