round-up: 7/13
what i'm reading & listening to, and some quotations
Happy Sunday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
What I’m listening to:
What I’m reading:
Madder: A Memoir in Weeds, Marco Wilkinson (3.5/5 stars)
The Mausoleum of Lovers, Herve Guibert (5/5 stars)
Quotations:
This umkempt garden. My life, these weeds.
-Marco Wilkinson
I want to remember. Remember that the little and the useless are what knit the visible world together. Remember that there is no such thing as absence, only ache.
-Marco Wilkinson
As is common in so many immigrant families, we code-switched, answering our parents’ native language with that of our own native tongue. Which is to say that we all spoke Rhode Island English to our parents’ Rioplatense Spanish and laid down linguistic borders and checkpoints, securing our little lives against the terror of being other.
-Marco Wilkinson
In grade school did you also have a deep, pressing anxiety that you were not learning English the right way? That you could not handle the idioms of your world or wield a joke adequately?
Did we all secretly hate our parents for opening their mouths?
-Marco Wilkinson
I am not telling the truth. I am letting you in on what I have stolen from the sealed archives, overheard from around corners, wrenched from clenched hands by screaming and shouting, fantasized out of thin air into a cobweb of a life.
-Marco Wilkinson
How could I tell you the truth when I don’t know it myself? Instead I will curse you with this life in your hands. If you can break the curse, please come and tell me how.
-Marco Wilkinson
a box, a screen. a hollow sphere, a steady plume of smoke. an unflattering blemish or scar. a question.
-Marco Wilkinson
Every tree is more dead than alive, every cell of wood a hollowed-out husk, a tiny splinter of bone.
-Marco Wilkinson
He bends down and kisses me n the forehead before kissing me on the lips before pouring his tongue into my mouth.
-Marco Wilkinson
Circle of mouth, circle of sky; open: let all your life out, let all your life in.
-Marco Wilkinson
Lost between wakefulness and sleep, I lose track: are those his hands or ripples of oil lapping against the banks of my skin?
-Marco Wilkinson
The summer rose up, closed me up in a humid coffin.
-Marco Wilkinson
In my heart there is a seed. In my seed there is a heart, spilled without care.
-Marco Wilkinson
Remember the kiss, and his fingers playing Chopin on my ribs as we fell asleep.
-Marco Wilkinson
Remember the embrace of soft flannel, the fresh smell of sand and sea at the nape of his neck, the sweetness.
-Marco Wilkinson
I am a bowl of smoke, empty and calmly revolving.
-Marco Wilkinson
I’m not sure what to do with the stark white hairs that have been showing up in my beard the past few years or how to reconcile feeling still so young and so unprepared for the world with these pigmentless ghosts already congregating on my chin.
-Marco Wilkinson
When I die I want (though I will be past wanting) to be buried without a casket or shroud, naked, completely unadorned, and have a fruit tree planted above me (above that which is not me), so that its roots might plunge hungry ino (not) my stomach, curious into (not) my brain, desirous into (not) my pelvis, thirsty into (not) my mouth.
-Marco Wilkinson
Any man migt be enough to make me man enough.
-Marco Wilkinson
The truth is I don’t even know if I am a worm or a child or a man or something past all of those, if there are wings on my back or just glancing reflections off the walls of my life. My memory plays tricks on me, and my vision has a habit of doubling, tripling, swimming with ghosts and shadows. Maybe I am the product of another lifetime.
-Marco Wilkinson
I would like for a hot body to crush me gently.
-Herve Guibert
I haven’t slept with anyone. I cling to the last gaze (in desire), the last encounter.
-Herve Guibert
Gray afternoon: urge to jerk off, to pull on my cock, slam the hammer. Urge to be jerked off.
-Herve Guibert
The sting of love (which comes from need: “What am I missing?”)
-Herve Guibert
My relations with my parents have been reduced to expressions of care, fear, reciprocal worry.
-Herve Guibert
The thought of crying comes to mind (without pleasure): I am helpless.
-Herve Guibert
I don’t know if I should be sad, give myself over to moroseness. I dance alone in front of a mirror, I want to find myself happy. I vamp. I smile at myself and the smile suits me.
-Herve Guibert
His beauty pulverizes my soliloquoy.
