this week’s Thought (singular)
i saw a tiny dog frantically pawing at the ground while walking because it was being pushed around by the wind, and for that one brief moment, everything was alright
a very warm welcome to all new readers. i love new readers so much that whenever i get an email about a new reader, i manifest that they receive the inspiration they require for their artistic pursuits. thank you for joining us. may your muse emerge from its secret cocoon, and may you have the flash of creativity that you’re so dearly craving right now.
hi
as mentioned on the lid, this issue is photos of clouds that i had the pleasure of coming across over the last few months, across and in-between cities. please peruse, and share your own favourite cloud/sky photos. if you have seen any of them before, please find it in yourself to appreciate them the same way you appreciated them the first time around.
A Picture!
absolutely not.
English Recitation Competition
Philomela’s tongue says, Melissa Studdard
you could mistake grief for a diamond the way it shines when cut into, like fish eyes in a boat’s drain. The eyes fly into death seeing everything: the cloud of alcohol in Sagittarius B2, the ten billion-trillion-trillion carat diamond in Centaurus, the soul swimming through air with its tie hanging silver beneath it like a kite string. But Philomela’s tongue does not die. Shards of memory fall through her, finding muscle at the shore where blood meets vein, cutting the string that’s kept her sanity tied to the root. In its place, mute swans lie dormant beneath frozen lakes of scar. Tereus says she cannot say what happened. She says silence writhes inside the walls of truth, like a fox thrashing hot in a hound’s jaws, or a riled fly, frantic to escape the hand that carries it to safety.Ubi Sunt, Virginia Konchan
Where are the good ones: the beautiful, strong, and virtuous figures of yore? Probably where the moon is, hung aloft in effulgent skies: eating nails for breakfast, dying in childbirth, then resurrecting to give it all away, cyclically, once more. I don’t want to be the moon, I said to Dick on the casting couch: I want to be a flower no one can touch without dying of hope of touching it again. Something rare and exotic: throaty stamen, purple pistil. Something that just stands on the stage and screams. Alas, that role is taken, said Dick, by Suzanne. Figures, I said. How about the wild river, he suggested, kindly. Or a creek, brook, rivulet, rill, stream? But where do I empty, I asked, before agreeing: in an ocean, sea, or lake, or do I just flow into the ground, a dried-up shrew? That’s between you and your character to decide, he said. The river, you mean, I said. Yes, he said. For god’s sake, you’re a woman. Just be you.
In my youth I longed for the unknown, and for the unknown I am still longing. But in the days of my youth longing embraced necessity that knows naught of patience. Today I long not less, but my longing is friendly with patience, and even waiting. And I know that all this desire that moves within me is one of those laws that turns universes around one another in quiet ecstasy, in swift passion which your eyes deem stillness, and your mind a mystery. And in my youth I loved beauty and abhorred ugliness, for beauty was to me a world separated from all other worlds. But now that the gracious years have lifted the veil of picking-and-choosing from over my eyes, I know that all I have deemed ugly in what I see and hear, is but a blinder upon my eyes, and wool in my ears; And that our senses, like our neighbors, hate what they do not understand.
The Good Side of the Internet
(subscribe to my standalone publication The Good Side of the Internet for consolidated and extra links at the end of each month!)
The concept of Christ is considerably older than the concept of zero. Both are problematic—both have their fallacies and their immaculate conceptions. But the problem of zero troubles me significantly more than the problem of Christ.
I am sitting in the exam room of a hospital entertaining the idea that absolutely no pain is not possible. Despite the commercials, I suspect that pain cannot be eliminated. And this may be the fallacy on which we have based all our calculations and all our excesses. All our sins are for zero.
Zero is not a number. Or at least, it does not behave like a num- ber. It does not add, subtract, or multiply like other numbers. Zero is a number in the way that Christ was a man.
Aristotle, for one, did not believe in Zero.
If no pain is possible, then, another question—is no pain desir- able? Does the absence of pain equal the absence of everything?
How Scientists Diagnosed King Tut Thousands of Years After His Death
Dale Greenwalt on the Detection of Ancient Diseases
Down here it's just winners and losers and don't get caught on the wrong side of that line
Consider the Lobster (and the Greenland Shark): On the Animals That Don’t Age
Nicklas Brendborg Explores the Lives of Animals That Get Stronger with Each Passing Year
Jungle Realm of the Snake Queens
How women ascended the ranks in the highstakes world of Maya politics
this week’s Song
find all shared songs here.
thank you for reading, and see you next week <3
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