Yayoi Kusama   The sea in the evening glow (Facing the imminent death)-夜中的大海（面對即將到來的死亡 

Do not care if you just arrive in your skeleton. Would love to take a walk with you. Miss you. Would love to make you shrimp saganaki. Like you used to make me when you were alive. Love to feed you. Sit over steaming bowls of pilaf. Little roasted tomatoes covered in pepper and nutmeg. Miss you. Would love to walk to the post office with you. Bring the ghost dog. We’ll walk past the waterfall and you can tell me about the after. Wish you. Wish you would come back for a while. Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know you. I know you will know me even though. I’m bigger now. Grayer. I’ll show you my garden. I’d like to hop in the leaf pile you raked but if you want to jump in? I’ll rake it for you. Miss you standing looking out at the river with your rake in your hand. Miss you in your puffy blue jacket. They’re hip now. I can bring you a new one if you’ll only come by. Know I told you it was okay to go. Know I told you it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me? You always believed me. Wish you would come back so we could talk about truth. Miss you. Wish you would walk through my door. Stare out from the mirror. Come through the pipes.

The sky at night. Shaggycoat, the biography of a beaver. 1906. Cover detail.

—

Walter Benjamin (via hqlines)

This is one of my favorite things written by Walter. And it’s one of the most misunderstood ones. In a letter to Brecht, he touches upon this again - and this is shortly before he kills himself when the Nazi presence reached Portbou, at the French–Spanish border (Bataille writes about this). He explains this statement in a simple way: Hope mystifies a person, place, object. Hope can be dangerous and often restricting if clung on to too desperately. And in love, we often cling on to hope before we even begin to know the person of our affection. The idea is to love them by knowing them - discovering them, understanding them - without hope. And the thing is simple: the antonymous reality of hope is not always despair. Sometimes - often - hope is despair itself. Despair taints, mars, hurts. The opposite of hope can be elucidating; it can be acceptance without abject powerlessness; it can be resolve without expectation. And for that, Walter would always point at beginning at one’s own heart. Fortifying it before going anywhere else.