-Herve Guibert
The most beautiful, the most unforgettable moment, when we have just laid down side by side, in profile, each turned towards the other, our faces so close, and when we look at one another, when we meet again, a smile, limitless, covering the face, then the first kiss, feeling his lips, his mouth, the inside of his mouth…
-Herve Guibert
Seeing T. again: becoming a boy again, a body, a heart.
-Herve Guibert
Perhaps if I unveiled my body to you, it would become unbearable to you, perhaps you love it still precisely because I hide it from you.
-Herve Guibert
Out of the absence, and the waiting, a scenario formulates itself. My heart beats to the point of breaking.
-Herve Guibert
(I can’t come to terms with limits right now, always straddled between hunger and nausea, between hot and cold, I don’t know what well-being is, how to forget the body, I am becoming an insomniac.)
-Herve Guibert
I feel everything with too much violence: deformities, wounds, twisted or shortened legs, gouged eyes, stains on clothes, I see them immediately, I see only them, I am beset with them.
-Herve Guibert
I got undressed. I saw my naked body before me in the mirror, and I immediately got dressed again.
-Herve Guibert
In front of the mirror I disfigure myself, I pull my skin on each side of my cheeks with my palms, I thin my eyes, I give myself the face of a mummy…
-Herve Guibert
(To have my sex thus at the end of my stomach, and to be able to make myself come whenever I want always astonishes me.) But this pleasure is nothing anymore.
-Herve Guibert
Nothing evaporates this sadness.
-Herve Guibert
I might be bewitched, driven out of myself, but one will still find, on my clothes, the trace of foreign hands on my back, on each side of my waist, at the edge of the window.
-Herve Guibert
I write on the back of a photo of T.: I want to love you always.
-Herve Guibert
A lack: indolence (or else lechery).
-Herve Guibert
(T.’s return. He is so beautiful when he fucks, when he sucks, when he is naked.)
-Herve Guibert
The desire to kiss his skin, despite its pimply whiteness; the desire to kiss his lips, despite their chapping; the desire to put my tongue into his mouth, despite his badly cleaned teeth;
-Herve Guibert
The body a machine, a mechanism, a resistance, a regulation.
-Herve Guibert
Right now, I’m ready to love anyone.
-Herve Guibert
I would like to chisel bits of grease out of my skin, disembowel myself, open my stomach and void myself.
-Herve Guibert
My body belongs to me completely, to the limits to which I want to push it.
-Herve Guibert
I would like to suck for a very long time on these fingers, the nails of which he bites and the flesh of which he eats in places. I would like to run my tongue in the interstices of his teeth.
-Herve Guibert
I would like to be able to put my cold feet whole into T.’s mouth (for his mouth to be to such a degree extensible, for love to make everything possible…).
-Herve Guibert
The sound of our breathing, in the dark, settles me into an animal reality. Our breaths collide one against the other, as though to surmount the other, annihilate him first in the auditory suspension of sleep (and in the certainty of the loss of desire).
-Herve Guibert
Each time I see you again the living image unfurls and astonishes me, calls me back, attracts me violently.
-Herve Guibert
Heard my father’s voice on the telephone, and for the first time heard the voice of an old man. The urge to cry.
-Herve Guibert
Don’t commit suicide so as not to grant victoy to those who are mediocre.
-Herve Guibert
I don’t want to obsess you, I want to be a sweet memory, an invisible ring, a heart sewn without stithes, without scars, under your own skin…
-Herve Guibert
In horror fantasies, the idea of not being published exceeds the idea of my body being chewed on by worms. It isn’t about posterity, but the vague, almost abstract assurance, of an encounter, in time.
-Herve Guibert
If there weren’t that assurance, that hope for a single reader, one day, I wouldn’t write anymore.
-Herve Guibert
I feel abandoned by everything.
-Herve Guibert
The curse of faces: to be struck by one’s own face as by a curse.
-Herve Guibert
The idea that I may die from the illness transmitted by the other, by his kiss, by his embrace.
-Herve Guibert
Pain isn’t heroic: it cuts me from writing. But what is marvelous, is the realization that pain is endurable. I imagine that death won’t be very different from life: I am already living at such a distance from those who are dear to me.
-Herve Guibert
The moment of reunion is always painful.
-Herve Guibert
I would like to retreat even more into myself, and only have dealings with the most interior events, bcause the world, now, seems disappointing, invisible, to me.
