You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
“perhaps the muse was always a critic, always a builder of stacks of things “interesting to look at”
“always a mind in relation to another.”
“Inside every critic is a coach or, to use Isabelle Graw’s image, “a sort of amplifier.””
“deferential, wry, combative. Humorous. Detached. At sea.”
Art’s stupidity, Mayer suggests, is the reason for its persistence in her memory: it is too dumbfounded to move.
But what first punched art in the face? Probably life. Or, as Mayer says, “fucked up time.””
“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.”
Anahid Nersessian. Originally published in Mousse 86.
a figure must be invented who can be superimposed on the society as a whole, whose routine and life-pattern serve somehow to tie its separate and isolated parts together. The equivalent is the picaresque novel, where a single character moves from one background to another, linking “picturesque” but not intrinsically related episodes together. In doing this the detective in a sense once again fulfills the demands of the function of knowledge rather than that of lived experience: through him we are able to see, to know, the society as a whole
Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality by Fredric Jameson
“Each of us has to find our question.”
“You look for it so you can confront the silence of a pure and uncompromising question.”
“Other possibilities in life.”
“Admire from afar, in silence”
–Sarr
Tippett: It was actually in your book that I first realized, and I had never thought about this, that the root — the Greek root for the word “beauty” is related to the word for “calling”; to “kalon” and “kalein.”
O’Donohue: That’s right. That’s it exactly.
Tippett: That’s fascinating.
O’Donohue: It is, actually, and it means that, actually, in the presence of beauty, it’s not a neutral thing, but it’s actually calling you. And I feel that one could write a wonderful psychology just based on the notion of being called — being called to be yourself and called to transfigure what has hardened or got wounded within you. And it’s also, of course, the heart of creativity, this calling forth all the time, because, like in the work that I do, trying to write a few poems, you never write the same poem twice. You’re always at a new place, and then you’re suddenly surprised by where you get taken to.
On Being with Krista Tippett, John O’Donohue : The Inner Landscape of Beauty
Original Air Date : February 28, 2008
“Pleasure … can fortify us. The pleasure that is beauty, the beauty that is meaning, order, calm” (RS)
Untitled (A place to stand and stare, recalling tunes of ballads in a minor key)
It is “the running after the spinning top” or “To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.” Carson via Enns.
“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.” Martin Luther King
“…je m’endormis, prêt à retrouver dans mon sommeil la transfiguration hallucinée des événements de la nuit, à me réveiller dans un monde qui paraîtrait inaltéré au premier regard, mais où tout, sous la surface des choses, sous la peau du temps, aurait changé à jamais.
Tels furent, après ma soirée dans la toile de l’Araignée, mes premiers pas sur le cercle de solitude où glissaient Le Labyrinthe de l’inhumain et T.C. Elimane.”
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes
The Psychosocial Foundation Presents: On Love, with Anahid Nersessian and Ronjaunee Chatterjee, (032023).
Untitled (Field Guide; “what’s not found at once, but lies within something of another nature”) ii, 2023. Graphite, colored pencil, gesso, enamel paint, gouache, collage, pigment print on paper. 75 x 54 cm
Denise Levertov, “Pleasures”. (I like to find/ what’s not found / at once, but lies …)
Hard luck and trouble
Been my only friend
I’ve been on my own
Ever since I was ten
[…]
You know wine and women
Is all I crave
A big legged woman
Gonna carry me to my grave
[…]