“… one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a [enchanted] lever, a means of inspiring fear” (JB)
AG2023_1033319a
Author: dig
AG2023_1023244a or space-route
“W. E. Du Bois interviewed Harriet Tubman late in her life …” seems part of, or at least a solid anchor point in, the epic narrative known as the Black Radical Tradition.
“… abolition geographies are made, on the ground, everywhere along the route–time-route as well as the space-route” (Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography Essays Towards Liberation)
AG2023_1110662a or a cosmology, an order
“a […] cosmology that depended on their attention”
“Distraction was not just a personal problem, they knew; it was part of the warp of the world,” Kreiner (Jamie Kreiner’s new book, “The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction” (Liveright)) writes. “Attention would not have been morally necessary, would not have been the objective of their culture of conflict and control, were it not for the fact that it centered on the divine order.” (Casey Cep, Eat, Pray, Concentrate, New Yorker, January 30, 2023)
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lulled by the numb languor of that divine emptiness,
[…]
driven either by ambition or adrenaline, by morbid curiosity or necessity,
AG2023_1023181a or guided at sea
A field guide. “The North Star, a wooden rectangle [kamal], and a knotted string guided Arabs at sea.” National Geographic, July 1982, p. 22.
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“Of heterotopias, Foucault writes, “We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.””
“In some way, any imaginary situation can be lived in advance.”
“confidence-sustaining habits” (LB)
What to do in it
“the perennial problem of artists: time, and what to do in it.” (ZS)
“the flowers we tend with our own hands have a habit of blooming in our expectations and filling our hopes with a sweetness”
“it is no use relying on artists, poets, philosophers, or saints to make something of the enclosed spaces or the waste portions of our soul: Il faut cultiver notre jardin.” (Vernon Lee)
Open Road
In dim light now, his eyes
straining to survey
the territory: here is the country
of Loss, its colony Grief;
the great continent Desire
and its borderland Regret;
vast, unfathomable water
an archipelago—the tiny islands
of Joy, untethered, set adrift.
At the bottom of the map
his legend and cartouche,
the measures of distance, key
to the symbols marking each
known land. What’s missing
is the traveler’s warning
at the margins: a dragon—
its serpentine signature—monstrous
as a two-faced daughter.
My Father as Cartographer, Natasha Trethewey
Allons! the road is before us!
It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well—be not detain’d!
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.
Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
Song of the Open Road, 15, Walt Whitman