-Herve Guibert
Besides the twinge below my ribs, my human machine is running smoothly: I eat twice a day and I sleep ten hours a night, every evening I masturbate before pornographic drawings, I am rested, regularly emptied of my tension, I don’t touch a single foreign body.
-Herve Guibert
I dream that T. is nibbling my shoulder under my clothes. We have just been reunited, I press myself against him, and all he does is that, nibble on my shoulder, but his recovered presence renders this instant, this sensation sublime.
-Herve Guibert
Hatred suddenly for the place where I live; I hate this table and I hate this armchair, I hate my bed, I hate these walls, not to mention the hatred for myself.
-Herve Guibert
(love is a tension, love is a fantasy, love is unreal and the terminated waiting emancipates me from this love).
-Herve Guibert
Once more, T. invites me to do gymnastics, and I tell him: it’s more towards the destruction of my body, or towards its symbolic forms, that I want to go.
-Herve Guibert
I am trying to understand the substance of the skin.
-Herve Guibert
I want to die, why isn’t there someplace on the body a little cork one could remove, and by which one would empty oneself all of a sudden?
-Herve Guibert
I want to melt into him, I beg him to recognize me, I’m prepared to do anything, for him to bite me, for him to beat me.
-Herve Guibert
Afraid of the wind at night, afraid like a child of the dark.
-Herve Guibert
I am caught in a flush of desire.
-Herve Guibert
(why must I insist on believing that he is my salvation—in the manner of a crucifix fixed to a bedroom wall—if he no longer has the means to be so?)
-Herve Guibert
Never submit oneself (except to obtain pleasure).
-Herve Guibert
I need catastrophes, dramatic turns inside this relationship, I would be prepared to invent a tragedy for it not to be dull, indifferent.
-Herve Guibert
T. fucks me with furor, kneeling, his cheek against the pillow, and my two hands joined, as though in prayer.
-Herve Guibert
A scratch on my back, incomprehensible since no one touches it anymore.
-Herve Guibert
Joy at the light filtered by the blinds: a sign of recovery.
-Herve Guibert
Fantasy of disappearance: since no one wants to kidnap me, I kidnap myself.
-Herve Guibert
I would like to be the night, I would like to be bone.
-Herve Guibert
Sadness. Desire for retreat, or collapse.
-Herve Guibert
Sublime emotion of my nudity against his: never before such a great joy. T. says to me: “I shall eat your corpse.”
-Herve Guibert
(No more money. I’m typing a long text for a magazine that won’t make me any. I am loath to ask the parents. I’m going to be thirty years old and I still don’t have money at my disposal. I’m waiting for something to fall from the sky.)
-Herve Guibert
On my knees at the front of the young man (Bruno), I kiss his fingers.
-Herve Guibert
I buy beautiful things, lights, sheets, as though they were going to help me die.
-Herve Guibert
I think life is a marvelous horror.
-Herve Guibert
AIDS, being devoured by one’s internal beast.
-Herve Guibert
It’s always on the eve of departure, at dusk, that I begin to like this city, to discover it by decentering myself.
-Herve Guibert
(That lost look had almost as much force as an embrace.)
-Herve Guibert
I write on average, with joy, fourteen pages a day. All that’s missing is eroticism.
-Herve Guibert
I have never had so little repulsion for my body, and I feel it less erotic than ever.
-Herve Guibert
It’s possible that a sunset insane with swallows would be enough for me.
-Herve Guibert
Don’t want to die, don’t want to live either.
-Herve Guibert
Thinking about it calmly suicide is nevertheless a solution, admittedly a bit of a sad solution.
-Herve Guibert
To awaken rested in the morning, quite simply that, has become the sensation of happiness.
-Herve Guibert
Is the experience of pain preferable to the annihilation of experience?
-Herve Guibert
I’m not able to rid myself of my self.
-Herve Guibert
Roses withering in the vase: I cut them a bit, drive them in more deeply so that they take water differently: all limp and broken they raise their heads.
-Herve Guibert
I mustn’t cry victory too quickly, but maybe this new medication will do me some good. The day before yesterday I was full of death, really saturated with death, and yesterday I was full of life, reviving.
-Herve Guibert
(A good sign in the work: when I start to fear someone will steal it, or that it will get lost.)
-Herve Guibert
Once again death invades me.
-Herve Guibert
One must give, let things circulate. No money stagnating at the bank.
-Herve Guibert
When I have a rosary in my hands, I always want to break it.
-Herve Guibert
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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