surrender

"I want

To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees."
-Neruda

books became half her world.

Supermassive black hole

Astronomers have captured a distant black hole creating the galaxy that will eventually become its home.

By sending a jet of gas into a neighboring galaxy, the black hole has touched off star formation at a rate 100 times the galactic average.

“Our study suggests that supermassive black holes can trigger the formation of stars, thus ‘building’ their own host galaxies,” David Elbaz, lead author of a paper on the work in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, said in a press release. “This link could also explain why galaxies hosting larger black holes have more stars.”

The quasar HE0450-2958, located about five billion light-years from Earth, is powered by a supermassive black hole. Unlike all other known quasars, this one did not appear to be surrounded by a galaxy, which had puzzled astronomers. They thought perhaps the quasar’s surrounding galaxy was obscured by dust. So in the latest observations they looked in the mid-infrared part of the spectrum, in which dust shines brightly, using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. But they didn’t see dust, confirming the idea that the quasar really is “naked.”

Instead of a surrounding galaxy, Elbaz’s team found the black hole was blasting its neighbor with energy and matter. That injection has caused the observed flurry of star births. 350 new suns are bursting into existence each year in the region.

Eventually, the black hole will merge with its neighbor. The two objects are located 22,000 light-years apart and are moving towards each other at less than 125 miles per second. In tens of millions of years, HE0450-2958 will finally get a home.

“This would provide a natural explanation for the missing host galaxy,” Elbaz and his co-authors wrote.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/

My body is a cage.

the eternal rocks beneath

"I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being."

M

Wretched crippling

Hangman’s noose

Peeling gold

Fall around my neck

Ineluctable rope that strangles you

Sharp breaking against my throat

It is

Suffocation

 

I want to take on your pain

All that black that leaked into your eyes

They used to light the sky

And I know I can’t

 

Disease

It’s liquid pours in your mouth

I have watched it take you

For years

Assiduous monster that rules you

I hate its mask

 

I wonder often

In this diseases face

Of who I am not afraid

If in drowning you

In it’s nefarious bed

If it wouldn’t take me instead.

Vogue

Natalie Wood

"Almost every girl falls in love with the wrong man, I suppose it's part of growing up. "

Melina Jesenska & Franz Kafka

Milena Jesenska, feminist, editor, fashion correspondent, traveler, writer, and love of Franz Kafka's life. Their correspondence started when she read a copy of his story "The Stoker" and wrote him saying that reading it was, "...the most beautiful thing that ever happened in my life." She offered to translate Franz's story from German to Czech for him. Thus began the strange and beautiful relationship they shared. She was married, unhappily so, he was a reclusive invalid with a repulsion to physical touch and extreme anxieties. Her husband cheated on her, as she says, "Over a hundred times a year." His tuberculosis rendered him unbelievably delicate, she was head strong, assertive, and capricious. Somehow, their reciprocity covered all the differences. As it usually does in the beginning of intense relationships.

Once he wrote to her in a letter, "When the soul and the heart can no longer bear the burden, the lungs take over one half of it, so that the weight will at least be evenly distributed."

That is how it was with his illness. Editor Ronald Tamplin describes Franz's illness thusly, "It gave him an almost miraculous delicacy and a frighteningly uncompromising intellectual refinement. As a human being, however, he pushed all his fear of life onto his illness. He was shy, timid, gentle, and kind, but he wrote gruesome and painful books. He saw the world as full of invisible demons, who tear apart and destroy defenseless people. He was too clear-sighted and too wise to be able to live; he was too weak to fight, he had that weakness of noble, beautiful people who are not able to do battle against the fear of misunderstandings, unkindness, or intellectual lies. Such persons know beforehand that they are powerless and go down in defeat in such a way that they shame the victor. He knew people as only people of great sensitivity are able to know them, as somebody who is alone and sees people almost prophetically, from one flash of a face. He knew the world in a deep and extraordinary manner. He was himself a deep and extraordinary world."

Initially he wrote Milena in German, his native language. He later insisted that Milena write in Czech, since he could only capture her whole personality through her native tongue. After the first Czech letter, Kafka wrote:

"I see you more clearly, the movements of your body, your hands, so quick, so determined, it's almost a meeting, although when I try to raise my eyes to your face, what breaks into the flow of the letter...is fire and I see nothing but fire."

