seamusheaney

[seamusheaney]

[ID: text from 'the skunk' by seamus heaney, reading:

"after eleven years I was composing / love-letters again, broaching the word 'wife' / like a stored cask, as if it's slender vowel / had mutated into the night earth and air

of California. the beautiful, useless / tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence. / the aftermath of a mouthful of wine / was like inhaling you off a cold pillow."

/END ID]

#love love love this poem. seamus heaney is so so clever #the whole poem is so cleverly constructed...and i just love how he writes about love #seamus heaney #poetry

[seamusheaney]

Michael Cunningham, The Hours

#words #love

[seamusheaney]

“to be an english major is to be many things: a writer, yes, a reader, yes, a scholar, yes—but also partly an historian—a philosopher—an analyst—a politician—a classicist—a lawyer—a translator—a theorist—a scientist—an archivist—an astronomer—! the study of english rarely stands alone. at its best it is a concert of ideas, an orchestra of disciplines, a wild meadow of scholarship. it stands in a room of human interests and emotions and works and dreams and it beams. it shakes hands again and again and again and again, takes a slot on every lady’s dance card, rides every ride at the amusement park, collects a business card from every pocket in an effort to paint a picture of minds and bodies and lives and ages and imaginations, all as inseparable from one another as your lungs and your breath. to be an english major is to look at the world and be left speechless and then attempt to speak, knowing you’ll be clumsy as a babe. to be an english major is to know you cannot explain it alone—and neither can any other.”

— from my journal, 4 february 2022

[seamusheaney]

“In the evening my griefs come to me one by one. They tell me what I had hoped to forget. They perch on my shoulders like mourning doves. They are the color of light fading.”

— Linda Pastan, from “Old Woman,” The Five Stages of Grief ( W. W. Norton & Company, 1978)

#grief

[seamusheaney]

broad daylight in horror is massively underused

#horror

[seamusheaney]

4/28/20 — song for loneliness

#loneliness #childhood

[seamusheaney]

Catriona Ward answering the question, It can’t possibly be a coincidence that horror fiction and haunted houses have been so popular during the pandemic. What does horror mean in the age of Covid?

#gothic lit

[seamusheaney]

—Marie Howe, from Magdalene Afterwards in "Magdalene: Poems"

#words #marie howe #longing

[seamusheaney]

When Oscar Wilde said Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation, and Jorge Luis Borges said I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

#the self

[seamusheaney]

Ophelia! This was also for the Hamlet production I posted about a year ago. <3 

#art #hamlet #ophelia

[seamusheaney]

literally i just can’t comprehend any interpretation of hamlet that doesn’t put grief at the center like. hamlet’s father died and he is actively grieving throughout the play that is the driver of all of his behavior. “is hamlet actually crazy or is he putting on a performance” is a boring question to me because grief is a type of insanity. grief makes you feel like you are performing even when you are all alone. it makes you feel like you’re seeing things it makes you feel completely alone it makes you cling to the people around you it makes you push them away it makes you angry and sad and hamlet wants to kill claudius for replacing his father and taking his mother from him as much as he wants to kill him for revenge.

#hamlet #grief

[seamusheaney]

i love reading sad books bc when your own grief is stopped up inside you like a clogged drain you can grieve for a character on a page and understand that you're also grieving for yourself a little bit

#tragedy #catharsis #drama

[seamusheaney]

Do you have a list or something of your favourite academic/theory books? 🥺

sure! all of them should be available on libgen, so enjoy 🧚🏻‍♀️ i did focus on cultural histories though, rather than theory, otherwise it would get too long. virtually all of them are published by the academic presses, and well-sourced and peer-reviewed. no pseudoscience in this household, no sirree! (also, none of them have anything to do with my actual field of study. i’m just like that)

— Medieval Ghost Stories: An Anthology of Miracles, Marvels and Prodigies, — Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages, — After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, — Darkness: A Cultural History, — Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris, — Angels & Angelology in the Middle Ages, — Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion 1250-1750, — Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science, — The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England, — Landscapes of Fear, — Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness, — The Severed Head: Capital Visions, — Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural, — Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, — When the Dead Rise: Narratives of the Revenant, from the Middle Ages to the Present Day, — Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History, — Religion and Its Monsters, — On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, — The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History, — Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages, — Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art, — Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, — From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, Or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends, — A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History's Most Orthodox Empire, — Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, and Other Airborne Females, — The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration, — Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds, — Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages, — Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, — Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers,

etc, etc, etc. 

#bookmark

[seamusheaney]

“The world did not begin with me / it will not end with me / I am / one pulsebeat in the throbbing river”

— Octavio Paz, from “Identical Time”, The Poems of Octavio Paz (via halcynth)

#words #nothing but dust

[seamusheaney]

Wenzel Tornøe (detail)

#art

[seamusheaney]

“I understood the true fate of Orpheus, that love is a constant terror of loss.”

— Kazimierz Wierzyński, tr. by Czeslaw Milosz, “A Word of Orphists,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

#greek mythology #love

[seamusheaney]

the fourth wall is fate

#tragedy