broke down / nothing else left

Get up, get up, pressure, pressure
Run away as fast as you can go
Every day our friends and lovers
Give the answers everybody knows 

– Bastille, Lethargy

Hello, Sylvia

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. 

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. 

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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About time for me to finally read this. :))

Hey, Jude

You are weathered and worn
Your petals soft and torn
The fading color

You have bent your shoulders
To hold the weight of the world
You will surely shatter

 — The Hush Sound, Magnolia

Pride and vanity

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.

 — Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Extraordinary ordinary

— Phil Kaye, Jesus Will Do It For Half (A Light Bulb Symphony, 2010)

 

The tongue-in-cheek cleverness notwithstanding, this poem hits home.

Because maybe, I was once guilty of romanticizing what it's like to be in a relationship, but have known better since. 

Because at the end of the day, it's not all about blinding fireworks and overwhelming waves nor about earth-shattering promises and immaculate ideals. Instead, it's how you learn more about each other, about life–together and as individuals–through all the mistakes and the flaws. It's in the quiet assurance to do one's best for each other, for the partnership, day after day, week after week. It's how you celebrate the little victories together, or how you could take comfort in each other's presence, whether in times of joy or fatigue. It's how the simplest, everyday moments could feel brand new after all.

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'But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same – like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?'

— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers (The Lord of the Rings Volume II)

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The first month of the year is almost over and I still am not yet done with my first book for the 2015 Reading Challenge. Haha. I am thoroughly enjoying reading this high fantasy classic and finally understanding why it has become such an important book. I know, I know. I should be fed to Shelob for reading/finishing it only now. The magnitude and, well, objectivity are so sweeping I can't help but root for the characters–despite knowing already what will transpire, thanks to the movies–and wonder what sort of bigger epic the Elder Days of the Middle-earth used to be. 

It is not enough to be dumbstruck

Tell me a piece of your history
that you're proud to call your own
Speak in words you picked up
as you walked through life alone.

— Bastille, The Silence

'In love one advances by retreating'

Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe it derives from the sheer strangeness of there being singing in the world… that such things should exist, that we should have discovered the magical intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all within the span of a human hand, from which we can build our cathedrals of sound, is as alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught us. Maybe not. Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don’t have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in may painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.

I think of faith as irony, which is perhaps why the only leaps of faith I’m capable of are those required by the creative imagination, by fictions that don’t pretend to be fact, and so end up telling the truth.

Power, like love, most fully reveals its dimensions only when it is irrevocably lost.

But let’s just suppose. What if the whole deal—orientation, knowing where you are, and so on—what if it’s all a scam? What if all of it—home, kinship, the whole enchilada—is just the biggest, most truly global, and centuries-old piece of brainwashing? Suppose that it’s only when you dare to let go that your real life begins? When you’re whirling free of the mother ship, when you cut your ropes, slip your chain, step off the map, go absent without leave, scram, vamoose, whatever: suppose that’s it then, and only then, that you're actually free to act! To lead the life nobody tells you how to live, or when, or why. In which nobody orders you to go forth and die for them, or for god, or comes to get you because you broke one of the rules, or because you're one of those people who are, for reasons which unfortunately you can’t be given, simply not allowed. Suppose you've got to go through the feeling of being lost, into the chaos and beyond; you've got to accept the loneliness, the wild panic of losing your moorings, the vertiginous terror of the horizon spinning round and round like the edge of a coin tossed in the air. 

You won't do it. Most of you won't do it. The world's head laundry is pretty good at washing brains: Don't jump off that cliff don't walk through that door don't step into the waterfall don't take that chance don't step across that line don't ruffle my sensitivities I'm warning you now don't make me mad you're doing it you're making me mad. You won't have a chance you haven't got a prayer you're finished you're history you're less than nothing, you're dead to me, dead to your whole family your nation your race, everything you ought to love more than life and listen to like your master's voice and follow blindly and bow down before and worship and obey; you're dead, you hear me, forget about it, you stupid bastard, I don't even know your name. 

But just imagine you did it. You stepped off the edge of the earth, or through the fatal waterfall, and there it was: the magic valley at the end of the universe, the blessed kingdom of the air. Great music everywhere. You breathe the music, in and out, it's your element now. It feels better than "belonging" in your lungs!

If Ficino believed that our music is composed by our lives, the contemporary Czech Milan Kundera thinks, contrariwise, that our lives are composed like music. “Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty, even in times of the greatest distress.” To stand the old principle of good design on its elegant head: in our functioning we follow the dictates of our need for form. 

—Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

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This book. Seriously.

there will be things we never dared

Now that you’ve grown so wise
Use that head and stop to think a little
Just cause you’re crazy doesn’t mean that you’re free 

— Stars, The Theory of Relativity

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She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins. 

— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

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I totally remember what it felt like to be so full…Full of promise, full of dreams, full of shit. Mostly just full of yourself. So full you’re bursting. And then you get out into the world, and people empty you out, little by little, like air from a balloon…You try like hell to fill yourself up with fresh air, from you and from other people. But back then…it was so damn effortless to feel full, you know? All you had to do was breathe. 

— Jonathan Tropper

How do you say 'I love you' without being able to?

We are collapsed in the act of just being here
Three blues, two greens, and a beer

 — Stars, What I'm Trying to Say

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Lettie shrugged. "Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don't. I don't. people are much more complicated than that. It's true of everybody." 

I said, "Are you a monster? Like Ursula Monkton?" 

Lettie threw a pebble into the pond. "I don't think so," she said. "Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't." 

I said, "People should be scared of Ursula Monkton." 

"P'rhaps. What do you think Ursula Monkton is scared of?" 

"Dunno. Why do you think she's scared of anything? She's a grown-up, isn't she? Grown-ups and monsters aren't scared of things." 

"Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie. "And as for grown-ups..." She stopped talking, rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Then, "I'm going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world." She thought for a moment. Then she smiled. "Except for Granny, of course."   

 — Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Alba

... I felt as if I were assembling a jigsaw puzzle in which each piece has a specific place. Before I put the puzzle together, it all seemed incomprehensible to me, but I was sure that if I ever managed to complete it, the separate parts would each have meaning and the whole would be harmonious... At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously...  

— Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

Férula

She was one of those people who are born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengeance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism, but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother's sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman – made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor – was consuming herself. 

 — Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

of rubble and sins

of rubble and sins from summerghost on 8tracks Radio.

a mix for the rebuilding of the north after the great war among the kings and queens, for the northmen's united rise from the ruins after the battle of ice and fire, for winterfell whose springs as warm as blood flow through the veins of its walls, for the heirs of the great house whose hearts, broken and cold, never stopped yearning for home

In Our Bedroom After the War | Stars
all the living are dead/ and the dead are all living/ the war is over/ we are beginning

Bad Blood | Bastille
all this bad blood here/ won’t you let it dry?/ it’s been cold for years/ won’t you let it lie?

That's Okay | The Hush Sound
you want to go back to where you felt safe/ to hear your brother's laughter/ see your mother's face/ your childhood home is just powder-white bones/ and you'll never find your way back

A City of Sleeping Hearts | Urbandub
i ponder the loss of stars/ in the night sky/ the smoked-filled air tonight/ for all of us/ i weep for our loss

Sunrise Ends | Stars of Track and Field
a myriad of color shines/ you're a rhythm that no one can unwind/ so come on, come out wherever/ you have gone for the winter

12 Fingers | Young the Giant
but when those sounds sang from our halls/ the backstop pressed against bleached walls/ do you remember the sound of snow?

Turn the Dirt Over | Sea Wolf
oh, turn the water over/ if you want to flow down/ oh, open up the shutters/ see the falling snow/ the falling snow

Innocence | Björk
when i once was/ untouchable/ innocence roared/ still amazes/ when i once was/ innocent/ it's still here/ but in different places

End Of All Time | Stars of Track and Field
you burn bright when you're left alone/ build up speed to bring you home/ turn off the lights and watch you glow

Winter Bones | Stars
can i come to your house?/ caught in the ropes and the wires/ the sunset is hard in the south/ winter lives in my bones/ it's all i've known/ it's all i've known

Daniel in the Den | Bastille
and for every king that died/ oh they would crown another/ and it’s harder than you think/ telling dreams from one another

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This has been sitting in my drafts for the longest time. The bands I've been listening to lately are giving me so much Stark/Winterfell/North feels, thus this mix (and the account and the lousy artwork). Haha. 

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"Ender, come see me. China's a beautiful country. More variety inside China than in the rest of the world." 

"I will if I can," said Ender. He didn't have the heart to point out that China was full of human beings, and that the mix of good and bad, strong and weak, courageous and fearful was bound to be about the same as in any other country or culture or civilization... or village, or house, or heart. 

—  Orson Scott Card, Ender in Exile

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I'm really enjoying this sort-of accidental find of a series. Ender Wiggin is as good a child hero character as it gets. ASA<3!

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<That is the tragedy of language, my friend. Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong.> 

<That is the source of their misery.> 

<And some of their strength, I think.>  

—  Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

Birthday Song

I am not your concern 
The world will still turn
When I'm not around
Rely on me and you'll fall
Backs up to the wall
Someone let me out 

 – The Hush Sound, Not Your Concern

don't you know that's okay?

You are broken and callow
Cautious and safe
You are boundless and beauty
With fright in your face
Until someone loves you,
I'll keep you safe
But like them, I will give you away 

And when you're gone, will they say your name?
And when you're gone, will they love you the same?
If not, that's okay. 

—  The Hush Sound, That's Okay