They met for four days in Vienna in the summer of 1920. That was the most they would ever have together. Franz was afraid married life would interfere with his writing. Milena's husband was pursuing her once more, in the shadow of Franz's attentions. Eventually, Milena wrote explicitly that she could not leave her husband. She desperately wanted to, but she just couldn't bring herself to follow through with it. Kafka replied that he had known her answer all along:

"It was behind nearly all your letters...it was in your eyes."

Simple domestic love could never be theirs:

"We shall never live together, in the same apartment, body to body, at the same table, never, not even in the same town."

Gradually the letters became less passionate and more like entries in a diary. Kafka's health deteriorated and Milena began to fell that she had added to his anxieties. She suggested a meeting, but he could not bear the pressure of seeing her again, and shortly afterward proposed that they stop writing to each other. He wrote to Milena that he was aware of an "irresistibly strong voice, actually your voice, that's demanding silence from me...these letters are nothing but torture, produced by torture, irremediable..."

In the end it was Kafka who made the decision that he and Milena should stop seeing each other:
"Don't write and avoid meeting me, just fulfill this request for me in silence, it's the only way I can somehow go on living..."

Sadly, he had little more life to live. Franz died of tuberculosis in 1924, two years after the relationship ended. Milena treasured his letters until she died, at Nazi concentration camp Ravensbruck, in 1944.

Night

"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to life as long as God himself. Never."
-Elie Weisel, author, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor.

Very early in my life, it was too late.

Tolstoy's opinion on life. I agree.

"I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor - such is my idea of happiness." -Leo Tolstoy

The dance

Hop hop hop
Tender little feet
Sole upon razors
Walks like a mountain
Shifting
Under molten magnanimous
Groaning earth.
Like a bird
I feel it
Slice slice slice
Intravenous digging
Scalpel this heart
Steady as a will
That can no longer take the beating
Puncture tiny bones
Breaking tiny hands
You never meant to do it.
Now feathers splattered, red
And my veins
Fill with ice.

“The voice called, and I went.” The heroic life of Hannah Szenes

Hannah Szenes was born on July 17, 1921, to an assimilated Jewish family in Hungary. Her father, Béla, was a journalist and playwright. Her mother Catherine raised both her and her brother Gyorgy (Georgie) in the privileged, artistic, and educated world of the Jewish upper class in Hungary. Hannah inherited her father’s deftness with words and was a poet herself. She wrote constantly. Keeping a diary up until her death and writing a plethora of poems that are recognized the world over.

She studied agriculture for a little while, but soon realized her heart was in the changing climate of a world on the brink of war.

“Suddenly, the idea grabbed me that I must go to Hungary, and be there during these days, to lend a hand to the ‘Aliyat Ha'noar'’ organization and also to bring out my possible and vital and I decided to rise and act.''

She began paratrooper training in Egypt with 250 other Palestinian-Jewish volunteers in order to help save the Jews of Hungary, who were about to be deported to the German death camp at Auschwitz. The selection process for these types of resistance missions were rigorous and only 33 of the trainees actually parachuted into occupied Europe. Seven of these were caught and killed.

In March of 1944, she and two male colleagues, Yoel Palgi and Peretz Goldstein, were sent to Yugoslavia and joined a partisan group. After landing, they learned the Germans had already occupied Hungary, so the men decided to call off the mission as it was obviously too dangerous. Convincing Hannah to give up was next to impossible, so she continued and headed for the Hungarian border alone. Upon arrival, she was arrested by Hungarian gendarmes who found the British military transmitter she was carrying in her bag. She was taken to a prison in Budapest, tied to a chair, stripped, then whipped and clubbed for several hours. The guards wanted to know the code for her transmitter so they could find out who the other parachutists were. She would not give away any information that would put her resistance allies in danger or jeopardy. She felt the greater cause of the resistance was more important than her life.

Even when her beloved mother was brought before her and the guards threatened to torture her as well, Hannah would disclose no information.

During her time as a prisoner, Hannah used a mirror to flash light signals to other Jewish prisoners as way of communication and tried to keep their spirits up by singing and keeping her joyful and bright personality—even in the darkest of circumstances.

After a bogus 8-day trial, she was executed by a firing squad. Her remains were taken to Israel, where she was buried on a hilltop in Jerusalem.

She wrote this poem shortly after she was parachuted into Yugoslavia, which was where she met her eventual demise:

“Fortunate is the match that burns and kindles the flames.
Fortunate is the flame that burns inside the hearts.
Fortunate are the hearts to know when to stop with dignity.
Fortunate is the match that burns and kindles the flames.”

