s.penkevich > Books: lgbt‎ (21)

‘ saw that the wretched creatures enslaved to the machines were as repetitive in their movements as machines. They were distinguished only by their unhappiness. The great wealth of the manufactories is not for the workers but for the owners. Humans must live in misery to be the mind of the machines.’

’If you believe, as I do, that religious texts – like myths – are texts we create to mirror the deeper structures of the human psyche, then yes, naming is still our primary task. Poets and philosophers know this…I cannot conjure spirits, but I can tell you that calling things by their right names is more than giving them an identity bracelet or a label, or a serial number. We summon a vision. Naming is power.’

‘We read a book about ourselves and wonder if we have ever existed. You hold out your hand. I take it in mine. You say, this is the world in little. The tiny globe of you is my sphere. I am what you know. We were together once and always. We are inseparable. We can only live apart.’

’One sign of the vampire is the power of the hand. The slender hand of Mircalla closed like a vice of steel on the General's wrist when he raised the hatchet to strike. But its power is not confined to its grasp; it leaves a numbness in the limb it seizes, which is slowly, if ever, recovered from.’

‘[T]hat is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time…Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognize its integrity.’

’ No live organism can continue to exist compassionately under conditions of absolute fascism, even the birds in Italy under Mussolini were observed to take part in rallies and violence. Albion, not compassionate, not sane, stood ringed by a tangled forest, holding inside, however messily, its overpowering ideology; it had stood so for a hundred years but would only stand for one more before it entered into the long process of becoming something else, at the end of which it was hoped it would seem to all the world that it had always been that way. Within, floors crumbled, ceilings gaped open, vines choked the chimneys and the windows. Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of the house, and whatever walked there marched on Rome.’

‘ No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.’

‘ Now, if three girls enter a house and only two leave, who is to blame? And if both girls tell a different story, but you read online that you have to BELIEVE WOMEN, what do you? Do you decide one is a woman and one isn't, so you can believe one them but not the other? Do you take the side of the woman who is most like you? Or the most intersectional one? But one is rich, and white, and trans, and the other is rich, and Asian and a lesbian, and cis (?), and fuck, who wins here? In the end it's so hard to choose where your sympathies settle. So, you go online and find an `intersectionality score calculator' on the internet…Numbers have been known to lie. Numbers have been known to show bias, statistics often have racist undertones, for example.
So, there's just two girls leaving a house and maybe you don't have to take a side, maybe you can empathize with them both and hope they get the therapy and help they need and can learn to forgive one another. No. You can't do that.'

’The House spreads. Its arteries run throughout the country. Its lifeblood flows into Westminster, into Scotland Yard, into every village and every city. It flows into you, and into your mother. It keeps you alive. It makes you feel safe.’

’suddenly felt that I was owed an apology. From whom? The idiots who blamed homosexuality for every stupid thing? Or the specific idiot next to me for smothering himself in that bullshit and being unable to accept himself for who he was? Or the other idiot who fell for the first idiot, even when he knew the first idiot was an idiot, who fell for him so hard he dug through his computer to know everything there was to possibly know about him? Maybe I was owed an apology from all of the above. Or maybe from none of them.’

‘In those days, we learned a little bit about what it was like to live as other people. Jaehee learned that living as a gay was sometimes truly shitty, and I learned that living as a woman wasn’t much better. And our conversations always ended with the same question.
-Why were we born this way?
-Who knows?’

’Aeja, was someone who, true to her own name, once brimmed with love, was nothing if not love. And so upon losing that love, she endued up a curious thing: she ended up a mere empty husk.’

’Anytime you hurt, remember that other people can hurt just as much. You've got to make that connection. But ...most of the time it might seem more natural to pretend otherwise. But that's why we've got to remember. Because if we don't, we'll forget, entirely.
And forgetting, that's how people turn monstrous.’

‘we can never run with our lies indefinitely. Sooner or later we are forced to confront their darkness. We can choose the when not the if. And the longer we wait, the more painful and uncertain it will be.’

’Because it’s in English that I really started reading books properly. It’s this part of my mind that feels really intimate and private, but not the same as intimacy between me and my family or intimacy between me and my husband. It’s a sort of self-intimacy.

’[W]hen I look at matters in those light...as arrangements rather than relationships, the primary movers starts to look...familiar’

‘You run the romantic gauntlet for decades without knowing who exactly it is you're giving and taking such a battering in order to reach...and then, by some stroke of fortune, the gauntlet concludes, the person does exist after all.’

’I couldn’t make out what she said and she had to repeat it.She never spoke those few words again. It wasn’t necessary. We both knew they were irrevocable and would last forever. We’ve accepted it, each in our own way.’

1. An eruption in a young girl’s life that causes her to separate from family and home.
2. Seclusion in an idyllic setting.
3. A catastrophe that drives the girl from the idyllic setting due to her violation of a promise or her being violated.
4. A period of wandering, suffering and atonement.
5. The accomplishment of a set of tasks or rescue that brings about a happy ending.

’[I]f we reread some of the tales with history in mind, and if we reflect for a moment about the issues at stake, it becomes apparent that these enchanting, loveable tales are filled with all sorts of power struggles...and that their real ‘enchantment’ emanates from these dramatic conflicts whose resolutions allow us to glean the possibility of making the world, that is, shaping the world in accord with our needs and desires. In essence, the meaning of the fairy tales can only be fully grasped if the magic spell is broken and if the politics and utopian impulse of the narratives are related to the socio-historical forces which distinguished them...’

they buried you all business, no ceremony.
cameras, t-shirts, essays, protests

then you were just dead, some nights
i want to dig you up, bury you right.

scrape dirt until my hands are raw
& wounds pack themselves with mud.

i want to dig you up, let it rain twice
before our next good-bye.

dear sprinkler dancer, i can’t tell if I’m crying
or i’m the sky, but praise your sweet rot

unstitching under soil, praise dandelions
draining water from your greening, precious flesh.

i’ll plant a garden on top
where your hurt stopped.

i survived yesterday, spent it
ducking bullets, some
flying toward me & some
trying to rip their way out.