The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
- Stopping by Woods, Robert Frost
Artist’s fungus can be scratched to leave a deep brown bruise - a mark that will remain when the fungus dries out and stops bruising when touched. I left this piece wedged in the fork of a tree near a path to be discovered by someone else.
Naomi Campbell and Cher photographed by Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott, CR Fashion Book #16 Spring/Summer 2020. Styled by Carine Roitfeld. Hair by Ashual and Serena Radaelli. Makeup by Rokael Lizama and Francesca Tolot. Nails by Diem.
About ten years ago I decided that the next step I needed to take in my life was to accept and explore what it meant to be a failure and to have failed. This infuriated almost everybody in my life and clearly terrified a lot of people. People do not want you to accept failure. They dont want you to like… Sit with and think about it and pick it up and turn it arpund in your hands and really examine it. They want you to keep throwing yourself against the impossible walls until your body explodes! They do not want you to say “alright then, I’ve failed. What does that mean for me? Im still here. What does the life of someone who has failed look like?”
This makes people very angry and panicky.
My mental health improved in ways it had not in the previous DECADE once I stopped. And. Sat. With failure. And thought about what my failure … Was. And looked at the structures that produced it and examined them critically.
It is so taboo to fail and admit it openly and talk about it. It is so taboo to talk about or think about failure in an accepting way rather than hiding it shamefully until you experience a degree of success in some area which allows you to present the past failure as “a stepping stone” to your current situation. Fuck that. We are put in positions of guaranteed failure by society every day and then punished and shamed for it. Lets fucking talk about failure
Chelsea said “same with accepting your disability” and tbh this post is about that. When I looked at my failure what I understood was that what I was looking at was disability. No one wanted me to understand this, ironically because they wanted me to understand it as a limitation from inside myself which I could overcome if I tried hard enough and “really cared” about succeeding. Understanding that what I was looking at was disability uncomfortably highlighted the failure as an inability on the part of the people around me to give me the help I needed and the structures I was being forced to try to survive inside of to … Not be designed to specifically exclude and oppress people like me
“Ahhh, ahh, noooo dont be People Like You lol then we would have to admit that this isn’t FOR you instead of simply continuing to act like a personal moral and constitutional failing has somehow caused you to exclude YOURSELF” one might imagine them saying !
this was cute until i realized the fish is probably trying to not get eaten
A fish trying not to get eaten wouldn’t slow down when the “predator” slows down. It also wouldn’t constantly swim in a circle near the edge of the tank; It’d try hiding. Also a fish in a tank in a a public place that is constantly filled with people is not likely to see people as predators.
Animals, I think people tend to forget, also enjoy playing.
