they kill the culture

violentwavesofemotion:

I don’t speak with anyone for a week. I just sit on a stone by the sea.

Anna Akhmatova, from Plantain

… and there is something about the achingly bright expanse of blue that makes me feel infinitely placid, infinitely calm, infinitely spacious. Something there is about the ceaseless, unperturbed ebb and flow … about the vast masses of green-blue water … that heals all my uneasy questionings and self-searchings.

Sylvia Plath, from a letter

You would rather have gone on feeling nothing, emptiness and silence; the stagnant peace of the deepest sea, which is easier than the noise and flesh of the surface.

Margaret Atwood, from Eurydice

The sea has many voices, Many Gods and many voices.

T.S. Eliot, from The Dry Salvages

Look there: how she approaches impatiently over the sea. Do you not feel the thirst and the hot breath of her love? She would suck at the sea and drink its depth into her heights; and the sea’s desire rises toward her with a thousand breasts. It wants to be kissed and sucked by the thirst of the sun; it wants to become air and height and a footpath of light, and itself light.

Friedrich Nietzsche, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The sea is working, working in my silence.

Pablo Neruda, from Nothing More

She knows what she wants: she wants to remain standing still in the sea. And so she remains. The woman neither receives nor transmits. She does not need to communicate. She knows that she is gleaming from the water, the salt and the sun. In some obscure way her dripping hair is like that of a shipwrecked person.

Clarice Lispector, from An Apprenticeship, or the Book of Delights

I wish you a kinder sea.

Emily Dickinson, from a letter

(via rosegoldenmoon)

cailleachan:

I do believe there is a real difference between history and the past. History is an official version in which people’s names are written. The past on the other hand is a place of whispers and gestures and names that are often not recognized, and identities that will not be remembered, and lives that are hidden. I think many women in different societies think of themselves as living in the past rather than in history.

Eavan Boland, from an interview with Stanford News

I have noticed that as soon as you have soldiers the story is called history. Before their arrival it is called myth, folktale, legend, fairy tale, oral poetry, ethnography. After the soldiers arrive, it is called history.

Paula Gunn Allen

We have poetry so we do not die of history.

Meena Alexander, What Use is Poetry?

Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in name [..] History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is perpetually an actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present, history is a representation of the past.

Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire

The past is living rather than dead; the past lives in the very wounds that remain open in the present.

Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion

As such, memoirs, oral testimonies and autobiographies are dismissed as falling under the auspices of Memory, assumed to be closer to fiction than History. Within this paradigm, “History” (with a capital “H”), which takes the archive as its basis, is assumed to be disinterested, verifiable and truthful. On the other hand, “Memory” is characterized by “lapses of forgetting, silences and exclusions.” It is cast as fickle and therefore un-authoritative and unreliable. Thus, where oral histories, letters, autobiographies, and testimonies (those forms of evidence characterized as Memory) throw doubt on dominant narratives, they are dismissed as unreliable. Given what we know about History’s (and therefore the Archive’s) role in legitimating male, elite and nationalist dominance, it is no surprise that sources produced by women, workers and …[the subaltern voice] are dismissed as unreliable and therefore as falling within the realm of Memory.

Hussein Omar, Speak, Memory: On Archives and Other Strategies of (Re)activation of Cultural Memory

(via rosegoldenmoon)