You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
still, inconspicuous things, to what is common, the incidental and the customary – the things that do not attract us but ground us in being
Meaning and coherence are founded on narration
Lingering on things in contemplation, intentionless seeing, which would be a formula for happiness
Byung-Chul Han, Non-things : Upheaval in the Lifeworld
blackness descended like a shroud on life itself. […] Nothing would change, it would merely be enriched.
LA
Fate of the Kingdoms | Ramin Djawdi.
Other Echoes Inhabit The Garden takes its title from T.S. Elliot’s first poem in his Four Quartets: Burnt Norton (1936) by way of Edward Said’s speech at Toronto’s York University in 1993. Said concludes,
Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a world scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively white or black or Western or Oriental. Just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages and cultural geographies…Survival, in fact, is about the connections between things. In Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the “‘other echoes that inhabit the garden.’
Clare began to talk, steering carefully away from anything that might lead towards race or other thorny subjects. It was the most brilliant exhibition of conversational weightlifting that Irene had ever seen. Her words swept over them in charming well-modulated streams. Her laughs tinkled and pealed. Her little stories sparkled.
Passing, Nella Larsen
Blackness
[…]
is a commitment
[…]
stretches over the land
[…]
The huge, the pungent object of our prime out-ride
is to Comprehend,
to salute and to Love the fact that we are Black,
which is our “ultimate Reality,”
which is the lone ground
from which our meaningful metamorphosis,
from which our prosperous staccato,
group or individual, can rise.
Primer For Blacks. Gwendolyn Brooks
I was patient with him because I found patience easier when there was no alternative.
The Vital Abyss, The Expanse novella.
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