drunk with the starry void

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.



Poetry, Pablo Neruda

Creativity and Mental Illness

Many personality characteristics of creative people … make them more vulnerable, including openness to new experiences, a tolerance for ambiguity, and an approach to life and the world that is relatively free of preconceptions. This flexibility permits them to perceive things in a fresh and novel way, which is an important basis for creativity. But it also means that their inner world is complex, ambiguous, and filled with shades of gray rather than black and white. It is a world filled with many questions and few easy answers. While less creative people can quickly respond to situations based on what they have been told by people in authority — parents, teachers, pastors, rabbis, or priests — the creative person lives in a more fluid and nebulous world. He or she may have to confront criticism or rejection for being too questioning, or too unconventional. Such traits can lead to feelings of depression or social alienation. A highly original person may seem odd or strange to others. Too much openness means living on the edge. Sometimes the person may drop over the edge… into depression, mania, or perhaps schizophrenia.


The Creating Brain, Nancy Andreasen
via brainpickings

separated by valleys

It mattered little if one was mute; people did not understand one another anyway. They collided with or charmed one another, hugged or trampled one another, but everyone knew only himself. His emotions, memory, and senses divided him from others as effectively as thick reeds screen the mainstream from the muddy bank. Like the mountain peaks around us, we looked at one another, separated by valleys, too high to stay unnoticed, too low to touch the heavens.

The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosiński

Two-Minute Personality Test

What’s the kindest thing you almost did? Is your fear of insomnia stronger than your fear of what awoke you? Are bonsai cruel? Do you love what you love, or just the feeling? Your earliest memories: do you look through your young eyes, or look at your young self? Which feels worse: to know that there are people who do more with less talent, or that there are people with more talent? Do you walk on moving walkways? Should it make any difference that you knew it was wrong as you were doing it? Would you trade actual intelligence for the perception of being smarter? Why does it bother you when someone at the next table is having a conversation on a cell phone? How many years of your life would you trade for the greatest month of your life? What would you tell your father, if it were possible? Which is changing faster, your body, or your mind? Is it cruel to tell an old person his prognosis? Are you in any way angry at your phone? When you pass a storefront, do you look at what’s inside, look at your reflection, or neither? Is there anything you would die for if no one could ever know you died for it? If you could be assured that money wouldn’t make you any small bit happier, would you still want more money? What has been irrevocably spoiled for you? If your deepest secret became public, would you be forgiven? Is your best friend your kindest friend? Is it in any way cruel to give a dog a name? Is there anything you feel a need to confess? You know it’s a “murder of crows” and a “wake of buzzards” but it’s a what of ravens, again? What is it about death that you’re afraid of? How does it make you feel to know that it’s an “unkindness of ravens”?

by Jonathan Safran Foer
from the project The Cultivating Thought Author Series

Forget everything.

Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don't find yourself.

Diaries, 1910-1923, Franz Kafka

outcast

In all her intercourse with society there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she had inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by other organs than the rest of human kind.

The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne (via)

we know nothing

There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.


The Years, Virginia Woolf

like a wastebasket full of waste paper, bits of hair, and rotting apple cores

I am feeling depressed from being exposed to so many lives, so many of them exciting, new to my realm of experience. I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends. It was that way with Ann: I admired her wit, her riding, her vivacious imagination - all the things that made her the way she was. I could lean on her as she leaned on me. Together the two of us could face anything - only not quite anything, or she would be back. And so she is gone, and I am bereft for awhile. But what do I know of sorrow?


The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, Sylvia Plath

you learn

After a while you learn
the subtle difference between
holding a hand and chaining a soul
and you learn
that love doesn't mean leaning
and company doesn't always mean security.
And you begin to learn
that kisses aren't contracts
and presents aren't promises
and you begin to accept your defeats
with your head up and your eyes ahead
with the grace of woman,
not the grief of a child
and you learn
to build all your roads on today
because tomorrow's ground is
too uncertain for plans
and futures have a way of falling down
in mid-flight.
After a while you learn
that even sunshine burns
if you get too much
so you plant your own garden
and decorate your own soul
instead of waiting for someone
to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure
you really are strong
you really do have worth
and you learn
and you learn
with every goodbye, you learn...


