Joy Harjo, Perhaps the World Ends Here / Osip Mandelstam, Stolen Air / James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk / Tennessee Williams, from a letter to Donald Windham
Wish you are happy and safe. I was thinking if there are some writings or/and quotes on "water has memory" , that water never forgets.. it takes in everything. Thank you🖤
“You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places to make room for houses & livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”
— Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory”
“I depend on the Nile, he said. The Nile is faithful. I said: The Nile has a memory of steel, and is not as shallow as we thought.”
— Mahmoud Darwish, from “As Fate Would Have It”
“In Mojave thinking, body and land are the same. The words are separated only by letters: ’iimat for body,* ’amat* for land. In conversation, we often use a shortened form for each: mat-. Unless you know the context of a conversation, you might not know if we are speaking about our body or our land. You might not know which has been injured, which is remembering, which is alive, which was dreamed, which needs care, which has vanished.
If I say, My river is disappearing, do I also mean, My people are disappearing?”
“A river is a body of water. It has a foot, an elbow, a mouth. It runs. It lies in a bed. It can make you good. It remembers everything.”
“Will we soon remember from where we’ve come? The water.
And once remembered, will we return to that first water, and in doing so return to ourselves, to each other, better and cleaner?
Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?”
— Natalie Diaz, from “The First Water Is The Body”
“I spent my days staring into the eye of the Baltic it’s because I am also a body of water it’s not that onerous I’ve built a muscle memory it’s not that heavy”
— Asiya Wadud, “attention as a form of ethics”
“I should have known but the water never told me. It sealed its blue lips after swallowing you, it licked my ankles like a dog. I won’t lie and say the ocean begged for forgiveness; it gleams unchanged in the sun. Some things are so big they take and take and remain exactly the same size.”
— Leila Chatti, from “Upon Realizing There Are Ghosts in the Water”
“Today I drank the oldest lake so that I could recover the parts of myself that are lost to a time before I was ever here on this earth full of lakes. A man poured the oldest lake out of a bottle and into a small metal cup and I touched the cold rim of the cup to my mouth and it smelled deep. When I meet people now, I have the oldest lake inside of me and I feel bad for them because they don’t. They probably don’t have any lakes inside of them, which is hard because it means that whatever is deepest in them is longing to return to the lake it came from, the lake that forgot it, the lake it couldn’t ever forget. Sometimes you don’t know that something inside you is longing for a lake that forgot you until you come face to face with that lake and everything in you asks for a drowning.
The oldest lake had so many children whose children had so many children. You can drink the oldest lake, like I did, and it will feel cold and whole but it’s not like you get to just carry possibility inside of you like that simply because you drank the oldest lake. People thought I drank the oldest lake to remember, but I drank the oldest lake so I could for a moment forget what it is like to be outside of something I can’t comprehend.”
— Ali Rachel Pearl, from “Aphanizomenon Flos-Aquae”
the kiss - klimt / the kiss - munch / poem number two on bell’s theorem - june jordan / dance me to the end of love - vettriano / LiTer II - muholi / in bed. the kiss - toulouse-lautrec / el beso - delfín / to won’s father / noonday heat - tuke / leyendecker / the mill on the floss - eliot / the siesta (after millet) - van gogh / cafe kiss - lorusso / the kiss - rodin / sensuous whisper - bakari / i like my body when it is with your - cummings / cupid kisses psyche - canova / CNG kissing his wife good-bye / the end of the affair / castle - kafka
