Gillian Flynn, From Sharp Objects

1.pat the bunny, I'm not a good person // 2. // 3. mitski, a pearl, art by @hauntedomens // 4.hieu minh nguyen, buffet etiquette // 5.art from pinterest // 6.christa wolf tr. by jan van heurck, cassandra: a novel and four essays // 7.extracurricular (2020) dir.kim jin min // 8.louise bourgeois, destruction of the father/reconstruction of the father: writings and interviews 1923-1997 // 9.alice osman, radio silence // mitski, fireworks, art by uol.art (on insta)

“How as a girl, in cut-off jeans and a skimpy string-bikini top, I lay in the back of a pick-up truck, the better to bronze my young, bare flesh. How I wanted to scorch myself, then; how I wanted to burn my beauty onto the very eye of love. How lovely, the way we wreck ourselves on the world; how we shine in it, too.”

— Cecilia Woloch, ‘Girl in a Truck, Kentucky Highway 245’, in Narcissus (via antigonies)

Woman King

King, Florence + the Machine //  Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses (1891), John William Waterhouse // Woman King, Iron & Wine // Macbeth, William Shakespeare // Medusa with the Head of Perseus (2008), Luciano Garbati // Show Your Fangs, The Crane Wives // Gold Dust Woman, Fleetwood Mac // La Belle Dame sans Merci (1901), Frank Bernard Dicksee // Brutus, The Buttress 

“The most haunting time at which to see them is at the turn of the moon, when they utter strange wailing cries; but the lagoon is dangerous for mortals then…”

“the mermaids” - marianne boruch // “hylas and the nymphs” - john william waterhouse // “the love song of j. alfred prufrock” - t.s. eliot // “a mermaid” - john william waterhouse // “the siren” john william waterhouse // moby-dick - herman melville // “the knight and the mermaid” - isobel lilian gloag // “the land baby” - john collier // “lamia” - john keats // of “hylas and the water nymphs” - henrietta rae // peter pan // j.m. barrie

From The Art of Loving and Losing Female Friends by Rachel Vorona Cote

Do you have something on Platonic love?

well, there’s definitely elements of it in the love tag, but i haven’t really differentiated between romantic and platonic in the tag system. concepts like love as attention etc aren’t strictly defined as either imo & also, it definitely depends on the context of the specific text/the author i feel..? it’s all tangled up and complex!

anyway, there’s this one which just came across my dash 😳 i think it fits this theme well! and this platonic love quotes by @4400lux​ is an absolute gem 💓

& here’s a couple from the friendship tag 

this one! / two / three (this one has i’d say the strongest focus on the ‘all friendship is romantic’ slant) / to sit in hell with you / the heartbreak of friendship

a lot of these themes come up in a few of the above but it depends on what type of relationship you’re considering? they’re all forms of platonic love but perhaps there’s different trappings to them like: 

the mothers tag / other familial love which. i don’t think i have tags for currently oops...

there’s also the whole ‘the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb’ angle, love for found/chosen family! !! there’s quotes in some of the above links :’) 

love for humanity! for yourself !! for strangers (this compilation!!) just the inherent connection... the love we all send out to the world 🥺 

love for nature!! for being alive!! would highly recommend mary oliver’s poetry for this... and the love for your pets, again off the top of my head, would rec ‘dog songs’ by mary oliver, it’s very sweet 

& have a couple of other quotes n stuff! 

this tenderness photoset by wing shya about brotherhood 

this very sweet story about kafka and the doll traveler (or tumblr post here) !! “Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.”

God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.

- ray bradbury

The other element of friendship is tenderness.

- ralph waldo emerson 

Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. 

- c.s. lewis

For me, friendship has always been the most accessible of relationships — certainly far more so than romantic love. Friendship, I learned, provided a buffer in the interplay of emotions, a distance that made the risk of intimacy bearable, a space that allowed the other person to remain safely another person. (...) You can tell how strong the friendship is by the silence that envelops it. Lovers and spouses may talk frequently about their “relationship,” but friends tend to let their regard for one another speak for itself or let others point it out.

- andrew sullivan

...the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

- david whyte

“But today, when the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love – all love – love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a cafe.” 

