“Among the most impressive shifts in Cuban agriculture has been in the cities, where urban farming has taken off to levels unimaginable a few decades ago. This is a crucial turn because by the 1980s the number of people living in cities reached between 69 and 80 per cent of the total population. Millions of tonnes of vegetables are now produced agroecologically over more than 50,000 hectares of urban land by 383,000 urban growers. There is no other country where low-input, ecologically sustainable urban food production has reached this degree of success”

— Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Eco-Socialist Futures

“Britain is not a happy place. The market-oriented prosperity promised by Thatcherism and New Labour has proved for many to be hollow. While some aspects of the post-war consensus remain influential and continue to be circulated as the underlying common sense of UK political life, in reality the NHS and council homes that defined the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s are being privatised and stripped to the bone, accelerating the crises in housing, health and social care. The austerity imposed on other parts of the welfare state which followed the 2008 financial crisis has brought increased hardship and frustration, through both a lack of services and cuts to public sector jobs. On top of this, a deregulated labour market, zero-hour contracts and the gig economy mean that work, if you can get it, is precarious and low paid. In this context, reactionary nationalism is mobilised for political gain, and migrants, whether constructed as workers or scroungers, documented or illegal, have shouldered much of the blame for finance capitalism’s fiscal calamities. A nostalgia for empire and the euphoria of world war victory has displaced demands for a return to post-war welfarism. The crisis of legitimacy for governments that cannot provide the jobs and prosperity promised by market-led growth has been partially reconciled by new covenants, promises to protect the nation from violent crime, terrorism and immigrants.”

�� Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State

cruellheaven

“Pain itself is merely a consequence of the desire for pleasure, the desire to destroy, to annihilate; in its supreme form, pain is a variety of pleasure”

— The Piano Teacher, Elfriede Jelinek (via thecourageofobscurity)

perfectframes

“I knew your presence in the twilight mist, In the world-filling darkness, in the rain That spoke in whispers,”

�� E.E. Cummings, from Sonnet (“No sunset”); Collected Poems: 1904-1962
(via megairea)

“While modern capitalism constantly develops new needs in order to increase consumption, people’s dissatisfaction remains the same as ever. Their lives no longer have any meaning beyond a rush to consume, and this consumption is used to justify the increasingly radical frustration of any creative activity or genuine human initiative — to the point that people no longer even see this lack of meaning as important.”

— Pierre Canjuers

0nieroi

““The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.””

— — Edgar Allan Poe, The black cat  (via avakian-kun)

voirlvmer

“To ask oneself before another: by what means does he calm within himself the desire to be everything? Sacrifice, conformity, trickery, poetry, morality, snobbery, heroism, religion, revolt, vanity, money? or by several means together? or all together? A wink of an eye in which glimmers a deceitfulness, a melancholy smile, a grimace of fatigue together betray the disguised suffering which the astonishment at not being everything, at even having concise limits, gives us.”

— Georges Bataille, Inner Experience
(via inertescapist)

“Whole months have passed during which I haven’t lived, but have merely endured, … marooned in an inner stagnation of thinking and feeling.”

�� Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“With such a hell in your heart and your head, how can you live? How can you love?”

�� Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming.”

�� e.e. cummings, from the introduction to New Poems, Complete Poems:1904-1962

helloagauniverse

“despite the mute coldness of the teeth and the hatred of the eyes, and the battle of dying beasts that watch over oblivion, in some summer place we are together watching with lips invaded by thirst.”

�� Pablo Neruda, from “II: FURIES AND SORROWS,” The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005)

“Love isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn’t a feeling, it is a practice.”

�� The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm (b. 23 March 1900)

“When we speak of the ‘end of history,’ ‘the end of the political,’ ‘the end of the social,’ 'the end of ideologies,’ none of this is true. The worst of it all is precisely that there will be no end to anything, and all these things will continue to unfold slowly, tediously, recurrently, in that hysteresis of everything which, like nails and hair, continues to grow after death.”

— Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (1994)

“A crisis of fidelity is always what puts to the test, following the collapse of an image, the sole maxim of consistency (and thus ethics): ‘Keep going!’ Keep going when you have lost the thread, when you no longer feel ‘caught up’ in the process, when the event itself has become obscure, when its name is lost or when it seems that it may have named a mistake, if not simulacrum.”

— Alain Badiou, Ethics

“Authentic philosophical interpretation does not meet up with a fixed meaning which already lies behind the question, but lights it up suddenly and momentarily and consumes it at the same time.”

— Adorno

journalofanobody

“That is why the bird sings its songs into the world as though it were singing into its inner self, that’s why we take a birdsong into our own inner selves so easily, it seems to us that we translate it fully, with no remainder, into our feelings; a birdsong can even, for a moment, make the whole world into a sky within us, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world’s.”

—

Rainer Maria Rilke, “Note on Birds”

(via melancholynotes;��the-final-sentence; girlmeetsdream)

I want to be destroyed in you, that is, I want to be you. But you are no longer in yourself; you are already entirely in me.

Marina Tsvetaeva, ⁠Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922; from 'Excerpts from the Book Earthly Signs, tr. Jamey Gambrell

“Philosophy, as I understand the word, is a positive theoretical science, and a science in an early stage of development.”

— Charles Sanders Peirce, “On Phenomenology”, The Essential Peirce, vol 2

Eroticism is, first of all, the most moving of realities; but it is nonetheless, at the same time, the most ignoble. Even after psychoanalysis, the contradictory aspects of eroticism appear in some way innumerable; their profundity is religious—it is horrible, it is tragic, it is still inadmissible. Probably all the more so since it is divine.

�� Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros

lucyindiesky

“I don’t want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.”

�� Georges Bataille
(via riversarmsx)