Author: dig

When we ask about the ends of criticism, we’re also asking how criticism ends. I don’t think it does, any more than love. Both things—criticism, love—are better off, and better done, if we let them admit their perversions, their failures and travesties and pratfalls. They are, both things, an unending negotiation of the limits of what is bearable. They are, at their best, avenues of grace within fucked-up time, languages of perpetual inquiry and curiosity, poses of submission and dominance and everything in between, a practice of turn-taking in a world that runs on theft and greed. They believe, rightly or wrongly, that there is always room to try again. And maybe there is.

Anahid Nersessian, Originally published in Mousse 86

Maybe it’s chance. Maybe it’s fate. But the two aren’t necessarily contradictory. Chance is merely a fate unknown to us, a fate written in invisible ink.

[…]

And that’s exactly what you should always follow: life and its unpredictable paths. They all lead to the same place, the same destination for all of us, but to get there, they take routes that can be beautiful or terrible, paved with flowers or bones, night roads we often travel alone, but where we have the chance to put our souls to the test.

The Most Secret Memory of Men: A Novel
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, translated from French by Lara Vergnaud

Ordinary Unhappiness, Anahid Nersessian on The Lights by Ben Lerner.

“If the aim of this art is to map in language “the motion,” as John Ashbery put it, “by which a life / May be known and recognized,” it must confront what happens when life begins to take a shape whose patterns are warped or aborted by an anomalous present and the anticipation of an even worse future.

In The Lights, the pervasive unreliability of the world is visible on the page, where it takes many forms”

[…]

“The title The Lights seems to refer to what Lerner calls “sources / of lift,” those unexpected instants when someone … or something … leavens without eliminating the difficult immensity of being alive. It doesn’t always work.”

[…]

“Kindness, it turns out, does not mean trying to argue someone into sanity by exposing her delusions nor does it mean ignoring them. Instead, it might mean finding a way to enter unobtrusively into madness as if in a collaborative spirit and to make it non-catastrophic together.”

[…]

“The madness of the world might not be malleable and yet there is no ethical choice but to try and reshape it. If Lerner’s language aspires to be a medium in which experience is, however briefly, suspended before it is shorn down into clarity or cliché, that language has no illusions about its power. It knows that poetry—like sex or parenting or friendship—is a discipline of barely getting by. We fuck up, we act like clowns, we cause pain without thinking or because we cannot control ourselves. But we also show up and repair what we must and save who we can.”

“I selected
sleep, but could not
I decided to change everything
Composed entirely of stills
or fade into the trees

[…]

In a perfect world, this would be
April, or an associated concept
Green to the touch
several feet away

[By any measure], Ben Lerner

1.
I was the starlight
I was the moonlight
I was the sunset,
Before the dawning
          Of my life;
I was the river
Forever winding
To purple dreaming,
I was the glowing
Of youthful Springtime,
I was the singing
Of golden songbirds,—
        I was love.

            2.
I was the sunlight,
I was the twilight, 
I was the humming
Of winged creatures
    Ere my birth;
I was the blushing
Of lily maiden,
I was the vision
Of youthful striving,
I was the summer,
I was the autumn,
I was the All-time—
      I was love.

Revery, Fenton Johnson

Reading List: Publishers for Palestine. (Afterall)

• Edward Said on After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, 1986 at ICA, London, with Salman Rushdie. Listen

“to participate in creating a vision of the future that will enlarge the humanity of all of us”

“When people come together voluntarily to create their own vision, they begin wishing it to come into being with such passion that they begin creating an active path leading to it from the present.”
Robin Kelley, Freedom Dreams

“Marxism has always claimed that being can determine consciousness precisely to determine being anew.’”

“Consciousness is no longer the mere product of social being but is at once a condition of its practical existence and, further, one of its central productive forces.

Raymond Williams