The following lines were found in Hanna's death cell after her execution:

“One - two - three... eight feet long
Two strides across, the rest is dark...
Life is a fleeting question mark
One - two - three... maybe another week.
Or the next month may still find me here,
But death, I feel is very near.
I could have been 23 next July
I gambled on what mattered most,
the dice were cast.
I lost.”

BUY NOTHING DAY 2009

Go on a consumer fast on November 27 in North America and November 28 in Europe and overseas.

dissolving

"I cannot exist without you. I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again. My life seems to stop there, I see no further. You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I were dissolving. I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion... I have shudder'd at it... I shudder no more. I could be martyr'd for my religion: Love is my religion. I could die for that. I could die for you. My creed is love, and you are its only tenet. You have ravish'd me away by a power I cannot resist." -John Keats

Love me without fear.

And that he can never move fast enough to catch her.

"The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light. The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach. Every night was different, each one had a name as long as it lasted. Their sound was that of the dogs, the country dogs baying at mystery. They answered on another from village to village, until the time and space of the night were utterly consumed." -Marguerite Duras

I am worn out with desire.

"Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome." -Marguerite Duras

Your back's a meadow

Your lips are nettles
Your tongue is wine
You're left as liquid
But your body's pine

Your arms are lovely
Yellow and rose
Your back's a meadow
Covered in snow
Your thighs are thistles
and hothouse grapes
You breathe your sweet breath
And have me wait.
-Sea Wolf

by blood and by mean, I follow your lead.

There’s a possibility

There’s a possibility  

All that I had 

was all I am going to get

 
There’s a possibility 
All I'm going to get  
is gone with your step 

So tell me when you hear my heart stop,
You’re the only who knows

Tell me when you hear my silence 
 There’s a possibility  
I wouldn’t know  

Know that when you leave 
By blood and by mean 
You walk like a thief
By blood and by mean 

I'll fall when you leave  

So tell me when you hear my heart stop, 
You’re the only who knows 
 
Tell me when you hear my silence
 So tell me when my sigh is over 
You’re the reason why I’m close

Tell me when you hear me falling
There's a possibility
It wouldn’t show  

By blood and by mean
I fall when you leave 
By blood and by mean
I follow your lead.

I'll eat you up I love you so.

Something like his mouth

Grip my waist

Feel the bones press in

A spider’s belly.

Searching around fingers

Searching what we didn't know

I touched

Something hot and wet

Like his mouth

My hand pulled back

Smoldering coal

I could feel the dying

Of something in me

I could feel the re-bearing

of a load 

I can't imagine again 

to carry.

Sea grey

Lightest frost

Eyes that push 

and pull me out

I drink it in 

Wine of symphony

Arrange your notes on me.

...my whole soul through my lips.

I wonder, how it is you forgot so well.

Teen Trafficking Survivor Gets Life Without Parole

These days, the Rhodes scholars of the criminal justice system seem to like locking people up for life the way Mark Sanford likes frequent filer miles on Aerolineas. Well, they've managed another winner: sentencing 16-year-old trafficking victim Sara Kruzan to die in prison for killing her pimp.

When Sara met G.G., the 31-year-old man who would become her pimp, she was 11. Sara's mom struggled with drug addiction, so when G.G. would drive Sara and her friends to the roller skating rink or the mall, it felt like having a real parent around. He gave Sara presents and told her she was special- so special, that she should never give sex away for free. He convinced her she was a product.

G.G. groomed Sara like this for two years before he raped her. By then, his control was complete and he forced her into prostitution. Sara and the other girls who G.G. exploited were out on the streets from 6pm to 6am, every night. Twelve hours a night, seven days a week, for three years, Sara was raped by strangers so G.G. could profit. After three years, she snapped, and she killed him.

Surviving sexual violence is one of the most difficult things in the world. Surviving repeated sexual violence as a child doubtlessly takes its mental and physical toll. G.G. stole Sara's 8^th, 9^th, and 10^th grade years- money and rape taking the place of dances and dates. How can a person ever recover from something like that? But Sara survived.

What Sara did was terrible, and she knows it. But if ever there are mitigating circumstances for a crime, these are them. To tell someone like Sara who has overcome such abuse that her destiny is to die in prison, no matter how much she changes, is cruel.

The vast majority of women in prison have histories of abuse from families and/or intimate partners. Does this mean they are not accountable for their actions? Of course not. Murder should always be punished. But Sara Kruzan's case is one of ludicrous over-sentencing of a young girl who escaped from hell in a heinous way.

