Christina Tudor-Sideri
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dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
Christina Tudor-Sideri
@dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
1.5K followers 1.2K following 560 posts
writer, translator, and researcher whose work unfolds at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, and critical theory (currently writing about relics and time)
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dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
“The night is the night.”

Paul Celan; tr. Michael Hamburger
The Years from You to Me Your hair waves once more when I weep. With the blue of your eyes you lay the table of love; a bed between summer and autumn. We drink what somebody brewed neither I nor you nor a third: we lap up some empty and last thing. We watch ourselves in the deep sea’s mirrors and faster pass food to the other: the night is the night, it begins with the morning, beside you it lays me down.
November 23, 2025 at 10:58 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
On Paul Celan’s birthday, a memory of my own—the red poppies of childhood years.
A wide field of tall green grass filled with red poppies and scattered wildflowers stretching toward low tree-covered hills beneath a sky of large, soft clouds.
November 23, 2025 at 6:22 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
One evening we sat together at a café she says suddenly, “You remember you talked about dreaming that you kissed me and that your kiss devoured Death’s cold lips” Yes I say The Private Journals of Edvard Munch translated by J. Gill Holland
November 22, 2025 at 7:48 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics as a poem in the private journals of Edvard Munch
Life—angst has raved inside me ever since I caught the idea—like an illness—since I was born—doubly inherited. It has lain like a curse which has haunted me. Still I often feel that I must have this life—angst—it is essential to me—and that I would not exist without it—
November 22, 2025 at 7:32 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
A Celanian night—when only the void stood between us.
distant stars twinkling in the deep blue void
October 31, 2025 at 5:15 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
And his sun-loving brothers, shadowed by hauntology.
Two white cats sitting outdoors on sunlit steps. One cat is sitting lower, looking to the side, the other is positioned a bit higher up, facing the camera. Their shadows are visible on the ground, cast by the bright sunlight. There’s also a large blue plant pot with green leaves to the left and some moss on the steps.
October 31, 2025 at 12:11 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
Narcissus receiving the revelation of his identity.

“Then Narcissus no longer says: I love myself as I am; he says: I am the way I love myself.”
An orange cat standing on the edge of a blue bucket filled with water. The bucket is in the yard on a stone pathway with greenery and fallen leaves surrounding it. Part of a house wall is visible in the background.
October 31, 2025 at 11:25 AM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
at night and in the fire, the blue that flees the fingers
Nighttime campfire. The flames are predominantly orange and yellow, transitioning into a mesmerizing ethereal blue at the top. The surrounding environment is dark.
October 30, 2025 at 5:08 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
Hélène Cixous (tr. Peggy Kamuf)
I am alive. I never doubt it. That is my strength and thus my pleasure, I trust myself. I have known many lives. I am living another one. On one of those days, I received notice of a sentence, I wrote it down: ‘I live with my death.’
October 29, 2025 at 11:23 AM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
TO LOU ANDREAS-SALOME 1 I kept myself immensely open, yet forgot that out there more than things exist, or animals completely at home in themselves, with eyes which no more reach beyond their life's circumference than pictures in a frame; forgot that always and in everything I did, I kept stuffing glimpses into myself: glimpses, opinions, mere curiosity. Who knows but that eyes take shape in space and sleep together. Oh, only when my face is streaming toward you does it cease being on exhibit, becomes one with yours and darkly goes on and on into your impregnable heart . . . 2 The way someone holds a cloth to stopped breath, no: the way it is pressed on a wound from which life wants to come out, in one gush, unceasingly, I held you to me: I saw I was getting you red. How could they know what happened between us? We made up for everything there never was time for. I ripened strangely at every impulse of omitted youth, and you, my love, somehow laid down wildest childhood over my heart! 3 Remembering's just not enough, there must remain, of those moments, some pure being in my deepest place, a precipitation of that immensely oversaturated solution. For I do not remember - , what I am moves me for your sake. I don't pretend you're there at desolate places where it's getting cold now, places you've moved on from: even your not being there still holds your warmth and is more real and more than a deprivation. Too often longing misses the point. Why should I cast myself out, when perhaps your influence is a simple thing to me, like moonlight at a spot by the window . . .
October 28, 2025 at 9:47 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
“Time is above all the truth of time”
The dead accompany me. I do not live without my dead. The dead write to me. Without writing we would not have been able to exist or survive. My father would have turned pale and disappeared into the fog. I hear my mother stirring the air in the kitchen with her categorical phrases while I see her walk down the main alley to go conquer the market. She is a decisive woman shot through with worries and disapprovals, without any hesitation: according to her, one must do everything so as to live in the present, that's the ambition, there is no other time but life. She completely disagrees with many of the people she meets in my study, Socrates, cousin Pons, Kafka, Achilles and moreover all those soldiers, her father who dies for Germany, my father, if he had listened to her he would not have died by France, and don't forget to disconnect the battery of the car when you leave, that is one piece of advice that does not provoke disagreement. Disconnect reconnect. What is finished is finished says my mother, what is finished continues I say. I write so as to continue, the birds at dawn still dark at this hour would not exist if I didn't hold out the paper and the pen so as to hear their affirmations in their language. Time is above all the truth of time, its truths independent of our prejudices, which the birds take care to remind me of as any other being allied with the birds and with writing. We, people of houses and prisons who are conjugated in the imperfect.
October 26, 2025 at 4:05 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
Chapter 5: The Tears of Kronos The sea is the continuum, the perfection of the undifferentiated. Its emissary on earth is the snake. Where the snake is, there gushes water. Its eye is liquid. Beneath its coils flows the water of the underworld. Forever. Being sinuous, it has no need of joints. The same pattern covers its whole skin; its scales are uniform, its motion undulating and constantly self-renewing, like waves. —ROBERTO CALASSO
October 26, 2025 at 10:25 AM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
sunday in the here and now
DAVID FARRELL KRELL The Sea A Philosophical Encounter
October 26, 2025 at 9:51 AM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
“One day I will write a book composed solely of the last pages of my notebooks. It will be like the last looks of Argos, the one who passes into immortality looking into the eyes of the beloved.”
Mdeilmm. Mole Speech. Hélène Cixous. Translated by Peggy Kamuf
October 25, 2025 at 9:41 AM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
In the candlelight of a Bachelardian dream, I offer these fragments to you as one might offer a confession: a letter to the Other—lover, double, sea, or time itself.

