it's the telling

Writing isn’t just telling stories. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s telling everything at once. It’s the telling of a story, and the absence of a story. It’s telling a story through its absence. Practicalities, Marguerite Duras via le temps perdu (love this blog)

Bathers, David Park, 1954 on view at SFMOMA

she bears them unknowingly

Hélène Lagonelle’s body is heavy, innocent still, her skin’s as soft as that of certain fruits, you almost can’t grasp her, she’s almost illusory, it’s too much. She makes you want to kill her, she conjures up a marvelous dream of putting her to death with your own hands. Those flour-white shapes, she bears them unknowingly, and offers them for hands to knead, for lips to eat, without holding them back, without any knowledge of them and without any knowledge of their fabulous power. I’d like to eat Hélène Lagonelle’s breasts as he eats mine in the room in the Chinese town where I go every night to increase my knowledge of God. I’d like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers.

I am worn out with desire for Hélène Lagonelle.

I am worn out with desire.

From The Lover, Marguerite Duras

The Little Mermaid Dissolved in Foam, 1911. Edmund Dulac via even*cleveland

women who write

“Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so.” Marguerite Duras

Bra by DOSA via petit garden

who shall say

The Lover, by Marguerite Duras is less than 30,000 words. The Postman Always Rings Twice, by Richard Cain, about 35,000. Fahrenheit 451 about 45,000; and The Great Gatsby, maybe, 50,000.

Photo: Denise Grünstein

all the lives that follow

For C: “I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhood and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.” Marguerite Duras.

Photo from Cushman Photograph Collection.