chthonic-cassandra

[chthonic-cassandra]

Maybe what this situation actually needs is some Angela Carter.

#the divine angela carter

[chthonic-cassandra]

still working to try to reach my teenage self. here in this room next to the bookshelf with all the books about trauma she had not yet read. she read the definition of ptsd once, probably around the same time that she was researching the definition of sadism, and rolled her eyes. none of that language is hers.

the sky outside is going dark and glowing outside like the presage of a summer storm. trying to remember - what did she have? what language? Stoker's Mina. blood of my blood flesh of my flesh kin of my kin my bountiful winepress my jackal when I want to feed. and then her own version of Mina, a woman on her knees with a knife held between her hands or wrists bound with pearls by her laughing vampire sisters or spilling the cup of tea on the train. and also, speaking of women with knives between their hands. no beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity / but I know none and therefore am no beast. Lovelace's simile of the bird new-caught. Clarissa's endless letters and my/her endless journals, the dark of the ink upon the side of her/my palm. he must never have touched my hands without them being ink-stained? all the Bluebeard stories, though she didn't start listening to Bartók until she was maybe 16. blood seeping through the walls, thick and glossy on the floor. so many times she watched The Piano and Nosferatu and Caligari and all the criterion collection movies she could find at the library alone in her parents' homes. so many books she read on the train in the middle of the night and then again early in the morning. she knew that she had crossed far out of the realm of the believable so long ago that she didn't even think that it could be told in a way that it would give it other labels, labels with which people might sympathize.

look, let me say to her, look at what we have now. but I don't know if it's what she wants. she wants him, I think, but she's the one who left; she can't blame me for that. she wants everything without compromise, maybe, but she knew as well as I do now how impossible that is. 'living, breathing. they live here!/[...] they shall ever live immortal/they have bled to feed my flowers./ [...] no more, no more. I am still here.' there's no way without compromise.

#personal #trauma #trauma frameworks

[chthonic-cassandra]

Made a few additions to this, so reblogging it.

For @di-goldene-oygn and anyone else who would like it, have my trauma memoir reader. 

This is a long list, but it is whittled down from the ~250 trauma memoirs I have apparently read, so there are many, many things I did not include. I’ve organized loosely by what type of trauma is the focus of the narrative but this is an imperfect categorization system.

Memoirs of childhood abuse: The Tricky Part - Martin Moran Tiger, Tiger - Margaux Fragoso Where I Stopped - Martha Ramsey I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou That Mean Old Yesterday - Stacey Patton Excavation - Wendy Ortiz Skin and Two or Three Things I Know for Sure - Dorothy Allison Goja - Suniti Namjoshi Educated - Tara Westover A Shining Affliction - Annie G. Rogers Heavy - Kiese Laymon The Sound of Gravel - Ruth Wariner Man Alive - Thomas Page McBee The Book of Emma Reyes - Emma Reyes Bad Indians - Deborah A. Miranda The Incest Diary - Anonymous Denial - Jessica Stern Pulling the Chariot of the Sun - Shane McCrae Consent - Vanessa Springora Sex Cult Nun - Faith Jones

Memoirs of adult sexual assault and intimate partner violence: The Other Side - Lacy Johnson Days of a Russian Noblewoman (1758-1821) - Anna Labzina After Silence - Nancy Venable Raine Aftermath - Susan Brison Lucky - Alice Sebold In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption - Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton When I Hit You; Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife - Meena Kandasamy A History of Violence - Édouard Louis On Being Raped - Raymond Douglas South of Forgiveness - Thordis Elva and Tom Stranger Know My Name - Chanel Miller

Memoirs of abduction and captivity: Finding Me - Michelle Knight Hope - Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus A Stolen Life - Jaycee Dugard 3,096 Days in Captivity - Natascha Kampusch

Memoirs of genocide: At the Mind’s Limits - Jean Améry If This Is a Man, The Reawakening, The Drowned and the Saved - Primo Levi And I Am Afraid of My Dreams - Wanda Poltawska Auschwitz and After - Charlotte Delbo First They Killed My Father - Loung Ung Cockroaches - Scholastique Mukasonga The Last Girl - Nadia Murad Tears of the Desert - Halima Bashir

Memoirs of political violence (torture, detention, exile) and war: Guatánamo Diary - Mohamedou Ould Slahi Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guatánamo - Lakhdar Boumediene and Mustafa Ait Idir Journal of an Ordinary Grief - Mahmoud Darwish A Woman in Berlin - Anonymous A Fort of Nine Towers - Qais Akbar Omar Daring to Drive - Manal Al-Sharif A Long Way Gone - Ismael Beah The Blindfold’s Eyes - Dianna Ortiz Asylum Denied - David Ngaruri Kenney Consequence - Eric Fair The Question - Henri Alleg The Little School - Alicia Partnoy Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number - Jacobo Timerman The Latehomecomer - Kao Kalia Yang

Memoirs of slavery and trafficking: The Interesting Narrative of Olaudo Equiano Twelve Years a Slave - Solomon Northrup Slave - Mende Nazer Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Harriet Jacobs My Life Has a Price - Tina Okpara Barracoon - Cudjo Lewis, transcribed by Zora Neale Hurston

Memoirs of gun violence and/or traumatic grief: Men We Reaped - Jesmyn Ward The Return - Hisham Matar Dear Marcus: A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me - Jerry McGill

#books #trauma

[chthonic-cassandra]

Changing someone into a vampire as making your victim into part of your family.