After A While, Veronica A. Shoffstall (via)

Deep memory is a polyphony of voices

(...) everything you read might end up in your work whether you're aware of it or not. At the same time the reader brings their own readings into the reading of a new work and might identify echoes the writer never interacted directly with. When you read an author, let's say author X, you might be reading so many other authors indirectly, and all these authors were in turn reading other authors that you as a reader might too have read. So, you, as a reader, find these echoes there that perhaps author X never intended. It's all really promiscuous and confusing; an orgy of voices making up a unique voice. Reading might be one of the most promiscuous activities as you get to be intimate with all these voices replayed in your head with your own voice.


Susana Medina (via debunking the anxiety of influence)

without

And I sit here without identity: faceless.
My head aches.

The Unabridged Journals, Sylvia Plath

Tonight

I want to resemble a sort of liquid light which stretches beyond visibility or invisibility. Tonight I wish to have the valor and daring to belong to the moon.


A Writer’s Diary, Virginia Woolf

a hole that extends to the center of the earth

I cannot really play. Either at piano or at life; never, never have I been able to. I have always been too hasty, too impatient; something always intervenes and breaks it up. But who really knows how to play, and if he does know, what good is it to him? Is the great dark less dark for that, are the unanswerable questions less inscrutable, does the pain of despair at eternal inadequacy burn less fiercely, and can life ever be explained and seized and ridden like a tamed horse or is it always a mighty sail that carries us in the storm and, when we try to seize it, sweep us into the deep? Sometimes there is a hole in me that seems to extend to the center of the earth. What could fill it? Yearning? Despair? Happiness? What happiness? Fatigue? Resignation? Death? What am I alive for? Yes, for what am I alive?

The Black Obelisk, Erich Maria Remarque

em busca do sentido

O sofrimento de alguma forma deixa de ser sofrimento no momento em que encontra um significado, tal como o significado do sacrifício.
(...)
A preocupação principal do homem não é obter prazer ou evitar a dor, mas sim ver um significado na sua vida. É por isso que o homem está mesmo pronto a sofrer, sob a condição garantida, de que o seu sofrimento tem significado.


Em Busca do Sentido, Viktor Frankl

You don't possess life; life expresses itself through you.

Observe your own body. It breathes.
You breathe when you are asleep, when you are no longer conscious of your own ideas of self-identity.
Who, then, is breathing?
The collection of information that you mistakenly think is you is not the protagonist in this drama called the breath.
In fact, you are not breathing; breath is naturally happening to you.
You can purposely end your own life, but you cannot purposely keep your own life going.
The expression, ‘my life’ is actually an oxymoron, a result of ignorance and mistaken assumption.
You don't possess life; life expresses itself through you.
Your body is a flower that life let bloom,
a phenomenon created by life.


The Twelve Enlightenments, Ilchi Lee

finding a place where the beam of light can be caught

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

Blue Octavo Notebooks, Franz Kafka

She couldn't hold on to it and make sure it never changed.

I think she was afraid to love sometimes. I think it scared her. She was the type to like things that are concrete, like the ocean. Something you could point to and know what it was… And I think that’s why she struggled with love. She couldn't touch it. She couldn't hold on to it and make sure it never changed.

The Dead-Tossed Waves, Carrie Ryan

Learn your way around loneliness.

Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.

Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert

A strange gratitude

Kiss your demons
One by one
On the head

They have paved your way-
They have helped you survive-
No matter how dysfunctionally.

Remember you are here
Sometimes in spite of them
Sometimes because of them.

Honor where you have been,
Who you have been, and what you have done to get to this moment

(via)

do we share the same secret without knowing it? wear the same disguise?

How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?

White Noise by Don DeLillo (via)