two quotes and a poem

Gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualised and reproduced as reality once again. - Judith Butler


An idea opposed to another idea is always the same idea, albeit affected by the negative sign. the more you oppose one another, the more you remain in the same framework of thought. New ideas come from the desert, from hermits, from solitary beings, from those who live in retreat and are not plunged into the sound and fury of repetitive discussion. All the money that is scandalously wasted nowadays on colloquia should be spent on building retreat houses, with vows of reserve and silence. - Michel Serres

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Tear it Down by Jack Gilbert

We find out the heart only by dismantling what

the heart knows.  By redefining the morning,

we find a morning that comes just after darkness.

We can break through marriage into marriage.

By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond

affection and wade mouth-deep into love.

We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.

But going back to childhood will not help.

The village is not better than Pittsburgh.

Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.

Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound

of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls

of the garbage tub is more than the stir

of them in the muck of the garbage.  Love is not

enough.  We die and are put into the earth forever.

We should insist while there is still time.  We must

eat through the wildness of her sweet body already 

in our bed to reach the body within that body.