RE: Human Connection - Tumblr Posts
family (found)
on childhood friendship: (1) / (2) / (3, 4) night in the woods (2017) / (5) / (6) / (7) p.s. i still love you, jenny han
heartbreaking doctor who moments ♢ vincent hearing his worth
I just wondered, between you and me, in a hundred words, where do you think Van Gogh rates in the history of art?
When I say “I love you”, I don’t just mean “I love being around you”, “I love the way you talk to me”, “I love your good traits”, “I love the things you make”. I mean I love every single part of you, both good and bad. I love the highs and lows of you. I love your humanity, I love every inch of you from perfection to flaw. I love you as a part of my beloved Earth. When I say “I love you”, I really mean to say, “all of you is welcome in me”.
james baldwin, just above my head
cant stop thinking abt ursula k. le guin’s essay abt the carrier bag theory….. she’s like, maybe the first human tool was not a weapon, but rather something that holds, a bag, a pouch, a vessel, something for gathering and storing and sharing. let’s shift the narrative of humanity from that of violence to that of safekeeping. and i’m like
poetry is stored in the tags
omar apollo, ‘pram’ / tamino, ‘verses’ / christopher citro, ‘our beautiful life when it’s filled with shrieks’ / hope tala, ‘crazy’ / raveena & hope tala, ‘floating’ / sogumm & penomeco, ‘honey bee’ / young the giant, ‘repeat’ / tamino, ‘every pore’
1 @i-wrotethisforme || 2 John Berger, "Will it be a likeness?" from The Shape of a Pocket || 3 @softkatie || 4 @chennai-expression || 5 peanuts || 6 it, Stephen King || 7 @lizclimo || 8 @petrichara || 9 The Essays of Montaigne, “On friendship" || 10 @honeytuesday
During a lecture on epic poetry like the Mahābhārata and Iliad in my first year of college, my professor said, “When the whole world dies, even when brick and mortar is destroyed, memory survives. It survives and lives on in generations to come. And literature carries that memory. All your geography, your economics, your psychology, they’re all based on the memory of man, passed down generations after generations. These epic poems and literature we are studying right now is to remind us that we too will be memories one day. And therefore, let us be good memories” and I think a piece of this lecture will live on in me wherever I go.
archive mb for @peoplehood !! 🫂🌱🥭
Thinking about how my mom tried to “seduce” my dad when they were in college together by sneaking oranges into his backpack, because she grew up food insecure and feeding someone/sharing food was a big deal with her upbringing with a lot of emotional meaning–
and meanwhile my poor dad is just convinced that he’s been haunted by some citrus poltergeist because why the fuck are there always oranges in his bag he swears he did not put there???
So I went to an art exhibit recently, a collection of Native American art from pre-colonial times to the present. As you might guess, there were a few pieces whose artist was lost to time or erased. But instead of the usual “artist unknown” credit, the curators instead chose to label the artists as “Name Once Known”.
I think that’s amazing. It says, “we don’t know your name any longer; we’ll never know who you were, exactly. But you were a person once, and you mattered. You had a name, and you were loved, you had a life, and you made this art. And that means something. Your name was once known.”
using a multiverse as a narrative framework to tell an immigrant story really is THE best possible implementation of this concept. like the idea that every time you make a decision in your life a different branching universe splits off where you chose differently, while obviously broadly universal because of course everyone wonders what if (what if i had chosen differently, what would my life look like then), really does hit such a specific core question that is imo fundamental to the immigrant experience
all the time my parents talk about imagining what lives they might have lived if they had chosen differently, if they had never left home, if they had never come here, if they had not raised their daughter in a world and a culture so utterly foreign to their own where she might make her own choices that are painfully incomprehensible to them. it’s all tied up with a sense of grief and loss and regret and almost existential melancholy, not necessarily because they think they chose wrong specifically, not because they think they’d actually choose differently if they had a chance to do it over again, but merely because that choice is such a monumental one and the enormity of it and the ripples it would end up causing are only obvious in retrospect. you make the choice to uproot your life and move to a different world, a different universe, and once you cross that bridge you can never go back. you can never truly go home again. and when we do go back to visit, we see in their old friends and classmates and relatives funhouse versions of ourselves, people we might have been but never were and never will be.
every immigrant story is a ghost story and the ghosts that haunt you are all the people you left behind including yourself—versions of yourself, of your family, of your children, of the people that are you but that you are not, lives that you recognize but are not yours. immigrant stories are ghost stories are multiverse stories and in multiverse stories all of your ghosts inhabit your body simultaneously, everyone who came before you and after you and everyone you left behind, everything that is and everything that never was… it really is everything everywhere all at once i am going to scream
honestly it’s actually the small, mundane, boring things that someone does for you out of love which mean so much rather than grand gestures and proclamations
HAND ON MY HEART. HAND ON MY STUPID HEART
ross gay / susan sontag / unknown / richard siken / warsan shire / lana del ray / tturing / hera lindsay bird / richard siken