Happy Tuesday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Housekeeping:
If you’re in LA, I’m leading a free (!) workshop on sonnets on July 6. I would love to see you there. Let’s read and write some sonnets together!
What I’m reading:
Weight of the Earth, David Wojnarowicz
Quotations:
I’m wearing a blue coat; I call it my Picasso jacket, not because Picasso ever wore such a jacket, or because the jacket resembles one of his paintings, but because I need to discover a name for every desirable object that surrounds me.
-Wayne Koestenbaum
Toward what goal do I aspire, ever, but collision?
-Wayne Koestenbaum
Closing in, closing up, having a fear of showing myself completely to somebody that I desire: that it will drive them away or give them cause to become disinterested.
-David Wojnarowicz
There’s a part of me that needs to be embraced.
-David Wojnarowicz
Sometimes I think I just want to leave the city and go away, go someplace that’s very quiet and somewhat desolate and removed, and just live my life in a totally different fashion.
-David Wojnarowicz
I like ugly people or people with some sense of derangement.
-David Wojnarowicz
I mean, I felt good, but there’s just these times when I want to step out the door and keep on going, beyond state lines, beyond borders.
-David Wojnarowicz
My life is my life. My work, my ideas, my approach to things are my own, and there’s no reason in the world for me to change them for other people.
-David Wojnarowicz
I’ll never end my own life. I never had any desire to. I just thought that if somehow I knew when I was going to stop living, somehow that would be an enormous amount of inspiration to do exactly what I wanted.
-David Wojnarowicz
It gives you a kind of strength, loving somebody or wanting to love somebody.
-David Wojnarowicz
The streets were completely empty, and traffic was almost nonexistent. There was one car squealing to a stop at a red light. One solitary car, braking for a light.
-David Wojnarowicz
All I really want to do is be alone, completely alone in a silent house just for a short period of time.
-David Wojnarowicz
I’m tired of what my life is sometimes. Things seem to get out of control, and it’s like I’ve resigned myself to not having any control of my life. I can control specific things right in front of me that are my life, as far as direction—which way to walk, what to eat, things like that. But overall, mentally, it has seemed to have taken a course of its own.
-David Wojnarowicz
I feel at times like I’m getting dumb, that I’m losing it, that I’m losing the sense of life that I had that gave me a lot of energy to create things and to love things and respond to things and be happy about things.
-David Wojnarowicz
I fear that loving someone and living with them will ruin me.
-David Wojnarowicz
Sometimes I just want to be by myself, and sometimes I love people so much. Sometimes I want to change my whole life and do something like leave, walk out the door, and keep going, like so many stories I’ve read when I was growing up, in newspapers or heard or saw in psychology magazines that were lying around the apartment some people had brought me to when I was little: about parents who simply walked out and left all their belongings behind and disappeared forever and started new lives in other locations in the world. Sometimes I want to do that, and sometimes I feel like sticking it out in what I’m doing, hoping to arrive at—or achieve—some sort of place where life becomes something more simple and easy.
-David Wojnarowicz
Suddenly, I got struck with a feeling that I wanted to start smashing things, and I wanted all the art in the apartment—all the paintings and sculptures, the photographs, everything that I made, or all the things that came back from the last gallery I was in, lined up against the wall—I just wanted to grab things like this plaster head and start smashing it on the floor. Start smashing the paintings and breaking them up and breaking them into pieces and taking a buzz saw and just cutting through the center of canvases and just ripping out every nail.
-David Wojnarowicz
That’s what I love about when people make things: I love that they just do it, and I love that it even occurs to them to make something.
-David Wojnarowicz
I believe in what I do so much that it can’t be wrong, and it can’t be work that’s unnecessary, and it can’t be things that are unnecessary or just clog up the surface of the world. They’re meaningful things and they’re meaningful to me, and I know that they have to have a life beyond me.
-David Wojnarowicz
I know that I’m an artist—I know that I’m compelled to make things; it’s a compulsion to make things to make sense of my life, and it makes me feel relieved about the experience of living or the experience of this world—
-David Wojnarowicz
The weight of the earth is about things in captivity: animals and people and all that surrounds us.
-David Wojnarowicz
Maybe it had something to do with my mortality, having this virus, and maybe it had something to do with loss or longing, which may be one and the same.
-David Wojnarowicz
Sometimes when I fear dying—I know it’s just odd moments when it’s hard to articulate—I think about it and I just hope it’s not something prolonged and painful. I hope it’s not fearful, and I hope it’s something that I can slip into, like slipping into a tub of water, warm water, something restful. But when I think about dying and suddenly have fear about it, it’s fear of going before I’m ready. And then I think, How can I ever be ready?
-David Wojnarowicz
I don’t want to go. I don’t want to die. Or I don’t want to see it coming.
-David Wojnarowicz
All my life I’ve tried to maintain some kind of complete control of myself.
-David Wojnarowicz
When people look at you as a walking disease, a walking illness, a vessel of disease and death, they deny the very life that you carry.
