Logophile

Musings

“‘La Vita Nuova’ explained how to become a great poet. The secret was to fall in love with a perfect girl but never speak to her. You should weep instead. You should pretend that you love someone else. You should write sonnets in three parts. Your perfect girl should die.”

- from “La Vita Nuova” by Allegra Goodman

What Dante knew, what Goodman knows, what is ignored so often by our success-driven society, is that sometimes it’s about more than what loves you back.

I see this in our collective obsession with Marilyn, with Audrey, with Edie. They are the great muses of our modern age, to the extent that we are almost born knowing the curve of one’s eyebrow or the width of her waist. But their true seductive power is not merely their physical beauty, rather it is is in the adoration which that beauty inspired, in the impact of the art created in their image.

But for all that she inspires, the muse remains static. It is the artist that loves, and who shapes that love, that preoccupation, that focus, into something beyond themselves. It is the artist who is able to transcend our usual form of existence and become something more than he had been before.The muse when viewed from this lens is a vessel used for a greater expansion of the artist’s soul.

Because what do we really get when we are loved? Validation. Encouragement. Safety, perhaps? Passive things, because they are not generated from within ourselves but are doled out at the whim of the one who loves us.

And what do we get when we love? We find motivation. We grow, sometimes painfully. We are inspired. Most of all we are active and the energy that fuels this action is sourced by our will, independent of the feelings and behaviors of the one we love.

Of course I am motivated by a need to be loved, I believe we all are on some level. But there is a difference in the kind of strength one can gain from from the act of loving versus being loved and for me, the former is the more intoxicating of the two. Perhaps it is only a quirk of my personality, but I want to be deeply in love, forever inspired, unshakably motivated more than I want to be loved. Not that the the choice between muse or creator is always mutually exclusive, but when it is, I want to be the one wielding the pen, the brush, the lens.

More than anything else, I never want to be static.

Five Fantasy Exit Stragedies

thatkindofwoman:

Found on Thought Catalog By Courtney Preiss

1. Run away to Brooklyn. Rent an apartment with a claw footed bathtub. Commute to Manhattan during the week and put in hours at a menial publishing job. Drive home to New Jersey on weekends to swim in the pool and cry to your mother. Smoke Gauloises on the fire escape. Let yellowing issues of Rolling Stone and Vogue pile into a protective fortress around your bed. Listen to Cat Power. Fall asleep mostly naked beneath the duvet watching Sportscenter and drinking earl grey. Date a Yankees fan and kiss his hands on the 4 Train into the Bronx.

2. Run away to Barcelona. Eat milk chocolate magnum bars and drink cheap champagne. Burst into charming fits of laughter whenever you get embarrassed about butchering the Catalan language. Wear denim cutoffs, Dr. Pepper chapstick, and very little else. Go dancing at 3 a.m. Whiten your teeth. Tan your shoulders. Braid feathers into your hair. Perpetually wake up with sand caught in the thin cotton sheets of your tiny bed. Listen to the Rolling Stones and kiss all the longhaired boys you can get your hands on without ever having to apologize.

3. Run away to Los Angeles. Sublet a studio in Venice three blocks from the beach. Listen to top 40 radio. Go to Chateau Marmont and charge drinks you can’t afford to a long-dormant credit card. Sleep with a television actor who lives in the valley. Sleep with a musician who lives in Bel Air. Break things off with both of them when gas prices begin to rise. Find Gilda Radner’s star on the Walk Of Fame and swallow a sob when you see the filthy cement around her name is cracked. Walk through the Venice Canals until the sun sets and you forget your own name. Call your mother crying from the parking lot of a 24-hour Ralph’s supermarket. Tell her you want to come home.

4. Run away to Paris. Gaze at the pink and pistachio glow of macarons in the window on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Listen to Joni Mitchell. Meet an Argentinean man in the Latin Quarter for drinks. Melt into his accent and kiss him goodnight, but return to your apartment alone because his face doesn’t look enough like the man’s you are trying to forget. Get lost in the Richelieu Wing of the Louvre, admiring Napoleon’s fine red damask. Walk alone along the Seine in an old dress, ten-dollar shoes, and an Hermes scarf. Fumble with the locks on the fence overlooking the river. They all have lovers’ names etched into them and the girl who left the red heart-shaped lock has the same name as you.

