Fiona Apple - "Hot Knife"

I could NOT be more excited for her new album!!!!! If you didn't spend time with The Idler Wheel... then hang out with it this week and increase your anticipation!

I recommend Aniara very strongly. Be warned: like The Lighthouse, it is about being confined, cut off from the rest of humanity, and things getting worse. I don't know why the two movies at the top of my watch list were thematically-linked with the imperative to isolate, but I'm grateful for them. Looking at art with a perspective on my present situation is usually helpful, even if the art itself is intense.

Additional warnings: sex, suicide, the unseen deaths of children and adults, active engagement with despair. But additional recommendations: The most important characters are all lesbian or queer women, and even though bad things happen to them it didn't feel tropey to me. Fascinating sci-fi setting and details. Beautiful language. Constructive-feeling reflections on real-life difficulties. An important movie along several axes.

Mary Ruefle, "On Fear," in Madness, Rack, and Honey

I suppose, as a poet, among my fears can be counted the deep-seated uneasiness surrounding the possibility that one day it will be revealed that I consecrated my life to an imbecility. Part of what I mean — what I think I mean — by "imbecility" is something intrinsically unnecessary and superfluous and thereby unintentionally cruel.

[...]

I asked the poet Tony Hoagland what he thought about fear. He said fear was the ghost of an experience: we fear the reoccurrence of a pain we once felt, and in this way fear is like a hangover. The memory of our pain is a pain unto itself, and thus feeds our fear like a foyer with mirrors on both sides. And then he quoted Auden:

"And ghosts must do again / What gives them pain."

It is interesting to note that this idea — fear's being the ghost of pain, or imaginary pain — figures in psychological torture by the CIA; in fact, their experiments with pain found that imaginary pain was more effective than physical pain — poets, take note — and thus psychological torture more effective that physical torture. Here is an excerpt from their Exploitation Training Manual, written in 1983: "The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself. For example, the threat to inflict pain can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain."

Although I have never been bitten by a dog, I am scared to death of them, as I am of all living creatures, including myself and my own fragmentation in the long hall of mirrors.

James Ward, future British psychologist, broke with religion as a young man in 1872, but found himself a bundle of reflexes over which he had no choice and no control. He said: "I have no dread of God, no fear of the Devil, no fear of man, but my head swims as I write it — I fear myself."

What do I means by fear? Why I mean that thing which drives you to write, but let us step out of the foyer, and back onto the street, back down the road, and make our approach somewhat more slowly.

[...]

Dread. I like it better than the word fear because fear, like the unconscious emotion which is one of its forms, has only the word ear inside of it, telling an animal to listen, while dread has the word read inside of it, telling us to read carefully and find the dead, who are also there. But I have not used the word dread in what follows. I have used the word fear. And fear is an older word —

But she shows all, candid and upright,
unto the last projecting fire and death,
and, turning to the others, I cry out
my pain of pains beholding Doris’s death:
There is protection from near everything,
from fire and damages by storm and frost,
oh, add whichever blows may come to mind.
But there is no protection from mankind.
When there is need, none sees with clarity.
No, only when the task is to beat down
When there is need, none sees with clarity.
No, only when the task is to beat down
and desolate the heart’s own treasury
of dreams to live upon in cold and evil years.

— Aniara, 26

Seldom do we take the slightest note
of our majestic wonder of a boat,
and only during sermons at a grave
does this world dawn on us as all we have;
then come a multitude of black thoughts flapping
through these vaults that hold us bound
filled with the echoes of a prior life
and threading an outlandish void of sound.

— Harry Martinson, Aniara, translated by Klass, S. & Sjoberg, L.

Am I only dreaming?

hell yeah

This is GREAT, they're having so much fun!