Gardens are nodes “where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result” may coalesce, but those aspects may align and “fit into the life of someone, perhaps of anyone, who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.” (RS)
Mendes was assassinated in 1988. He might have added nuance to this quote, that seems too easily quotable.
Cameron Rowland, macandal, 2023 Oxalic acid 37.5 x 30.5 x 67 cm Packets of materials that could invoke spirits, protect against punishment, and poison slave masters were called macandals. They were at the center of a plot in 1757 to poison all the white people in Haiti. The plot was organized by hundreds of enslaved and free black people. All macandals were subsequently outlawed. Their trade and use continued despite their criminalization. Enslaved people throughout the Atlantic world used arsenic, manioc juice, ground glass, and oxalic acid to poison overseers, masters, masters’ children, and livestock. Oxalic acid is a stain remover and household cleaner.
Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany 10 February 2023 – 15 October 2023
Negations of accumulation manifested in theft, fugitivity, praise meetings, and plots.[53] Stealing the crops, eating the livestock, and refusing to work diminished the output of the plantation.[54] The formation of fugitive communities emptied the plantation of its value.[55] Sharing information evaded supervisory control.[56] Coordinated poisonings of masters and overseers instilled fear of the slave population.[57] Arson destroyed sugar mills, masters’ houses, and entire fields, inflicting property damage and halting production.[58] These black negations are unwritten losses. They are neither failed nor successful. Their impact is incalculable. They operate beyond the rubrics of value and production. Rather they were grounded in “the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality” of blackness.[59]
“[summarized] thoughts of Marx: by mixing our labor with the earth, we change the external world and thereby change our own nature. That’s what drama is; that’s what geography is: making history, making worlds.”
RWG
Don’t Be Voyeur with Me – by Michael Giacchino | The Batman, 2022.
“It could not be predicted. The condition had a name, the kind of name usually associated with telethons, but the name meant noting … (Joan Didion, The white Album)
Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness, to wisdom, we only make promises; pain we obey. (Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain)
so soft, I feel like I’m still wrapped for sleeping
as I head uptown in my undercover power-suit,
bitch sunlight fingering the spaced-out tenements.
This morning there ain’t nothing I can’t do.
This is my territory, I know all of it—
ten long blocks flanked by mighty water.
Walking any Avenue is like riding
a cosmic surfboard on the biggest wave
of the goddam century, the East River
twerking her bedazzled behind
while sky spills coin like a luck-crazed
Vegas granny flush at the slots. Today
I’m gonna make out like a bandit myself:
hook up with my buds to drop
a few shots on the courts, ogle the ladies,
then play the rest of the day
as it comes see where it goes
feeling good
feeling good
somewhere over the Hudson
the sun heading home
Rita Dove, via The Georgia Review, Spring 2016 and Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems.
““Aubade East,” is set in Harlem, N.Y. The cocky speaker, out for a walk, squints into the “bitch sunlight fingering the spaced-out tenements.” This is a hat-tip to Toni Morrison, who famously — famously in my house, anyway — wrote in “Sula,” “The sun was already rising like a hot white bitch.”” Dwight Garner, Houston Chronicle.
