Life may be brimming over with experiences, but somewhere, deep inside, all of us carry a vast and fruitful loneliness wherever we go.
Etty Hillesum, An interrupted life: The diaries, 1941–1943, and Letters from Westerbork (via nemophilies
You can be sad and clean and pure, if you go far enough inside yourself you are against yourself, or under yourself, like the Metro, the train cars tunneling life under life."
“Toilette” in My Dim Aviary by Gillian Cummings
“Yes, even when I don’t believe— there is a place in me inaccessible to unbelief, a patch of wild grace, a stubborn preserve, impenetrable, pain untouched by the sleeping body, music that builds its nest in silence.”
This world of pain and promise that we inhabit
Beauty stretched across the surface of things, hiding in plain sight.
Something about the Old Gods.. .
I put together a list of the most sensuous and sensual movies. Raw and Titane are both on it because they visually thrum and quiver with the desire emanating from their protagonists. Can you tell me more about the role that desire—who feels it, who’s fueled by it, and who expresses it—plays in your work, especially in relation to the gaze? You’ve mentioned that in Titane you tried to subvert the male gaze that usually dominates how we see women’s bodies. Absolutely. For me, the gaze has a connotation of social construct, especially when you’re talking about the male gaze, but the female gaze as well. This gaze is biased in some way that has been socially constructed. Desire is something that escapes that. For me, desire is freedom. I think that is very much what I have portrayed in both my features.
Years do odd things to identity. What does it mean to say I am that child in the photograph at Kishamish in 1935? Might as well say I am the shadow of a leaf of the acacia tree felled seventy years ago moving on the page the child reads. Might as well say I am the words she read or the words I wrote in other years, flicker of shade and sunlight as the wind moves through the leaves.