Category: landscape

“Ecology without class struggle is gardening” — Chico Mendes, via Marcela Cantuária’s The South American Dream at PAMM.

Gardens are nodes “where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result” may coalesce, but those aspects may align and “fit into the life of someone, perhaps of anyone, who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.” (RS)

Mendes was assassinated in 1988. He might have added nuance to this quote, that seems too easily quotable.

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)