“There is no doubt that late capitalism certainly articulates many of its injunctions via an appeal to (a certain version of) health. The banning of smoking in public places, the relentless monstering of working class diet on programs like You Are What You Eat, do appear to indicate that we are already in the presence of a paternalism without the Father. It is not that smoking is ‘wrong,’ it is that it will lead to our failing to lead long and enjoyable lives. But there are limits to this emphasis on good health: mental health and intellectual development barely feature at all, for instance. What we see instead is a reductive, hedonic model of health which is all about ‘feeling and looking good.’ To tell people how to lose weight … is acceptable; but to call for any kind of cultural improvement is to be oppressive and elitist.”
— Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
Tag: quotes
“The invalidating environment contributes to emotion dysregulation by failing to teach the child to label and modulate arousal, to tolerate distress, or to trust his or her own emotional responses as valid interpretations of events. It also actively teaches the child to invalidate his or her own experiences by making it necessary for the child to scan the environment for cues about how to act and feel.”
— Marsha M. Linehan, DBT Skills Training Manual, Second Edition, p.8 (via mysocalledborderlinelife)
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room // Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories
“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
— Thomas Mann (via dostevsky)
“Most of us aren’t defeated in a decisive battle. We are defeated one tiny, seemingly insignificant surrender at a time that chips away at who we should really be […] It’s a slow and incremental process chipping away at our will – chipping away at our discipline. We sleep in a little later. We miss a workout, then another. We start to eat and drink what we shouldn’t until you wake up one day and you’ve become something that you never would have allowed.”
— John Willink, Discipline Equals Freedom
I lead a life much below my level. Beyond the books, which trickle in slowly (I have to read what I can get, not what I have a mind to read), I have nothing to sustain my inner life; and everything around me exudes an indescribable prosiness, which presses down on me too with its brutal weight. Nothing on the order of a stroll with a dear person, not one hour of quiet and serene contemplation–all is tainted by mundane worry and staleness. I take it that productive creators fence themselves off from their environment by a certain regimen of living, a certain organization of their daily routine that does not allow the workaday banality, humdrum job, and the rest of it to get to them. I badly feel the lack of such a regimen, my incapacity to subject myself to such a discipline. One must, for instance, fence off one’s inner life, not permit the vermin of ordinary cares to infest it. Some blindness used to protect me from this truth; I wore blinkers like a horse in harness. Now reality has won and penetrated my interior.
― Bruno Schulz in a letter to Roma Halpern, October 29, 1938
Antonin Artaud, translated by Mary Ann Caws and Patricia Terry, from “The Nerve Meter,” (x)
“I’m lost by life. I don’t know anything about life. If I make a movie, I don’t even understand why I’m making the movie. I just know that there’s something there. Later on, we all get to know what it’s about through the opinions of others. If you make a film, it might as well be as important as be nonsense. You can’t go for ten cents and expect to come up with a million. You have to go for everything. Whether you fail or don’t fail, you have to go for what will make us better when we’re finished. I like to work with friends and for friends on something that might help somebody. Something with humour, sadness; simple things.
The artist really is a magical figure whom we would all like to be like and don’t have the courage to be, because we don’t have the strength to be obsessive. Film is an art, a beautiful art. It’s a madness that overcomes all of us. We’re in love with it. Money is really not that important to us. We can work thirty-six, forty-eight hours straight and feel elated at the end of that time. I think film is magic! With the tools we have at hand, we really try to convert people’s lives! The idea of making a film is to package a lifetime of emotion and ideas into a two-hour capsule form, two hours where some images flash across the screen and in that two hours the hope is that the audience will forget everything and that celluloid will change lives. Now that’s insane, that’s a preposterously presumptuous assumption, and yet that’s the hope.”— John Cassavetes (via herewithmyabsentfriend)
“the love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “what are you going through?” it is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in the collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled “unfortunate.” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark of affliction. for this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way”
simone weil
countervisuality 