A plan for social transformation

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Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.

Annette Gordon-Reed in NYR, 2018.

Figures like King, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks have now become “safe” in ways they never were when they were operating at the height of their powers. Stripped of their radicalism, they are welcomed as sources of inspiration in the curricula of almost every elementary school in the country.

[…]

King started to speak even more openly and insistently about the “second phase,” which would be a “struggle for ‘economic equality,’” with unions as the linchpin of this effort. King, along with his aide Bayard Rustin, had long thought that there should be a “‘convergence’ between unions and the civil rights movement.” Everything was at stake for King here: if the second phase of his plan for social transformation was successful, “everyone could have a well-paying job or a basic level of income, along with decent levels of health care, education, and housing.”

He soon found, however, that “union racial politics remained contradictory and complicated.” The same racism that permeated American society also had a firm grip on the union movement. As had been true throughout American history, many poor and working-class whites had no interest in solidarity with blacks against white elites.

[…]

With the Poor People’s Campaign, King hoped to reprise his triumphant 1963 March on Washington by leading thousands of poor people to the nation’s capital to demand a “radical redistribution of economic power.” The effort was fraught from the start, as his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had neither the funds nor the infrastructure to organize the huge event he envisioned. The task was not only physically draining, it was psychologically difficult. For as King crisscrossed the country to promote the effort, “the right-wing hate campaign against him escalated.” While in Miami to speak to a group of ministers, King remained in the conference hotel because the police could not ensure his safety.

https://www.tumblr.com/birdbird/773238894983512064/mlk
Marrakesh. Image grabbed on 012025, CO’s fb.

Signal, worthwhile and preferred–open source, end to end encryption, cryptographically secure.

AG2024_1134136a holds unknown

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AG2024_1134136a
Flows and veils; garden syntactic arrangements of forms; they hold unknown, and therefore dangerous possibilities

Richard Brody wrote an appreciation of David Lynch.

“Many films are called revelatory and visionary, but Lynch’s films seem made to exemplify these terms. He sees what’s kept invisible and reveals what’s kept scrupulously hidden, and his visions shatter veneers of respectability to depict, in fantasy form, unbearable realities.”

Also, Dennis Lim (2015),

“Lynch’s mistrust of words means that his films often resist the expository function and realist tenor of dialogue, relying instead on intricate sound design to evoke what lies beyond language.”

AG2020_1880804a or a minutiae

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we cheer him on,

winter softened in the tropic of his strength.

Declan Ryan

Patrick Kavanagh’s poem “Epic” has talismanic importance to older Irish poets who took from the following lines license to write about the minutiae of their own locales:

                                        I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

To be from a small country and to write intimately about your own affairs is to risk making your poetry impenetrable, irrelevant, or both, even when writing in a global language like English. And yet to exclude your own affairs, to eliminate the parochial from your “epic” entirely risks self-censorship or a denial of one’s own truth.

An American poet can mention the film Predator, Henry Kissinger, or the town of Ferguson and an informed and cultured Irish person will know the references. Conversely, if an Irish poet chose to write about Wanderly Wagon, Pádraig Flynn, or the town of Granard even a cultured American reader, unless a specialist in Irish Studies, would be lost.

Patrick Cotter, Introduction, Poetry, September 2015

a calm, a weary happiness

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Acceptance

Yesterday it was still January and I drove home
and the roads were wet and the fields were wet
and a palette knife

had spread a slab of dark blue forestry across the hill.
A splashed white van appeared from a side road
then turned off and I drove on into the drab morning

which was mudded and plain and there was a kind of weary happiness
that nothing was trying to be anything much and nothing
was being suggested. I don’t know how else to explain

the calm of this grey wetness with hardly a glimmer of light or life,
only my car tyres swishing the lying water,
and the crows balanced and rocking on the windy lines.

Acceptance, Kerry Hardie via poets.org poem-a-day

AG2024_1122329a

a personal signature and a vision of the world

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The David Lynch who invented a cinematic tone that’s instantly recognizable as a personal signature and a vision of the world—as opposed to the David Lynch who let the power of his imagination become a style and a signature that took the place of a world view—has made his return in the third and fourth parts of “Twin Peaks: The Return,” and the result is mind-expanding, haunting, and deeply moving.

Richard Brody, 2017
https://www.tumblr.com/spacecovvgirl/756246728412413952/lost-highway-david-lynch-1997-japanese-poster
https://www.tumblr.com/classicfilmpunk/753147789927710720/lost-highway-1997
https://www.tumblr.com/izzylimon/760076818104631296/the-beauty-of-blue-velvet-1986-dir-david

break normativity by refusing

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AG2025PXL_20250113_211002834.RAW-02.ORIGINALa
AG2025PXL_20250113_211002834.RAW-02.ORIGINALa from Pixel 7a DNG file throug Capture One then Photoshop.

So my argument there is that you have to break analogies because a lot of the ways we build the world is to make this is like this and this is like this and this is like this.
And then you can just start refusing analogies, right?
Like you could say, well, actually, it’s not like this.
Like you, that whole, there’s a normativity to the kinds of connections that you make.
But I’m interested in like the rhetorical question and the kind of the politics of refusing the rhetorical question.
Because someone will often say, well, why, like Milton Friedman would say, why would we, why would we give the state the opportunity to organize our lives?
The state is like the worst possible institution for organizing our lives.
And he thought it was a rhetorical question and it isn’t.
You could say, oh, for these 10,000 reasons.
And then you would have to have the argument, you know, you break normativity by refusing.
It’s right to ask a rhetorical question.
You break normativity by refusing its sense that we know what the evidence of democracy is because we can put different objects near it.
And that’s a thing that I think is so important about why scholarship matters and why scholarship and the humanities matters and why just experimental thought matters is the way you break something
isn’t to just find a better object.
It’s to loosen up the object and transform it from within itself.
And so what we have to do, kind of as artists and writers and teachers is to ask the question, are there other concepts of the good life that would be more satisfying than the ones that you have been trained to pay attention to?

Why Chasing The Good Life Is Holding Us Back With Lauren Berlant [Ppdd2R46Eh4] transcribed via zamzar