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— St. Gemma Galgani’s autobiography, which the Devil allegedly tried to burn.

Moist and Dry Souls Fragments 36, 37, and 38 refer to the human soul as either moist or dry.
Another reference comes from Aristotle, who in his De Anima (I. 405 a, 25-28) says, crediting but not quoting Heraclitus, “Soul is the vaporization out of which everything else is derived.”
38
We do not know to what extent this idea belongs to Heraclitus or whether Aristotle is drawing this conclusion from the references we already pos- sess, but the concept of vaporization related to soul helps us with the following fragments.

Fragment 36 reads,
It is death for souls to become water, as it is death for water to become earth; water comes to be from earth, as soul comes from water.
If we read “death” here as destruction or loss of material nature, we can see a range of alteration in the trans- formation of water into earth and earth into water and then water into soul.

Soul has a nature of its own, we would assume, not necessarily connected directly with human nature but obviously influenced by it.

The key is a range of refinement into aspects of animation.

Another writer, Arius Didymus, has Heraclitus saying,

“Souls are vaporized from what is moist.”

39

This phrasing suggests that when human beings are born, their souls are formed in water, or, as Wheelwright phrases it, “vaporized from that generative moisture,” which he objectifies as the womb.

40

From that state the soul dries or vaporizes into divine nature through the influence of higher consciousness.

— Richard Geldard, Remembering Heraclitus—

Imam Al-Ghazali

This is How You Lose the Time War // Gideon the Ninth

“I am the angel of nothing.”
— Kingdom Animalia; Self-Portrait as the Airplane (Ode to the Noise in the Ear), Aracelis Girmay

Men theorize about love, but women are more often love’s practitioners. Most men feel that they receive love and therefore know what it feels like to be loved; women often feel we are in a constant state of yearning, wanting love
but not receiving it.
— bell hooks, All About Love

“Hanging out with girls, smoking, fraternizing with girls, talking to girls on the telephone while smoking, smoking with girls.”

— Rowland S. Howard talking about his influences.

January 31, 2025
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Not predicting, but being attentive to the unknown knocking at the door.

Gilles Deleuze, Foucault

Natalie Díaz, from “From the Desire Field”, Postcolonial Love Poem

I am struck in the witched hours of want—

— Natalie Diaz, “From the Desire Field”, from Postcolonial Love Poem

As there are

Apartments in our own minds that –

we never enter without

apology –

we should respect the seals of others –

Emily Dickinson, from Manuscript #842

I’m so old-fashioned, darling, that all your friends would stare.

Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Austin Dickinson wr. c. August 1851

I used to think when I died—

I could see you—so I died

as fast as I could—

— Emily Dickinson, ‘Master’ letter no. 3

—the world looks staringly, and I find I need more v[e]il-

— Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Susan Dickinson, as quoted by Richard B. Sewall in The Life of Emily Dickinson

“My heart will do its best to devour you.”

— Denis Diderot, from a letter to Sophie Volland written c. July 1762

My my mind gasolined while I ate her in the orchard.

— Shira Erlichman, from “The Deer,” published in The Rumpus

“My deplorable mania for analysis exhausts me. I doubt everything, even my doubt.”

— Megan Fernandes, “Do You Sell Dignity Here?” from I Do Everything I’m Told

— Gustave Flaubert, from a letter to Louise Colet

My mother’s massive house is at the southernmost point of Wind Gap, the wealthy section, if you can count approximately three square blocks of town as a section. She lives in—and I once did too—an elaborate Victorian replete with a widow’s walk, a wraparound veranda, a summer porch jutting toward the back, and a cupola arrowing out of the top. It’s full of cubbyholes and nooks, curiously circuitous. The Victorians, especially southern Victorians, needed a lot of room to stray away from each other, to duck tuberculosis and flu, to avoid rapacious lust, to wall themselves away from sticky emotions. Extra space is always good.

— Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

January 31, 2025

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