dig

Category: landscape

  • AG2023_1022710b

    AG2023_1022710b

    “split open the dreary world to expose an enchanted one”

    “It was the name that called forth the true him.”

    “The other selves were like the words he spoke—fabrications of the moment, misinformation required to protect Son from harm and to secure that one reality at least.”

    “There were no photos of them, but they were there in the pictures of trees behind their houses, the fields where they worked, the river they fished, the church where they testified, the joints where they drank.”

    “This is the place. Where you can take a choice.” (TM, Tar Baby)

  • AG2023_1120001a

    AG2023_1120001a

    “cities arranged primarily not to improve the lives of their citizens”

    “absented itself from the art of the possible”

    “Deriving not only from the landscape but from the claiming of it, from the romance of emigration, the radical abandonment of established attachments, this imagination remains obdurately symbolic, tending to locate lessons in what the rest of the country perceives only as scenery.” (JD)

  • AG2023_1011934a or elagant, golden

    AG2023_1011934a

    “an invisible band strung between us, connecting us and preventing us from straying …”

    “elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain.”

    “in my dream we were golden!”

    “It gave me an unexpected but not unpleasant sense of stillness, of being outside of time” (ZS, Swing Time)

  • AG2023_1000103a or tranquility

    AG2023_1000103a

    “this place is indifference. This place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies; it doesn’t care about his last name or where he went to school; it hasn’t even noticed him.” (ESM, Sea of Tranquility)

  • AG2023_1022862a or a system of renewal

    AG2023_1022862a

    Roses for the Home, Farmers’ Bulletin 750, by United States Department of Agriculture (Home and Garden Bulletin 25, May 1953).

    “To garden is to make whole” […] “even if it’s a windowsill geranium high above a city street, it can be significant in meaning.”

    “Close attention itself can be a kind of sustenance.” [Part of a] “system[s] of renewal” (RS)

  • Transfiguration gestures toward freedom

    The abolition of chattel slavery and the emergence of man, however laudable, long awaited, and cherished, did not yield such absolute distinctions; instead fleeting, disabled, and short-lived practices stand for freedom and its failure. Everyday practices, rather than traditional political activity like the abolition movement, black conventions, the struggle for suffrage, and electoral activities, are the focus of my examination because I believe that these pedestrian practices illuminate inchoate and utopian expressions of freedom that are not and perhaps cannot be actualized elsewhere. The desires and longings that exceed the frame of civil rights and political emancipation find expression in quotidian acts labeled “fanciful,” “exorbitant,” and “excessive” primarily because they express an understanding or imagination of freedom quite at odds with bourgeois expectations. Paul Gilroy, after Seyla Benhabib, refers to these utopian invocations and the incipient modes of friendship and solidarity they conjure up as “the politics of transfiguration.”21 He notes that, in contrast to the politics of fulfillment, which operate within the framework of bourgeois civil society and occidental rationality, “The politics of transfiguration strives in pursuit of the sublime, struggling to repeat the unrepeatable, to present the unpresentable. Its rather different hermeneutic focus pushes towards the mimetic, dramatic and performative.” From this perspective, stealing away, the breakdown, moving about, pilfering, and other everyday practices that occur below the threshold of formal equality and rights gesture toward an unrealized freedom and emphasize the stranglehold of slavery and the limits of emancipation. In this and in other ways, these practices reveal much about the aspirations of the dominated and the contestations over the meaning of abolition and emancipation.

    Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, 1993), 37; and Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York, 1986), 13, 41.

    Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America.
    AG2023_1022804a

  • AG2023_1022772a or a little bit of this

    AG2023_1022772a

    Jupiter, Venus.

    “The danger and its necessity focused them, made them calm.” (TM)

    “Turn on the night!,” Adam Gopnik in New Yorker; article on light pollution. (An aside–“nature’s secret to survival is not one perfect plan but a little bit of this and a little bit of that.”)

  • AG2023_1022634a or a promise

    AG2023_1022634a

    “being on the side of the future”

    “so a flower is also a promise”

    “Happiness seems to require having a well-ordered life avoiding difficulty or discord, while joy can and does show up anywhere, often unexpectedly” (RS)