“I’ve long admired photographers/artists, … , who’d write directly on their prints.” Moyra Davey. Exposé·es at Palais de Tokyo.
Moyra Davey, Visitor (detail), 2022. Courtesy of Galerie Buchholz.
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Category: landscape
canopy, late night, nourished dreams of a free territory
Untitled (Suburban canopy, late night) 2018.
“In the context of social death, everyday practices explored the possibility of transfigured existence and cultivated an imagination of the otherwise and elsewhere, cartographies of the fantastic utterly antagonistic to slavery.
[…]
At secret meetings and freedom schools, hidden away in loopholes of retreat and hush arbors, gathered at the river or dwelling in the swamp, the enslaved articulated a vision of freedom that far exceeded that of the liberal imagination. It enabled them to conceive other ways of existing, flee the world of masters and invite its fiery destruction, anticipate the upheaval that would put “the bottom rail on top,” nurture a collective vision of what might be possible when no longer enslaved, and sustain belief in the inevitability of slavery’s demise.
[…]
The arrangement of stars in the night sky, the murmur and echo of songs traveling across a river, the revered objects buried near a prayer tree, the rumors of fugitives in the swamp or maroons in the hills nourished dreams of a free territory, or an existence without masters, or a plot against the plantation, or reveries of miraculous deliverance.” (SH, Scenes of Subjection)
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“When we want to see blue, we look up at the sky. The Earth is blue to anyone looking down at it from the sky. Is blue in itself a color or merely a question of distance? Or a question of profound nostalgia? The unreachable is always blue.” Clarice Lispector, Too Much of Life.
every decision matters, though not in ways we could have anticipated
“One of the tragedies that plot brings to light is the degree to which our inner lives and intentions can simply come to nothing—unrealized despite our best efforts, misunderstood and fruitless, as the story we played our part in generating goes on without us. It is only by elevating human choice that we can see how often our choices don’t matter, after all. Or maybe it would be better to say that our choices matter only unpredictably. There’s no way of knowing what will really count until later, and by then it’s too late. Better choose.”
B.D. McClay reviews Birnam Wood and on Catton’s use of plot, in New Yorker.
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“The presence of the sublime tells us that to break the world and open access to the universal sense, we have to shatter how we know.” (LB)
“to split open [this] dreary world to expose an enchanted one” (TM)
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La Llorona de los Cafetales de la película La Llorona
CRÉDITOS MUSICALES Dirección musical y arreglos (música): Andrea Bravo Arreglos (letra): Gaby Moreno Arreglos (música) y producción musical: Javier Mazariegos Supervisión musical: Herminio Gutiérrez Compositor original: Luis Martínez Serrano
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The Scorpion and the Turtle. This earlier fable appears in the Anvaar Soheili, a collection of fables written c. 1500 by the Persian scholar Husayn Kashifi. via Wikipedia.
This American Life, Epsiode 389 : Frenemies, Act Four, by David Rakoff, 091109.
With discreet significance
Love is too young to know what conscience is;
Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?
Then, gentle cheater, urge not my amiss,
Lest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove:
For, thou betraying me, I do betray
My nobler part to my gross body’s treason;
My soul doth tell my body that he may
Triumph in love; flesh stays no farther reason;
But, rising at thy name, doth point out thee
As his triumphant prize. Proud of this pride,
He is contented thy poor drudge to be,
To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side.
No want of conscience hold it that I call
Her ‘love’ for whose dear love I rise and fall.
Love is too young to know what conscience is; (Sonnet 151), William Shakespeare
Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness;
Some say thy grace is youth and gentle sport;
Both grace and faults are loved of more and less;
Thou makest faults graces that to thee resort.
As on the finger of a throned queen
The basest jewel will be well esteem’d,
So are those errors that in thee are seen
To truths translated and for true things deem’d.
How many lambs night the stern wolf betray,
If like a lamb he could his looks translate!
How many gazers mightst thou lead away,
If thou wouldst use the strength of all thy state!
But do not so; I love thee in such sort
As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report.
Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness; (Sonnet 96), William Shakespeare
The spring has many sounds:
Roller skates grind the pavement to noisy dust.
Birds chop the still air into small melodies.
The wind forgets to be the weather for a time
And whispers old advice for summer.
The sea stretches itself
And gently creaks and cracks its bones….
The spring has many silences:
Buds are mysteriously unbound
With a discreet significance,
And buds say nothing.
There are things that even the wind will not betray.
Earth puts her finger to her lips
And muffles there her quiet, quick activity….
Do not wonder at me
That I am hushed
This April night beside you.
The spring has many silences.
The Spring Has Many Silences, Laura Riding Jackson
As usual, Death sweetly slips her arm in mine—
& we take a deep breath from the eucalyptus breeze.
We both worked honestly at our jobs: all day Death
destroyed traffic with wailing ambulances while I killed
hours & lines on eight-&-a-half by eleven inch pages.
We’re fast friends by now, Death much older of course,
but there’s no hierarchy between us: we’re both taking
a break from it all, glad to watch waves collapse on rocks
& pelicans dive-bomb fish. I try to be sensitive to Death’s
guilt: that whole pandemic disaster she can no longer
control. She’ll soon betray me too—like she will you.
I know. But today the gulls are silver angels etching
great cursive blessings in a perfect sky—so Death & I
make believe we believe that, & amble on.
Late Afternoon Stroll on the Cliffs, Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Legna Rodríguez Iglesias on betrayal and a bit on movies.