-David Wojnarowicz
I want to be able to provoke some change, in whatever limited fashion—whatever small sense of shift that anything I could do or say could create in people, in a person, in numbers, in subtlety.
-David Wojnarowicz
There’s so much more going on in the world taht I want to be a part of. And yet I never allow myself to be truly a part of it—and less and less as the years go by…
-David Wojnarowicz
My feeling is that the imagination is the key to breaking through pre-invented existence: that in imagination, we can break the images of borders—we can break through the borders of countries, we can break through existing structures of government, or we can break through whatever systems of control are on our shoulders.
-David Wojnarowicz
I feel that in my work I can only declare myself, I can only declare my allegiance or my ideas, in a search for some kind of self-truth.
-David Wojnarowicz
I don’t have a terrific amount of hope about the future of things, but at the same time, that doesn’t disregard the idea of pleasure, of beauty, of subtlety.
-David Wojnarowicz
All this emptiness, all this desolation, sometimes feels like one big great mirror held up to my own heart, my own mind. My own soul, if you will.
-David Wojnarowicz
Right now I’m riding through all this beautiful landscape: It’s just scrub, brush, landscape, plains, and these brown, dark mountains in the distance covered with smog or smoke from the fireplaces this time of year. And big explosions of trees just suddenly uttering out of the earth, uttering out of crevices in the earth. And it’s really wonderful. It’s the feeling of winter and yet the sun’s so warm.
-David Wojnarowicz
Whether it’s anxiety or whether it’s real, physical aspects of disease, I want, I want to be washed. Or I want to be like a sieve with water moving through it, taking away the particles, the things that are keeping me in this treading position.
-David Wojnarowicz
Really, I just don’t want to fucking die.
-David Wojnarowicz
Maybe I just want to shove my face underneath his shirt and kiss his chest, or plunge my head through his chest and kiss his heart. Maybe just kiss his heart.
-David Wojnarowicz
I feel extremely dark. I feel really very dark today. And I feel, uh, I feel something stronger than what I know is fear. Something very shaky, something inside out.
-David Wojnarowicz
I keep having these feelings or these thoughts. I keep dreaming of breaking things, I keep having these leanings toward smashing everything.
-David Wojnarowicz
It's not wanting to kill life, it’s wanting to kill my fears—or it’s wanting to kill the things that tie my hands, or the things that frustrate m,e, or the things that are symbols of what it is to live in this pre-invented existence.
-David Wojnarowicz
Who I am is something that I want to let go, that I want to fre up by cracking open something else, cracking open—reaching into the inside of me or the inside of someone else.
-David Wojnarowicz
I want to live inside dreams. I want to live inside myths.
-David Wojnarowicz
I want to fuck some guy; I want to take his clothes off slow and unbutton his sleeves and pull his shirt from around his body.
-David Wojnarowicz
Slamming of bodies, slamming of my body against the wall until it crumbles, until it breaks, until it shocks.
-David Wojnarowicz
I want to lose myself; I want to lose myself in distances or landscape or movement. I want to fuck somebody, I want to take off somebody’s clothes. I want to lie down in sand, I want to lie down in dirt, I want to lie down with this other person. I want to lie down and roll around and lick them from the beginning of their feet all the way up their legs, up their sides, up into their armpits, up into their neck, up into their mouth. I want to stick my tongue in. I want to fuck somebody. And I want to do this in landscape, I want to do this somewhere in the hills, I want to do this somewhere by a river. I want to swim underwater; I want to suck somebody’s dick underwater. I want to roll around in a way that pulls me completely from inside myself, something like turning the skin backwards so that everything’s revealed.
-David Wojnarowicz
What I need right now is to be free of gravity and to float or slep in that state, or to lie down in the air rather than on the floor, on the bed, on the chair. Lie down in atmosphere. Lie down and stretch. And lie down and sleep.
-David Wojnarowicz
If I could take a shotgun to my—to my bed: If I could take a shotgun and blow it in half or blow a big hole in it, that starts approximating something of what I’m feeling. If I could take a shotgun and blow holes through every window in the house and sit down afterward and laugh, maybe that approximates what I’m feeling.
-David Wojnarowicz
I somehow just need the power to affect something inside me: turn something inside out, look at it, examine it, lick it, throw it against the wall, pick it up, put it back in.
-David Wojnarowicz
I think of death, death, death.
-David Wojnarowicz
This is life. Let’s swim in it.
-David Wojnarowicz
I hate giving words to things like this, moments like this, but I feel very much alive and happy that I’m here witnessing all this. And I’m amazed. I feel like I’ve cheated death this long. I’m just amazed that I’m still here. And I hope I’ll be here for years and years to come.
-David Wojnarowicz
In moments like tihs, with the sky the way it is, just mountains in the distance, I’m sitting on the curve of the earth and watching the light slowly dissipate.
-David Wojnarowicz
I’m here by myself and I don’t mind. I kind of wish it could just stay like this for maybe a few years, or I just never moved out of this spot. I could just watch the light stay like this. And maybe somebody coming along and just putting their arms around me for a few minutes.
-David Wojnarowicz
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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