For the newest issue of Socrates on the Beach and forthcoming with Erratum Press.

socratesonthebeach.com/christina-an...
“I would love to dream of time” Excerpts from An Absence of Sea — Christina Tudor-Sideri at the far end of the world nestled in the time of a dream the longing for a good night a good life a good passage on the river through the forest inside the heart may time continue to pass we say not in gusts but with the gentle touch of a summer breeze and so begins this letter in fragments thus words adrift unknowing of themselves make the text the body of this letter to you who are but wind but passage but sea the rumbling of waves time against nature other languages temps in all languages *** at the far end of the world the dreamer dreams she has your face your eyes and through her hair have passed your hours
October 24, 2025 at 4:45 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
In the chaos of an ordinary Thursday, a moment with my favorite Bataille. The Impossible. Translated by Robert Hurley.
What joins me to B. is the impossible, like a void in front of her and me, instead of a secure life together. The lack of a way out, the difficulties recurring in any case, this threat of death between us like Isolde's sword, the desire that goads us to go further than the heart can bear, the need to suffer from an endless laceration, the suspicion even—on B.'s part—that all this will still only lead, haphazardly, to wretchedness, will fall into filth and spinelessness: all this makes every hour a mixture of panic, expectation, audacity, anguish (more rarely, exasperating sensuality), which only action can resolve (but action ... ).
October 23, 2025 at 10:12 AM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
He would have loved this
Mr. Cioran lived reclusively in a simple Left Bank apartment, frequenting the area around the Luxembourg Gardens and avoiding the company of other literary figures. He rejected two French literary awards, the Prix Rogier Namier and the Grand Prix Paul-Morand.
October 22, 2025 at 10:34 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
At night—
Photo of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Collected Screenplays, published by Faber & Faber in 1999, on a white desk, leaning against a white wall. The book cover is a still from The Sacrifice, a solitary figure by a waterside, the child, Little Man, looking up at the withered tree that he and his father planted. Also on the desk, in front of the book but more to the right, a miniature tree, its branches bare and reaching, mirroring that of the tree from the cover, and interspersed with small string lights, serving as a desk lamp. The tree is rooted in a rectangular dark blue pot, which appears black in the photo.
October 18, 2025 at 10:18 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
In Tarkovsky’s nonlinear screenplay Hoffmanniana, about the life of E. T. A. Hoffmann, where the mirror is the central motif, there is a moment when, dying, Hoffmann remembers his life, and what he sees in the mirror is not his own reflection, but that of a lost love:
HOFFMANNIANA The room is already visible through the shining glass of the varnished windowsill... And a black-haired woman with a blue ribbon in her hair, sitting at the tea-table. There... she is turning her head... But he cannot make out her features because darkness descends. He merely feels that he never knew a face that was nearer and dearer to him, more kind and more beloved than hers in his entire, destitute, short, mad life.
October 18, 2025 at 4:22 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
Ingeborg Bachmann's Word for Word, in Three Paths to the Lake, translated by Mary Fran Gilbert.
In the bar she asked for something, anything, like an invalid in dire need of an injection, usually she weighed her choice, but not now: just something that takes effect quickly, and she was given a glass, drank it in one gulp and tasted nothing, but the alcohol made her warm and her agitation melted away, the barrier separating her from him and the world. Trembling, she lit her first cigarette of the evening. In the room, when he embraced her, she began shaking again, didn't want to, couldn't, she was afraid of suffocating or dying in his arms, but then again she did want to, it was better to be suffocated and undone by him and thus to undo everything which had become incurable in her, she no longer resisted, let it come over her, and she lay there without feeling, then turned away from him silently and fell asleep. In the morning when she awoke he had already packed, and while listening to his razor in the bathroom she began to collect her things. They didn't look at one another, and after he had gone she walked down the path to the sea. She couldn't find him, then he appeared at the ladder and held out a large starfish to her. She had never seen a live starfish, much less been given one, and she smiled, pleased and sad, admiring the starfish and wanting to take it back as a souvenir, but then she suddenly threw it back in the water so it could live. The sea was wilder than before, but no one needed her anyway and knowing he was underwater didn't frighten her anymore. She pointed to the cliffs, gesturing, and then walked along the black, green and brightly mottled boulders where the water roared furiously, and she climbed up and down the cracked and jagged slabs, fearful in the midst of the roaring sea.
October 17, 2025 at 3:11 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
With Ingeborg, on the day of her death.