Sara Kruzan deserves to be punished. But she also deserves hope. She deserves hope that she didn't survive being raped and sold for three years for nothing. She deserves hope that the darkest chapter of her life has passed, and a horizon lies ahead. She deserves hope that she can change.

See full article and video of Sara here: http://humantrafficking.change.org/blog/view/teen_trafficking_survivor_gets_life_without_parole

The Blood Countess

Erzsébet Bathory was a Hungarian Countess accused (though never convicted because of her royal status) of killing over 600 virgin women. She thought if she bathed in their blood she would remain eternally youthful. Rumor is it actually worked. She was notoriously beautiful and seemingly ageless. She is considered the most prolific serial killer ever and as well as the first female 'vampire'.

This piece is part of a 'Hysteria' show, featuring women who are afflicted with supernatural desires and rampant emotions. http://www.etsy.com/shop/BabyFangs

"And therefore I am come amongst you at this time, not as for my recreation or sport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all; to lay down, for my God, and for my kingdom, and for my people, my honour and my blood, even the dust. I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too."

Thornfield Hall

"A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank; he wishes to catch a glimpse of her fair face without waking her. He steals softly over the grass, careful to make no sound; he pauses - fancying she has stirred: he withdraws; not for world would he be seen. All is still: he again advances: he bends over her; a light veil rests on her features: he lifts it, bends lower; now his eyes anticipate the vision of beauty - warm, and blooming, and lovely, in rest. How hurried was their first glance! But how they fix! How he starts! How he suddenly and vehemently clasps in both arms the form he dared not, a moment since, touch with his finger! How he calls aloud a name, and drops his burden, and gazes on it wildly! He thus gasps and cries, and gazes, because he no longer fears to waken by any sound he can utter - by any movement he can make. He thought his love slept sweetly: he find she is stone-dead.

I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house: I saw a blackened ruin."

-Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Paintings

The Governess, Jane.

Lena's excursion to Paris.

Lady Austen
Marie A.'s skivvies

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?ref=vl_other_2&listing_id=33865645

Sit down and write me a letter.

When you get the time
Sit down and write me a letter
When you're feeling better
Drop me a line

I wanna know how it all works out
I had a feeling we were fading out
I didn't know that people faded out so fast
And that people faded out
When there was love enough left to fix it

But, there it is
There it is, we are only one push from the nest
There it is, we are only one push from the nest.
There it is, the sun rises
But the sun sets, the sun also sets

When you get these feelings
Next time, next time
Oh, be sure
You're gonna tear someone apart

I wanna know how it all works out
I had a feeling we were fading out
I didn't know that people faded out
That people faded out so fast

I wanna show you what I've got inside
But you know those parts of me died
Just like that, they faded out
They faded out so fast
And there was love enough left to fix it

But, there it is
There it is, we are only one shove from the nest.
-Ryan Adams. 

Edie Sedgwick and Clementine

To that one kid who makes me really happy.

"And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it." -Roald Dahl

Books in winter. A friend.

Birds of paradise

Birds of paradise

Beat in me

Careening

unassailable screams

Hung on sinewy feathers

Inked with bone, and vein,

And flesh.

Filmy brush of white

A body breaks the ceiling

Splits through my sky

Explodes in a fury of light

You ripened

I kiss a bloomed mouth

Touch me, brokenly

Like fog slipping

through silent trees.

Here the arrant poem lies

Mended and seamed with strands of fire

Into a bladed wing

Memories caught in your teeth.

I left my lamp at your feet

For the first time

Dreamed you into a watercolor

A sinking sea

Bled beneath our bed

Kiss me, thrown back

A century of sighs are screaming

Under my throat.

A female corpse, back view

Down turned

Mouth filled with dirt

Long have I lain

Expiating.

A jeweled apple

my skull talks back

decomposed prettily

barnacles from our sea

arrange themselves in little rows

tegument me

 

I do my corpse-waltz

To your side

press your lips on mine

I want to smell you exhale

Feel you pale

Linen wrapped

my body arabesques

flinging free

a jaundiced arm

Surprised it still can sway

 

You brandish desire

Like a sword

In a flourished grave

I've become cowardly.

There is nothing left human

To recognize by

Dark circles

Ring my eyes

I hear chanting

deep inside

My coffin dilates

to abide you

cob-webbed and crippled

brightest thing I've seen

Come, lay next to me

Dust is beginning to become me

Touch these drying wounds

Still bleeding ochre.