I sing of memes and a man

nothing will ever top clodius getting cicero exiled and then just fucking demolishing his house - and not only that but then going ahead and building a whole fucking temple to liberty on top of the site. the drama. the boldness. the panache. 

thinking about how orpheus turning to look back at eurydice isn’t a sign of mortal frailness but a sign of love

“Eurydice, dying now a second time, uttered no complaint against her husband. What was there to complain of, but that she had been loved?” ― Ovid, Metamorphoses

oh but how many poets wrote things like “now no age will forget me” and “someone in some other time will remember my songs” and then we did forget them, their songs dropped out of memory? how many said, with helen’s homeric certainty, “we will be the stuff of song for men long yet to come,” but petered away into silence? how many proclaimed, like ovid, “through all ages in fame will i live,” but found their prophecies had no truth to them?

oh god i am thinking of that famous sappho fragment, “someone will remember us, i tell you, even in another time,” but we didn’t, we don’t know who “us” was or what she hoped we would remember about them, we can only probe at the hole that is the absence of their memory and feel its loss like a wound

Happy Birthday to the finest, daintiest speaker 🎉🎉

you’re laughing. my tongue is numb and delicate flames are running through my limbs and my ears are ringing with a sound of their own and my two eyes are covered by night and he’s sitting across from you and gazing at you and hearing you again and again, and you’re laughing.