The Oceanic Feeling

"Water as body; water as communicator between bodies; water as facilitating bodies into being. Entity, medium, transformative and gestational milieu. All of this enfolding in, seeping from, sustaining and saturating, our bodies of water. 'There are tides in the body,' writes Virginia Woolf. We ebb and flow across time and space—body, to body, to body, to body."

Astrida Neimanis // Hydrofeminism:
Or, On Becoming a Body of Water

come get lost inside the oceanic

"I fell into a swimming pool when I was very young. I remember being under the surface, looking up, bright turquoise all around me. I felt disembodies down there, and I saw the blue above me as if it were a sky. I don't remember anything my body felt, just the blue on top, as if I were supine, under the water, facing up and toward the ledge I'd slipped from. But I don't know how I'd gone supine from sitting there. and that's why I think of this as an out-of-body experience. I wasn't aware of my body, just what I could see, and what I could see was geometrically improbable."

-Sarah Manguso "Oceans"

“Our love for one another is a life jacket which allows both partners to learn to swim, yet we behave as if the other person is instead the sea that carries us both.”

— Lou Andreas Salomé, from Looking Back: Memoirs

. . .

“Perhaps for a moment, only a moment, this affront will bring us together, all human, all much more alike than different, all much more alike than is good for our prickly pride. Humanity, E pluribus unum at last, a oneness focused on and fertilized by certain knowledge of alien others. What will be born of that brief, strange, and ironic union?”

— Octavia E. Butler, “The Monophobic Response”

. . .

“There is a moment in Camaraderie
when interruption is not to be understood.
I cannot bear an interruption.
This is the shining joy;
The time of not-to-end.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks, from Riot

“[Our] nebulous impurity can be perceived in them: the affinity for groups, the use and obsolescence of materials, the mark of a hand or a foot, the constancy of the human presence that permeates every surface. This is the poetry we are seeking.”

— Pablo Neruda, from Passions and Impressions

. . .

“[As they] pass over the earth, they [weave] a sacred cloak over the Great Mother, each journey like a thread…[Even] a person’s thoughts are like threads. The act of spinning is the act of thinking. The cloth they weave and the clothes they wear become their thoughts. [Everything they do is conceived of as a fabric, and] everything begins and ends with the loom.”

— Wade Davis, from One River

. . .

“Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.”

— John Donne, from “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”

. . .

“If I wore the jacket, Allon wore me. He was there in the wrinkles of the elbows...he was there in the stains at the very bottom...he was there in the smell...The magic of cloth, I came to believe, is that it receives us: receives our smell, our sweat, our shape even. And when our parents, our friends, our lovers die, the clothes in their closets still hang there, holding their gestures...touching the living with the dead.”

— Peter Stallybrass, from “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of Things”

“I’m just high and in a vibe.”

— Colson Baker from, "Don’t Call Him Machine Gun Kelly"

. . .

“I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist.”

— Kay Redfield Jamison from, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness”

. . .

“Reality is not static—its properties are in constant flux, so perhaps we are as much in the world as we can ever be, and that's the problem.”

― Renee Gladman from, The Activist

“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

― Albert Einstein reacting to the death of his friend, Michele Besso (1955)

. . .

“It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because is was never born.”

― Jack Kerouac in a letter to his wife Edie (January 1957), from The Portable Jack Kerouac

. . .

“If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.”

― John McPhee, from Basin and Range (1981)

“Let me pull myself out of these waters. But they heap themselves on me; they sweep me between their great shoulders; I am turned; I am tumbled; I am stretched, among these long lights, these long waves, these endless paths, with people pursuing, pursuing.”

– Virginia Woolf, from The Waves (1931)

. . .

“Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation's hoop.”

–– Black Elk, from Black Elk Speaks written by John Neihardt (1961)

. . .

“In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.”

–– Eckhart Tolle, from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (2004)

. . .

“A human being is a spatially and temporally limited piece of the whole, what we call the “Universe.” He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

–– Albert Einstein, from a letter written to Robert S. Marcus (1950)

“[...] after all the terrible things I do how amazing it is / to find forgiveness since what is done is done and forgiveness isn’t love / and love is love nothing can ever go wrong / though things can get irritating boring and dispensable / (in the imagination) but not really for love / though a block away you feel distant the mere presence / changes everything like a chemical dropped on a paper / and all thoughts disappear in a strange quiet excitement / I am sure of nothing but this, intensified by breathing”

Frank O’Hara, untitled poem

. . .

“I don’t think I want to win anything I think I want to die unadorned”

Frank O’Hara, Biotherm (for Bill Berkson)

. . .

“ceci est la coleur de mes rêves”

Joan Miro, painting/poem

. . .

“Call me when you land / I'll drive around again / One hand on the wheel / One in your mouth / Turn me on and turn me down”

Phoebe Bridgers, Savior Complex

. . .

“ Take your hands off your neck and hold on to the ghost of my body / You know that good lives make bad stories, you can text me / When punching mattresses gets old / Don't think it'll always be this way / Not comforted by anything I say / We were wrecks before we crashed into each other”

Car Seat Headrest, Sober to Death

. . .

“ I am going to love these discarded Americans, even though they’re useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art.”

Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater

“Say, can you hear?
Is there a meaning to your grief?
Where there is pain
You see grace
As if sacrifice
Was meaningful and in itself
Your trial and error is error and error”

Say Can You Hear — Men I Trust

. . .

“You are going somewhere. You are somewhere. This stillness. You cannot imagine how. Still. So still all around. Such stillness. It is endless. Spacious without the need for verification of space. Nothing moves. So still. There is no struggle. Its own all its own. No where other. No time other conceivable. Total duration without need for verification of time.”

Dictee (pg 50) — Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

. . .

“maybe there’s no place to memorize grief
script slants to signal what is my opaque
oranges illuminated cubbied
under whole catfish we’ll eat
for the New Year we’re
half a year late to celebrate

a date is no place
where my hands never held
your dirt
where do headstones come from?
give me
a mountain to look down history

how high a surface makes an altar?
a book face-up
spine-out
what can I place on it to make it
work?”

ALTAR — Claire Meuschke — Upend

“To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence.”

― Simone Weil

. . .

“To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one's self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.”

― Gilles Deleuze

. . .

“Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.”

― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“Every general and every soldier was conscious of his own insignificance, aware of being but a drop in that ocean of men, and yet at the same time was conscious of his strength as a part of that enormous whole.”

-Tolstoy, War and Peace

. . .

“For the more a man limits himself, the nearer he is on the other hand to what is limitless; it is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, termit-like.”

-Stefan Zweig, The Royal Game

. . .

“There is no such thing as was—only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.”

― William Faulkner

. . .

a world of vanished routines,
your home and your rooms suddenly emptied
of yesterday’s light.
- Abba Kovner, He fell asleep under strange skies