dianapharah's reviews
119 reviews

I ask about the office
where opinion shapers
rhyme my country with its cancer,
And I will flip the conference table
 on the conference itself.
I will tell them
I have mailed you fire last week, did you receive my flames?
They will imagine a rifle on my tongue
and fix themselves fetuses in the corner,
cover their ears in fear of the firecrackers
and horses and rockets I’ve stuffed in my bag.
They will heave their proclamation,
heed my “perspective” of current affairs,
I’ll hold my word to one of the men’s heads.
and he’ll tremble as I press against his temple and say,
Say it.
Say it.
Say my name without spitting.
— “Crows”

On most days we weep in advance.

We looked up to the clouds, got up on clouds.
Here, we know two suns: earth’s friend and white phosphorus.
Here, we know two things: death and the few breaths before it.

What do you say to children for whom the Red Sea doesn’t part?
— “No Moses in Siege”

there's nothing visual you can cram in a glowing rectangle that fucks with your brain quite like a sunset
so
if we can't see the physical sublime
what are we supposed to look at
where's that constant amazement
that we can check in on every so often
whenever we can stand it

"'Where there's a secret,' she says, 'there's shame—and shame is something we can do without.'

'Okay.' I take big breaths so I won't cry.

She puts her arm around me. 'You're just too young to understand.'

As soon as she says this, I realise she is just like everyone else, and wish I was back at home so that all the things I do not understand could be the same as they always are."

"I want the inconclusive. I want the profound organic disorder that nevertheless hints at any underlying order. The great potency of potentiality."

"Before I organize myself, I must disorganize myself internally. To experience that first and fleeting primary state of freedom. Of the freedom to err, fall and get up again."

"To create a being out of oneself is very serious. I am creating myself. And walking in complete darkness in search of ourselves is what we do. It hurts. But these are the pains of childbirth: a thing is born that is. Is itself. It is hard as a dry stone. But the core is soft and alive, perishable, perilous it. Life of elementary matter."

"Pain is exacerbated life. The process hurts. Coming-to-be is a slow and slow good pain. It's the wide stretching as far one can go. And your blood thanks you. I breathe, I breathe."

"The more accursed, the nearer toward the God. I deepened myself in myself and found that I want bloody life, and the occult meaning has intensity that has light. It is the secret light of a knowledge of fatality: the cornerstone of the earth. It is more an omen of life than actual life."

"Death is just future to such an extent that there are those who cannot bear it and commit suicide. It's as if life said the following: and there simply was no following. Only the waiting colon."

"I am—despite everything oh despite everything—am being joyful in this very instant because I refuse to be defeated: so I love. As an answer. Impersonal love, itlove, is joy: even the love that doesn't work out, even the love that ends. And my own death and that of those we love must be joyful, I don't yet know how, but they must be. That is living: the joy of the it. And to settle for that not as one defeated but in an allegro con brio."

"And now suddenly after an evening of 'who am I' and of waking at one in the morning still in despair—now suddenly at three in the morning I woke and met myself. I want to meet myself. Calm, joyful, fullness without fulmination. Simply I am I. And you are you. It is vast, and will endure."

"Will anyone ever penetrate the secret of this disease which transcends ordinary experience, this reverberation of the shadow of the mind, which manifests itself in a state of coma like that between death and resurrection, when one is neither asleep nor awake?"

"It seemed to me that until now I had not known myself and that the world as I had conceived it hitherto had lost all significance and validity and had been replaced by the darkness of night. For I had not been taught to gaze at and to love the night."

"Am I a being separate and apart from the rest of creation? I do not know. But when I looked into the mirror a moment ago I did not recognize myself. No, the old 'I' has died and rotted away, but no barrier, no gulf, exists between it and the new one."

"What comforted me was the prospect of oblivion after death. The thought of an afterlife frightened and fatigued me. I had never been able to adapt myself to the world in which I was now living. Of what use would another world be to me?"

"I thought to myself, 'If it is true that everyone has his own star in the sky mine must be remote, dark and meaningless. Perhaps I have never had a star at all.'"

'There was nothing to do, nothing to hear, nothing to see, nothingness was everywhere around me all the time, a completely dimensionless and timeless void. You walked up and down, you and your thoughts, up and down, over and over. But even thoughts, insubstantial as they seem, need a footing, or they begin to spin, to run in frenzied circles; they can't bear nothingness either.'

‘My only interest, the only attraction for me, is a postmortem curiosity to know whether that was chess or madness in the cell, whether at that time I was just on the brink or already over the edge—that's all, nothing else.’

"Whenever I stop, the blood starts, as though only my constant racked shambling can keep the life inside me. As if I'm truly condemned now, to stagger through these midnight halls like the Flying Dutchman, an endless life of pointless travel."