Salazar on the Poor

“Begging is not a sign of poverty but a vice,” said Antonio de Oliviera Salazar, the former Prime Minister of Portugal, who suggests that a society should “punish the false beggars and place the rest, those left over, in asylums." This is what Foucault deemed "power-knowledge," the production of social knowledge through discourse with the intent to create a power hierarchy. Salazar sought to force his conservative mentality onto the populace, claiming that the poor were the malignant and should be forced into mental institutions. If one reads Foucault's Madness and Civilization, they could find where the roots of "mental insanity" lie and learn the power institutions had in shaping those standards of our contemporary reality. Though this is certainly a complicated ordeal nowadays, convoluted amid the various social discourse we have from politicians, civilians and the field of medicine; I found this short blurb meaningful enough that it may provoke one to delve deeper into understanding power, class and mental health. The initial inspiration derives in the Chiado Museum of Contemporary Art in Lisbon where I visited last Spring. 

Henry Miller’s Eleven Commandments

From Henry Miller on Writing, New Directions
via BIBLIOKLEPT

the nose

Alberto Giacometti, The Nose (Le Nez), 1947, Bronze, wire, rope and steel, 81 x 97.5 x 39.4 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, © Alberto Giacometti, BY SIAE 2007.

When God was a Woman

"She who knows the orphan, knows the widow, seeks justice for the poor and shelter for the weak"

-Merlin Stone

a big hand for a little lady (1966)

a must see.

compliments of pleaded jeans tumblr

this was my last sunday afternoon-monday evening.

Our Rich Futures

"The idea of the future, pregnant with the infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality."

Henri Bergson
1927 Nobel Peace Laureate in Literature
Time and Free Will