You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
There is [another] response to chaos, which I have not read about, which is stillness.
TM
Walking, paradoxically, allows for the possibility of stillness.
LE
Place stilled by mottled formations and a scruple of compassion.
Poet’s House : Anne Carson on Stillness (audio), 2018.
Mottled formation, with a scruple of compassion, that stills and bends.
… you should settle quickly
The Principles of Concealment by David Wagoner
All your differences with whatever lies
Around you, forcing yourself to agree
With rocks and bushes, trees and wild grass,
Horses, cows, or sheep, even debris
To find out what you have in common.
Statement Preliminary to the Invention of Solace by Pattiann Rogers
A comfort understood like that
Must be present now and possible.
“How do songs, stories — the unique ones that are art, the no less special everyday ones locked up inside people’s heads or bantered back and forth with other folks — become narratives in which daydreams, words and sounds of actual lives/life are embedded. Maybe stories, fiction or not, give solace, context, possibility, as much with their stable recurring forms as with their infinitely various contents, and thereby produce examples of lives shaped, framed so they are recognizably distinguishable from emptiness, from darkness that seems always to surround and render lives unseeable.”
Arizona By John Edgar Wideman, November 18, 2019, New Yorker
[…] perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words
So you imagine other worlds, […] hatch plots of escape and dereliction–a. A gaining of land by the permanent recession of the water line. b. The land so gained.–(SH)
There was hardly any color; just greens and browns (TM)
“Vini kouzen map mennen’w!”, in the title of the exhibition, translates as “Come on cousin, I’ll take you!”. The bit of dialogue parallels a moment toward the end of Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, when Thérèse volunteers to take Son to Isle de Chevaliers. Though partly blind, Thérèse insists on leading the way to a place where she thinks Son needs to be in order to make a better choice about his life, future, and in service to blackness; she encourages him to run toward the ancient and enchanted. It is, in essence, the best way to navigate this formulation of the Caribbean, through kinship and with the help of those we share deep affinities.
[The Free birds] strive to overcome the immobilizing locality of continental and national ontologies and the modern/colonial predicament, the bleakness of the looming world of total surveillance but also inevitable self-limitations instead of thoughtless consumption and growth.
Madina Tlostanova, Of birds and trees: Rethinking decoloniality through unsettlement as a pluriversal human condition. Echo 2, 2020
Related: … simple besideness
