You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
as the best parts of living have come
unsought and undeserved
inconvenient
Last Words, Rita Dove, in New Yorker.
Related : “… scenes that people say they want, are uneasy wanting, try to make do with, try to get at, go in and out of caring about, and want to be okay with.” On the Inconvenience of Other People, Lauren Berlant.
that stretch of no time, no home
but the gray
The way that we teach [Black studies] is really about examining Black lives: the structures that produce premature death, that make us vulnerable; the ideologies that both invent Blackness and render Black people less than human; and, perhaps most important, the struggle to secure a different future. And so, therefore, a lot of it’s about interrogating racial categories, understanding the persistence of inequality, how this is shaped by the very foundations of Western thought, which is to say, it’s not about making Black people feel better. […]
But, as a scholarly endeavor, it tries to understand how Black people came into being in the modern world—how that process through kidnapping, enslavement, the extraction of labor, the extraction of ideas, was foundational to the modern world. And, finally, the way that African people really tried to remake and re-envision that world, through art, through ideas, through social movements, through literature, through study in action.
[…]
And not just narrating that oppression and understanding it, and not just trying to think about ways to move beyond it—to transcend it, to come up with strategies to try to live—but also understanding what’s wrong with this country, with the system.
Robin D. G. Kelley with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, New Yorker.
“history’s footprints threaded among the trees” (Kari Gunter-Seymour via SWWIM) or a history’s footprints threaded though this ixora.
The idea of paradise is no longer imaginable or, rather, it is over-imagined, which amounts to the same thing—and has therefore become familiar, commercialized, even trivial (TM).
On these long walks he did not forget his preoccupations. He used them to frame what we saw (ZS)
Pleasure … can fortify us. The pleasure that is beauty, the beauty that is meaning, order, calm. Orwell found this refuge in natural and domestic spaces, and he repaired to them often and emerged from them often to go to war on lies, delusions, cruelties, and follies.
“forlorn hunger for certainties” “in the physics of the heart, distance is relative; it’s time that’s absolute” Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honor.