Author: dig

to estimate one’s position

digLeave a comment

to estimate one’s position
without instruments
or celestial observations

calculating direction and distance
traveled from the last known fix
while accounting for tides, currents, grief

drift         numbness
sudden storms of pain
unexpected joy

to reckon is to believe
something true
to reckon with the dead

is to believe I can know them
an airy thinness
gleaming

despite
the distance
traveled

I’d like to know how far
I’ve gone
how much farther there is

to go         how absence
unfathomable
becomes

something I can carry

Dead Reckoning, Hyejung Kook

AG2026_1540100a
AG2026_1540100a

Ce n’est plus seulement un choix de mode de vie, une vision du monde, ou une idéologie à opposer aux techno-fascismes. C’est un appel à protéger les un·es et les autres contre les violences invisibles que font subir, à leurs organes et à leurs esprits, l’extension continue du domaine des pollutions.

Le backlash contre l’écologie n’est qu’un discours.

Jane Lindgaard, La lettre écologie, mercredi 20 mai 2026.

A fine fixed point

digLeave a comment
AG2026_1222215a
AG2026_1222215a
"Give me a place to stand," Archimedes said, 
"and I can move the world." Paradoxical, clever, 
his remark which first explained the use of the lever 
was an academic joke. But if that dead

sage could return to life, he would find a clear 
demonstration of his idea, which is not 
pure theory after all. That putative spot 
exists in the love I feel for you, my dear.

What could be more immovable or stronger? 
What becomes more and more secure, the longer 
it is battered by inconstancy and the stress

we find in our lives? Here is that fine fixed point 
from which to move a world that is out of joint, 
as he could have done, had he known a love like this.

Sonnets on Love XIII by Jean de Sponde, translated by David R. Slavitt.

Jason Hirata on Louise Lawler. Dia. Birdcalls (1972/1981) (Audio recording and text, 7:01 minutes).

“Yáng Shu?ng-z?’s Taiwan Travelogue has won the 2026 International Booker Prize.” “It succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.” (NPR)

Survival is insufficient

digLeave a comment
PXL_20260518_151427360
PXL_20260518_151427360

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
    Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery

Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Because survival is insufficient.” (Emily St. John Mandel)

051726 or to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding

digLeave a comment
AG2022-FG_1011489a
AG2022-FG_1011489a

Bertrand Russell on useless knowledge and idleness via The Marginalian.

“a certain richness and freedom in art and speculation”
“Perhaps the most important advantage of “useless” knowledge is that it promotes a contemplative habit of mind. There is in the world too much readiness, not only for action without adequate previous reflection, but also for some sort of action on occasions on which wisdom would counsel inaction…”
“A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than in action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power, a means of preserving serenity in misfortune and peace of mind among worries.”
“it is a matter of individual psychology, is to be found in history, biology, astronomy, and all those studies which, without destroying self-respect, enable the individual to see himself in his proper perspective. What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information, but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, acquaintance with the lives of heroic individuals, and some understanding of the strangely accidental and ephemeral position of man in the cosmos — all this touched with an emotion of pride in what is distinctively human, the power to see and to know, to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding. It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs.“

051626

digLeave a comment

The Draw Project. A series of traveling exhibition of drawings and works-on-paper.

Poor, impious Soul! that fixes its high hopes
In the dim distance, on a throne of clouds,
And from the morning’s mist would make the ropes
To draw it up amid acclaim of crowds—
Beware! That soaring path is lined with shrouds;
And he who braves it, though of sturdy breath,
May meet, half way, the avalanche and death!

O poor young Soul!—whose year-devouring glance
Fixes in ecstasy upon a star,
Whose feverish brilliance looks a part of earth,
Yet quivers where the feet of angels are,
And seems the future crown in realms afar—
Beware! A spark thou art, and dost but see
Thine own reflection in Eternity!

Aspiration, Adah Isaacs Menken

and make some room

digLeave a comment
AG2026_1170926a
AG2026_1170926a, 043026

In-between the sun and moon,
I sit and watch
and make some room
for letting light and twilight mingle,
shaping hope
and making single glances last eternity,
a little more,
extending love beyond the doors of welcoming,
while wedding all the parted people,
even sons to violent mothers,
and searching all the others finding light
where twilight lingers,
in-between the sun and moon.

In-between the sun and moon, Pádraig Ó Tuama

The sea-god’s other bones

digLeave a comment

A sea-god, whose father had been a mortal, becomes a skeleton.

The skin of the sea was thick, to-night,
And the tone of the sea was dull;
When I found by the edge of the sullen sea
The half of a sea-god’s skull.

Half of a sea-god’s skull was there,
Half of a sea-god’s tail.
When I dug them out of the clutch of the sand
The peering moon went pale.

The peering moon went pale, because
Her other eye had seen
The other half of the sea-god’s bones
Ten thousand fathom green . . .

Ten thousand fathom green with sea,
The sea-god’s other bones
Swayed in a dead sea-goddess’s arms
On a pile of sea-washed stones.

The skin of the sea was thick, to-night,
And the tone of the sea was dull,
While I buried away from the sinister sea
All the mortal part of a skull.

Skull Song, Genevieve Taggard

ag_1000088
ag_1000088