Gailleo went blind at the end of his life; telescopes become taunts. He had been condemned and sequestered by the sanction of the Church. What is house arrest to a man who has baptized the moons of planets? Is it an annoying, debilitating or ironic fate? He tried to show them the heavens they praised, and they accused him of propagating devilish delusions. Having first laid eyes upon heavenly bodies, what did he feel of his own body’s disintegration? The senses take hold: perception. The senses slip away: deception. Sometimes the sensations that allow us to hold the world refuse to hold us any longer. We return to the blindly benign void. 

But oh, what sights he saw. 

Update: raw. Ache, ache. Find a source of light. Flap wings against it. 

Having taken leave of my senses, I am departing tomorrow for a residential treatment facility in California. I will not have access to a computer for much of the next few months. 

I do not know where I am but there is a suitcase on my bed and it is full of clothes and books and pens that belong to me. I look at this suitcase. I study this suitcase. I wonder who this suitcase belongs to and why it is filled with my things. 

Morning: 

Watching The Lady Eve for Philosophy in Film and Other Media (Prof. Irving Singer)

Philosophy 132 (Prof. John Searle)

Unpacking while listening to 1984 on audiobook

Afternoon:

First part of Physics of Vision

History of Psychology: The Middle Ages

Background lecture on Marcus Aurelius, read Meditations

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) dir. Alain Resnais

Spoils of the bookstore: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Basic Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, and Ecce Homo), The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, and The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. 

widowinparadise:

(by Randy P. Martin)

What do the words of others mean? They do not operate as my words do. I do not read words anymore; my lexicon has undergone a radical transformation, a metamorphosis, a mutation. I read roots, Latin roots, Greek roots when I can, I memorize etymologies and realize that these roots are my anchors. Ancora de prora iactur. Reading the words of others is like swallowing their saliva, and reading the same words others use while using them myself is like not appreciating the slight shift in alkalinity or acidity in that saliva. The nuances that insinuate themselves into language, afforded by experiences, ancient utterances, amusing mispronunciations, known only to the speaker, coalesce to form codes that cannot be broken. What do we talk about when we talk about love? aequat amorem. 

I have nothing to say. I wanted to become nothing. No, no, one cannot become no-thing, it implies that one was once a thing, and no-thing cannot be a contradiction because then it would not be nothing but a contradiction. I wanted to be nothing. No-thing. Barring that, could I be a voice? Echo sum. Sum ohcE. A reflection of sound, reverberations, resounding, re-re-re-re-re, reincarnation: that blind prison. Blindness is a prison in itself. I fear blindness more than I fear death. Death does not hold the possibility of sight. Life does. Life clutches sight; that is perception, you know: per+capio, to hold or grasp thoroughly. Physical blindness, functional, is not the blindness I shy away from. I do not play the coquette in my flight. Apollo inversus, a god of darkness without the hope of the shadow of the light, god of ignorance, of blindness, of care that does not believe it is ultimately palliative.Daphne. Flee. Flee from the blindness that drips from the mouths of others, the saliva of others come to drown your words, come to hang them by your vocal chords, come to call without desiring a response. 

I read an entry by a girl who is like me. She wrote words on the inside of her left arm, she wrote free. I carved “free” into the tender curve of my left elbow before I knew what it meant, before I realized the irony of carving “free” into the skin I am bound, bound, bound in. An embrace can be a stranglehold. She counts. I conjugate. There is comfort in astrophysics. There is comfort in numbers. Do you want safety in numbers? I will show you safety in numbers. 

When I heated up my oatmeal, I stopped the microwave after 16 of 30 seconds had elapsed. Realizing that 16 remained, that sixteen is my least favorite number, sixteen is 4 squared and I hate the number four, I nearly turned back to reheat it again. Just for time’s sake. Just for old time, old time’s sake. Comfort, yes? Yes. Safety in numbers. 

harkwhostalking:

(by deader than yesterday)

(via d-etriment)

It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish. It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish? No, no, it is my heart in the dish! Is it Carolyn’s heart in the dish, shall she eat it out, shall she eat her heart out of the dish?

Patera, paterae. Pater, patris. Take this, all of you, and eat of it: for this is my body, which shall be given up for you. Drink the green blood of the Amazon, mosquito mother, what do they do with the excised breasts? What shall I do with this throbbing chest? Pectus, pectoris. It is Carolyn’s heart in the dish. Shall she eat her heart out?

No other taste shall change this. No other tongue shall taste this. Golden-hearted scoundrel, draco sum, you shall not pass. 

Da mihi vocem ferream. Da mihi labias ferreas.