5. Run away to Martha’s Vineyard. Write heartbroken stories during the day in front of a large fan that blows curls of humid hair across your tired face. Take a waitress job at The Black Dog at night and try hard not to drop too many trays. Learn to ride a moped. Pretend you’re a Kennedy. Listen to Carly Simon. Eat hand-churned ice cream out of waffle cones. Visit the flying horses and consider how many girls just like you have sat on the same horse clutching for the same brass ring. Get stoned and dance barefoot down the length of the eroded Jaws beach. Date a Red Sox fan. Yell at each other during baseball games, and then kiss and make up between tangled sheets.

Inspiration to live life however I see fit. 

nogreatillusion:

She dressed like an after-hours librarian. The books somehow brought out the color in her cheeks. She hid love letters in the stacks, between books on the highest shelves, or taped under tables.

"I’ve always loved intelligent girls, no matter how they look, to be able to hold a conversation with someone is so important. The moment someone acts dumb, I lose interest. I think about the subtext and layers of a person when I design. I design for someone who has interest in the space around her, who is aware of her relationship with the world, someone a little evolved, a little concerned. I think putting more women in power will help solve a lot of problems in the world. It troubles me that the media celebrate women acting like bimbos on TV — it’s not cute, it’s ridiculous. I call it ‘Paris Hilton Syndrome’; there’s a place for that superficiality — but it must neutralized by an equally powerful, intelligent counterforce in culture. I don’t want to perpetuate the wrong ideal."

Prabal Gurung.  (via thatkindofwoman)

(Source: editor-in-chic, via thatkindofwoman)

"Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me."

Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann (via clavicola)

(via leopoldgursky)

"You will see me again, but it will be different. I will forget your name. I will tell you You look great and lie. You will tell me nothing and I will wish you had said something romantic so I could think about it after I turn away."

Alexis Pope, excerpt from Where The Pony Is Named Akron (via theoryoflostthings)

(via theoryoflostthings)

Notorious woman of affairs! Adventurous man of the world! 

(Source: sepiabebop)

"I will remember your small room, the feel of you, the light in the window, your records, your books, our morning coffee, our noons, our nights, our bodies spilled together, sleeping, the tiny flowing currents, immediate and forever. Your leg, my leg, your arm, my arm, your smile and the warmth of you who made me laugh again."

 ~Charles Bukowski (via theladycheeky)

(via dailystendhalnitesaudade)

shruggin:

Us — Iteration 1 (by Anthony Gerace)

(via leopoldgursky)

If only all my mornings looked like this

(Source: laurennlose, via thehipsterkids)

sonder

dictionaryofobscuresorrows:

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

"Hannah is simultaneously trying to document and construct her life. Making bad choices in life leads to good fodder for art, and she is willing to sacrifice a little (or a lot) of dignity in order to get the story. I think we’re getting more of a window into Lena Dunham here than we have in the series to date. Memoirists always mine their own lives for the plots of their essays/books/scripts, and Hannah is clearly willing to throw herself in the fire in order to properly describe the stench of her burning hair."

Emma Straub on the latest episode of Girls (via indigoday)

(via nogreatillusion)

pretty, delicate things.

(Source: ifhelovesyou, via thehipsterkids)

"You either like me or you don’t. It took me twenty-something years to learn how to love myself, I don’t have that kinda time to convince somebody else."

Daniel Franzese (via mmmmilk)

(Source: cherrywhore, via thatkindofwoman)

"He just wasn’t funny, you know? That’s always been my problem, I think. Not smart or not funny. Or not smart and not funny. Or smart, but in a totally unappealing way like funny stupid or funny dopy, rather than funny witty, or funny irony or funny goofy. Or, you think they’re smart- and then you realize that they’re not- and that’s funny. But funny tragic. And then, if you’re lucky enough to find someone who’s the right kind of smart and the right kind of funny, usually they’re just… kinda…”

“Ugly?"

-Kissing Jessica Stein