#since I can't say new things right now let's try to remember some true things I said in the past #vampire attachment theory #traumatic bonding

[chthonic-cassandra]

teenage self locked behind a door and I can't get to her but know that she's suffering. without her I can't write, can't feel like a whole person. I know the thing to do is to open the door and look straight-on at her experience, but the key keeps slipping out my hand.

#be bold be bold but not too bold #personal #trauma

[chthonic-cassandra]

Sleeping Ariadne (fragment), Greek, Hellenistic period. Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Κοιμωμένη Αριάδνη (θραύσμα), ελληνιστική περίοδος. Γκαλερί Ουφίτσι, Φλωρεντία.

#ariadne #classics

[chthonic-cassandra]

'Persephone' s Journey ' by Cate Simmons

#persephone #katabasis #art #hellenic

[chthonic-cassandra]

Pistachio and cardamom bars with saffron cream cheese frosting

#i love baking #cooking and baking

[chthonic-cassandra]

Worshippers hold snakes to place them on the statue of St. Domenico di Sora during the Festa dei Serpari, Cocullo.

> Photos: Filippo Monteforte (2019).

#snake

[chthonic-cassandra]

@child-of-hurin this was the book I was mentioning yesterday

“Proof has been Faustus’s obsession all his life. One of his former university colleagues asks, “I wonder what’s become of Faustus, that was wont to make our schools ring with sic probo.” Faustus’s refrain was “Thus I prove”: like the history of necromancy itself, his quest was inspired by the principles of Scholastic philosophy. […] Did he, like Aquinas’s other heirs, discover that Aristotle nowhere supports the reality of demons? Only physical contact with an embodied demon can prove that hell and the soul exist, that the soul is a substance that can be bought and sold, contracted away like any other thing. That contract shows Faustus’s Sadduceeism was never insouciant; it was serious, even despondent. The soul poses a dilemma: the only way to prove that one has a soul is to lose it. So Faustus evolves from reluctant skeptic to despondent believer: “Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul? Or why is this immortal that thou hast?…All beasts are happy, for when they die, Their souls are soon dissolved in elements; But mine must live still to be plagued in hell.” Where is the solution? Perhaps this: “Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years, A hundred thousand, and at least be saved.” But there is no happy ending for Faustus: a round-trip ticket to hell is impossible. […] Faustus systematically tries to verify the supposed truths of Christianity but never discovers a proof that satisfies him. This despondent quest goes a long way toward explaining why real-life necromancers, who, like Faustus, “should have known better,” engaged in an activity that they knew was punishable by harsh penalties. Perhaps, after all, their pretensions to virtue and piety were neither hypocritical nor in conflict with their activities. If any of them read Aquinas or witchcraft theorists, they must have intuited that their blistering condemnations of necromancy and witchcraft were often a rhetorical feint. For their part, witchcraft theorists, especially professional witch-hunters like Bartolomeo Spina, intuited that necromancy could never provide the ironclad, first-person experience with demons that they craved. They could repress this wish but not eliminate it; it returned to consciousness transformed into the notion that other people must have having the contact with demons that learned and pious men like themselves could never experience. […] The witch’s fictitious confession of firsthand physical experience was extorted or ventriloquized under the cruelest of conditions and was prized as expert testimony to the same demonic miracles that obsessed Doctor Faustus. Her terrible example offered the same admonition as his, to abandon skepticism and embrace fear.”

— Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief

#demon lovers #christianity // #torture

[chthonic-cassandra]

Everything I write keeps turning out to actually be about tangled threads of tension and intimacy between survivors/co-victims with overlapping yet distinct experiences of violence which is a) not something of which I can find a lot of other nuanced fictional treatments and b) maybe something that it makes sense would be difficult for me to write.

#vanessa/hecate is bringing up some stuff for me #(also when I step back everything I am working on is either about organized abuse or female perpetrators or both...so.) #obviously this is also #compromise series #but you probably know that #trauma frameworks #my writing

[chthonic-cassandra]

Waiting impatiently for rhubarb season.

#cooking and baking

[chthonic-cassandra]

Glow Worm Caves, New Zealand by Daniel Kordan

#antron

[chthonic-cassandra]

there are so many books in this beautiful world. many of them bad

#books

[chthonic-cassandra]

Have been feeling so much sustained irritation about Catherine Lacey's Biography of X, which I read a couple of months ago, that I decided to just reread Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World, a much better metafictional examination of art and gender and persona and truth, and am just feeling that more people should read The Blazing World.

#in this world there are so many terrible and mediocre books and there are also so many excellent ones #books

[chthonic-cassandra]

Jef Bourgeau (American, b.1950) "The River Marsh," 2023

#art #nature

[chthonic-cassandra]

With her blood I wrote a poem of love (Available as a print)

#vampire #art