(tr. Peter Filkins)
Current So far in life and yet so near to death that there's no one I can argue with now, I rip from the earth my separate part; I thrust its green wedge into the heart of the calm ocean, as I wash aground. Tin birds rise and cinnamon scents! With my murderer, Time, I'm alone. Drunk and blue we spin our cocoon.
October 17, 2025 at 4:42 AM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
Yves Bonnefoy; tr. Beverly Bie Brahic
Our Hands in the Water We stir the water. Our hands seek each other, Sometimes they touch, broken forms. Deeper down, a current: some of the invisible, Other trees, other lights, other dreams. And see, there are even other colours. Refraction transfigures the red. Was it a summer day, no, this is the storm That will 'change the sky, until evening. We thrust our hands into language, They took some words we didn't know What to do with, being only our desires. We grew old. This water, our hope. Others will know how to look deeper For a new sky, a new earth.
October 16, 2025 at 8:45 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
At night—
Qui se plaint du sommeil? Qui gémirait : « Je dors, Interrompez ma paix limpide et sans mémoire! Qu'on me rende l'éther agité du dehors, Les amours menacés, l'insuffisante gloire! » — Et c'est pourtant ainsi que parle l'insensé, Lorsque, n'ayant jamais de noble lassitude, Il ne peut concevoir que son être ait cessé, Guéri de tout espoir et de toute habitude. Anna de Noailles
October 15, 2025 at 9:31 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
Marguerite Duras. No other can conjure intimacy like she does—intimacy that burns quietly in the unsaid.
Marguerite Duras. Blue Eyes, Black Hair. Translated by Barbara Bray. “She is sleeping. He doesn't know her. He watches her sleep—her open palms, her still unknown face, her breasts, her beauty, her closed eyes. If he had left the doors of the other rooms open, she would probably have gone to look at them. That's what he must have thought. He looks at her legs in repose, smooth as her arms and breasts. Her breathing is the same, smooth and long. And under the skin of her temples, quietly, the beat of the moving blood, slowed down by sleep. Apart from the yellow light falling from the middle of the ceiling, the room is dark. Round, seemingly, sealing in the body completely.”
October 14, 2025 at 6:03 PM
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
Can you tell? I act, I wander past all the houses in the area, I am running after myself… If only I really knew what hour has struck! But was it really in front of my door, the stone I am trying to roll away? Oh, the word only comes to me through the air and—I fear once again—in my sleep.
October 14, 2025 at 12:39 PM