But it is as if the Christianized imagination, fearful of the flesh, can treat the naked body seriously only when it brutalized; it becomes "supremely symbolic" only when it is mortified, dying or dead.
Margaret Walters, The Nude Male: A New Perspective (1978)
The great Persian poet Hafez wrote, "Start seeing everything as God, but keep it a secret." I still have no idea what I mean when I say God, but I see it everywhere. I mean it intensely. I write poems and, yes, books about it. I read about it constantly, which seems, counterintuitively, to only deepen its secret. Close your eyes. Imagine in your head a bladeless knife with no handle. Do you see how the image recedes from view the more language I add to it? A bladeless knife. With no handle.
Kaveh Akbar, "What Can Ancient Spritual Poetry Teach Us about Living" (2022)
I WISH IT HAD ALL BEEN DIFFERENT!!!!!
but then who would i be
sailermoon, tumblr (2025)
Well Marianne it's come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.
Leonard Cohen's final letter to his dying muse, Marianne Ihlen (2016)
Imagine the emptiness in you, the vast cavities you have spent your life trying to fill - with fathers, mothers, lovers, language, drugs, money, art, praise - and imagine them gone. What's left? Whatever you aren't, which is what makes you - a house useful not because its floorboards or ceilings or walls, but because the empty space between them.
Kevah Akbar, Pilgrim Bell (2021)
...SEE I CAN'T HELP BUT FEEL THAT I'M LIVING ON BORROWED TIME...
some guy's t-shirt in McD's (2017)
Truly, nothing could be more opposed to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world as taught in this book than Christian doctrine, which is only moral, and seeks only to be moral, with its absolute standards: the truth of God, for example, which relegates art, all art, to the realm of falsehood - it denies, condemns and damns it. In this system of ideas and values, which must be hostile to art if it is to be in any way consistent with its principles, I had always sensed hostility to life, a furious, vindictive distaste for life itself: for all life is based on appearance, art, deception, point of view, the necessity of perspective and error. From the start Christiainity was, essentially and fundamentally, the embodiment of disgust and antipathy for life, merely disguised, concealed, got up as the belief in an 'other' or a 'better' life. Hatred of the 'world', the condemnation of the emotions, the fear of beauty and sensuality, a transcendental world invented the better to slander this one, basically a yearning for non-existence, for repose until the 'sabbath of sabbaths'... For in the face of marality (particularly Christian, unconditional morality), life must constantly and inevitably be in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral - in the end, crushed beneath the weight of contempt and eternal denial, life must be felt to be undesirable, valueless in itself.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Or: Hellenism and Pessimism (1886)