don't get caught

with the help of cornel west,
saving the eleventh commandment

 

 

There’s nothing special about being in love. It’s only a matter of gradation away from being very close friends. The feelings I have for Rowdy are different only in degree, not character, from the feelings I have for other people with whom I share affection, trust, and loyalty. Being with my friends just plain feels good, too.

Love is wonderful, but love is not ineffable. Love is powerful, but love is not mysterious. Love is a rock in storms and an open meadow on sunny days, but love is not a bolt from the blue. Love is just really really really really liking someone. And that’s enough.

Maybe our problem isn’t that we think love is too magical. Maybe our problem is that we don’t realize how magical every human connection is.

- Holly P., http://pervocracy.blogspot.com/2012/02/our-weird-love.html

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add LOVE ⇢

Here’s the truth: friendships between women are often the deepest and most profound love stories, but they are often discussed as if they are ancillary, “bonus” relationships to the truly important ones. Women’s friendships outlast jobs, parents, husbands, boyfriends, lovers, and sometimes children.

…The youngest of the three had had a stroke as a result of a brain tumor. These friends she’d worked and traveled and lived and laughed and loved with for over half her life rented a new ground-floor apartment that would accommodate a wheelchair, took shifts taking care of her, all the while holding down jobs that were about saving other people’s friends, other people’s kids, other people’s lives – not directly, no, but on the sidelines, behind the scenes, booking travel and setting up conference space and directing supplies and networking with people on the ground who were face to face with whatever crisis situation needed to be handled. I was nervous as I sat waiting in a pub to see them all again, afraid of seeing my paralyzed friend. Would my face show a reaction that I didn’t intend? Fear? Disgust? The three of them came in together, smiling. The unaffected two had learned to understand the other’s few words; they wiped her face, helped her eat and made her laugh. This was a snapshot of what my own deep friendships could lead to: transformation. I saw, on that afternoon, that it’s possible to transcend the limits of your skin in a friendship. That a friend can take you out of the boxes you’ve made for yourself and burn them up. This kind of friendship is not a frivolous connection, a supplementary relationship to the ones we’re taught and told are primary – spouses, children, parents. It is love.

…Support, salvation, transformation, life: this is what women give to one another when they are true friends, soul friends, what the Irish call anam cara. It’s what the Wrinklies did for one another, what the French resistance fighters in Auschwitz did for one another, what women do for one another in real relationships with real consequences in real time, every day, what my friends do for me. We help one another other live and sometimes, we watch – and help – one another die. It happens in movies, sure, but it also happens every day, in real life – now, tomorrow, yesterday. It is transformative and transcendent. It is real. It is love.

- Read it here: http://therumpus.net/2012/01/transformation-and-transcendence-the-power-of-female-friendship/

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“Independence” is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you’re a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. “Conquest” and “liberation” and “democracy” and “divorce” are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.

- Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

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Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.

- Alison Bechdel, Dykes To Watch Out For

yeah, art may imitate life /
but life imitates tv

- Ani DiFranco, “Superhero”

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We like to think that we are finely evolved creatures, in suit-and-tie or pantyhose-and-chemise, who live millennia and mental detours away from the cave, but that’s not something our bodies are convinced of. We may have the luxury of being at the top of the food chain, but our adrenaline still rushes when we encounter real or imaginary predators. We even restage that primal fright by going to monster movies. We still stake out or mark our territories, though sometimes now it is with the sound of radios. We still jockey for position and power. We still create works of art to enhance our senses and add even more sensations to the brimming world, so that we can utterly luxuriate in the spectacles of life. We still ache fiercely with love, lust, loyalty, and passion. And we still perceive the world, in all it gushing beauty and terror, right on our pulses. There is no other way. To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses - how they evolved, how they can be extended, what their limits are, to which ones we have attached taboos, and what they can teach us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.

- Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

When we describe ourselves as “sentient” beings (from Latin sentire, “to feel”) we mean that we are conscious. The more literal and encompassing meaning is that we have sense perception. “Are you out of your senses!” someone yells in angry disbelief. The image of someone sprung from her body, roaming the world as a detached yearning, seems impossible. Only ghosts are pictured as literally being out of their senses, and also angels. Freed from their senses is how we prefer to say it, if we mean something positive - the state of transcendental serenity found in an Asiatic religion, for example. It is both our panic and our privilege to be mortal and sense-full. We live on the leash of our senses. Although they enlarge us, they also limit and restrain us, but how beautifully.

- Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

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When your inner life is a place you have to stay out of, having an identity is impossible.

- Lynda Barry, One Hundred Demons

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…that time, you can’t forget it, but you do remember never to remember it, the time when the shattering into pieces became a way of life.

- Lynda Barry, One Hundred Demons