- jeanette winterson 

ok these are, for the most part, friendship focussed but going to stop now otherwise this post would be wildly long aha but i hope this helps! 💓

The Knight Wonders What, Exactly, He Rescued by Jeannine Hall Gailey

why is love ordinary and cruel?

everything I remember of him could belong to any woman who fell in love with any man in this city.

— Gwen Benaway, from day/break

what do you think drives lady macbeth's cruelty and do you sympathise with her at all?

This post and this post might be of interest. But I think ‘cruelty’ is the wrong word. Cruelty implies violence for the sake of violence and enjoyment of violence. (See here.) Lady M doesn’t revel in the violence. She doesn’t delight in it the way some of the characters in, say, Titus Andronicus do, or even Margaret in Henry VI does after the murder of Rutland/during the murder of York. For Lady M violence is always a means to an end. “Infirm of purpose” is what she calls her husband when he starts to get faint-hearted. He’s too full of the milk of human kindness “to catch the nearest way.” For her, it’s all about the outcome. The ends justify the means. Like I said in one of those posts, I think her driving force is ambition. She wants more than what she has. 

Interestingly, she never expresses any personal desire to be queen. She does, however, use the singular possessive pronoun ‘my’ when she says “The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements.” She claims the crime as her own, and even though the idea of murder occurs to her and her husband independently, she is the criminal mastermind. She says, “you shall put / This night’s great business into my dispatch; / Which shall to all our nights and days to come / Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom.” And at the end of the scene: “Leave all the rest to me.” This regicide is her baby–and I use that word very deliberately. There are a million possible explanations for why Lady Macbeth is so desperate to seize this power for her husband. My guess is it has something to do with that baby she mentions in 1.7 which doesn’t appear in the play. A woman’s function at this point in history was basically to be a baby-making machine and ensure the survival of her husband’s line. She hasn’t been able to do that (for whatever reason) and her husband, at least, is already middle-aged, so that procreation window is rapidly closing, if it’s not closed already. By early modern standards, that’s a huge dynastic failure. My guess is that her power-grabbing is about agency and compensation. Maybe she can’t continue Macbeth’s line, but she can make him king. And she does. 

But here’s the other part of it which I think is really important and often gets overlooked, and it goes back to the fact that Lady M never expresses a personal desire to be queen. She wants her husband to be king, and she thinks he is fully deserving of that office. “Thou wouldst be great;” she says, “Art not without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it.” AND THIS IS SO KEY. Because Lady M is nothing if not full of ambition. What she’s saying here is “You don’t have enough darkness in your soul to do this, so I’m going to do it for you.” Now. Is that somewhat fucked up? Absolutely. However, that is an enormous sacrifice to make. I’m not going to get into this in depth, but there’s a lot of natural law theory floating around in this play. What’s important to know is this: In the protestant ethos of this play, if you commit regicide, you are 100% going to be damned for eternity. There’s no doubt about that. So, in an insane backwards way, this is actually an incredibly loving, selfless thing to do on Lady M’s part. She is willing to sacrifice her own salvation to make her husband king. Let that sink in. That is so much more hardcore than just saying, “I’d take a bullet for you, babe.” She is willing to burn for all time to put him on the throne, and not only is she willing, but it’s her idea, not just something she does with her back against the wall. That is a crazy kind of love. And that’s one of my favorite things about this play. This is not a unanimous opinion by any means, but I firmly believe that even though the Macbeths are terrible tyrannical people, they are desperately, devotedly in love with one another. Their language is incredibly intimate. In his first letter Macbeth addresses his wife as “My dearest partner of greatness,” and throughout the play they are constantly struggling to help and heal one another. Theirs is a relationship built on love and equality, whatever else they do (and however their relationship is also sometimes toxic and fractures through the play). Look at Macbeth’s conversation with the doctor in 5.3 when his wife’s health begins to fail: “If thou couldst, doctor, cast / The water of my land, find her disease, / And purge it to a sound and pristine health, / I would applaud thee to the very echo, / That should applaud again.” That. Is. Love.

So. Why does Lady Macbeth do the terrible things she does? There’s no certain answer. Ambition has a lot to do with it. But I think that ambition is rooted in guilt about what she hasn’t been able to provide her husband with, and a passionate yearning to make up for that, somehow. Leo’s character says in Inception that positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time, and I think that’s true here. Lady M doesn’t orchestrate Duncan’s murder because she’s inherently cruel. She does it for love.