themidnightcleric

[themidnightcleric]

🤨

#need him

[themidnightcleric]

thinking about non-violent approaches to doppelgangers and shadow selves and runaway reflections

[themidnightcleric]

Mary Oliver, from “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac”, Blue Horses

[themidnightcleric]

#columbia

[themidnightcleric]

i do, often, think of that quote from wislawa szymborska talking about love and the inexplicability of some of it. "great love is never justified" etc. and it truly isn't. and thank god for that.

[themidnightcleric]

The person I reblogged this from deserves to be happy

I tried to scroll past this. I really did

[themidnightcleric]

me as a writer: Oh no I can’t write that, somebody else already has

me as a reader: hell yes give me all the fics about this one scenario. The more the merrier

#writing

[themidnightcleric]

Saw this advice on Twitter today, and I think it's going to end up being useful for me. 🥹 Thought I'd share it with y'all, too.

[themidnightcleric]

Mary Oliver, from “Hum Hum”, A Thousand Mornings

[themidnightcleric]

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

[themidnightcleric]

on watching a kid with PDA/ODD destructive aggressive behaviors write "i hate myself" before picking up the umbrella again to hit a teacher

Miss ___ I wish you could feel the break in my heart Knowing this war has no cause and no victory Seeing yourself stained, snot-faced and bleary eyed Staring around the corner at the beautiful girls who might Be more than friends (they want to spend time together without you) the world would be less interesting You offer a gentle fold in the world's black hole of a heart A place for compassion to land. But playing games adults suggest, is no fair compromise - wriggling in your jumper tremors show how much pain your heart is in. Girl who stands a little knock-kneed, whose braids and buns Stand out awry (its all your mother can do to put them in) Who is always hungry, who is intelligent and wants nothing More than approval - who can sculpt beautiful loops in clay who offers her crying brother a hug (that tackles him to the ground) Who throws wood chips and gives everyone at school Something to talk about, someone to run from, who liberates popsicles from the teachers lounge without asking who pushes boundaries and chats back "Who do you think you're talking to?" if you were gone, the world would be lonelier without your sideeyes, your sincere loneliness, and pensive attitude, and the way you tell boys who mispronounce it "thats NOT my name" I don't know how to do anything but love you, and I am sorry If that is wrong for a teacher's aide to feel for one student among a hundred rascal students, but you Take up space, you are not to be toyed with, and with time will become what you, like I, like everyone, were born to be: Some unruly, beloved memory, of a worthy human life. In the meantime, I hope someday you catch a glimpse of yourself In a window passing by, and see the flash of beauty that you are in all quiet, vitality and rage.

#poetry #literally writing this is the only thing i could do not to break down today

[themidnightcleric]

it's interesting to me that torture just works to us, as a literary device. It's everywhere in movies and stories and whatnot, from big-budget dramas to little grindhouse short stories. It fits neatly into the requirements of plot: character doesn't want to offer information, Gets Tortured, has to offer information.

the issue with this is that it isn't how it works.

torture is a display of power. It fouls interrogation, this is known; a person being tortured will tell you whatever you want to hear to make it stop, which is more often than not a lie, made up on the spot, or if the truth an incomplete and useless version of it. It isn't generally done for information's sake anyway, but as a form of what the ancient Greeks called hybris, the violent exhibition of your power over another person.

This is, every once in a great while, done right in fiction, but it's a challenge to write vs. the idea that it's a shortcut to one character revealing plot-critical information to another. Pretty much every form of torture works this way, even the ones that are legally permissible. Psychological torment or physical discomfort also produce an animalistic desire to escape harm and foul interrogation. The forms of torture the cops can do? The cops do it not to gain information (or if they think it will, they're lying to themselves) but because it makes them feel powerful.

There's probably a master's thesis in it for somebody studying the rise of torture as a plot device since the beginning of the war on terror and the contemporaneous development of the Broken Windows theory of policing. I'm not really aware of any similar level of disconnect between what Works in fiction and what happens in real life!

#writing #writing ref #political

[themidnightcleric]

getting some sweet returns… might replicate the conditions that created them. if i do it exactly the same they probably won't diminish

[themidnightcleric]

haven't written much lately but wanted to write something about my kind neighbours. JIM & KERRY on substack now

[themidnightcleric]

PACING IS ABOUT LOAD BEARING WALLS.

*staples violently to my own forehead*

#writing ref

[themidnightcleric]

#writing ref #fiction ref #lighting

[themidnightcleric]

Lol my large and handsome pig didn’t find Anything of interest in your yard