Category: landscape

Joshua Rothman on forms of thinking, in New Yorker.

“our inner voices are powerful tools that must be tamed. […] The idea is to manage the voice that you use for self-management.

[…]

Schwitzgebel thinks it’s a mistake to categorize dreams one way or the other. “We should also consider the possibility that our dreams are neither color nor black-and-white,” he writes. Dreams are unreal, and might not lend themselves to being described during waking life. In describing them, we give them a fixity they may not have.

[…]

Daniel Dennett argued that a layer of fiction is woven into what it is to be human. In a sense, fiction is flawed: it’s not true. […] Fiction, Dennett writes, has a deliberately “indeterminate” status: it’s true, but only on its own terms. The same goes for our minds.”

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Walking long and far help my thinking process.

Stand and stare some place, recalling or thinking through what comes to mind.

Drawn into “the lull of a certain infinity” (OM).

We sing the familiar because it feels soft and always.

Corazón in Fall, Emma Trelles

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when something taken for granted
is suddenly over, the pause when you take stock

and realize you’ll never have as much,
that change is always a lessening

The Way Words Echo in Our Heads, James Cihlar

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The relief of having something to focus our attention.

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The future refuses [or is slow] to happen, so where else should I turn?

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Prefer crossed out, scribbled over monuments

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Berlant’s work is underpinned by a pressing desire for new forms of relationality and alternative ways to flourish. There is an urgency to their writing: feelings are political, affective life sustains the possibilities for other life-worlds.

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What Berlant proposes then is ‘an affective register which recognises the relationship between the joy-giving parts and the parts that require a kind of patience with the way things do not fit. The out-of-synchness of being matters’ (Berlant & Hardt, 2012, n.p.

[…]

queer theory presumes the affective incoherence of the subject with respect to the objects that anchor it or to which they’re attached. (Berlant & Hardt, 2012, n.p.)

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Berlant helps us think about affective life through the lens of ambivalence, contradiction, and incoherence, rather than certainty and singularity. It is this that makes Berlant’s social theory so generative: an invitation to always ask questions, to unravel our own objects of attachment and fantasies of political transformation.

[…]

think capaciously about the affective dimensions it will take to rebuild the world from the fragments of the present.

Eleanor Wilkinson, 11 | AMBIVALENT LOVE, Encountering Berlant part 1: Concepts otherwise.

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“… always felt that the ground below him was charged with a sense of belonging.” Lapvona: A Novel, Ottessa Moshfegh

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the place where [it] remains a little distanced and discursive, but to which we are unfathomably attached. Joe Jukes, Encountering Berlant part 1: Concepts otherwise.

Beauty will come to them  
Where they stand.
[...]
Trees need not walk the earth 
For beauty or for bread;  
Beauty will come to them  
In the rainbow—  
The sunlight—  
And the lilac-haunted rain

David Rosenthal

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“It was necessary, she said, to do something to cure the multitude of its unreality. Her solution was fiction. She was making up their lives, their castes, their faiths, how many brothers and sisters they had, and what childhood games they had played, and sending the stories whispering through the streets into the ears that needed to hear them. She was writing the grand narrative of the city, creating its story now that she had created its life. Some of her stories came from her memories of lost Kampili, the slaughtered fathers and the burned mothers; she was trying to bring that place back to life in this place, to bring back the old dead in the newly living, but memory wasn’t enough, there were too many lives to enliven, and so imagination had to take over from the point at which memory failed.”  

A sackful of seeds, Salman Rushdie, New Yorker, December 12, 2022 issue.