Category: landscape

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“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. . . . Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.”

Orwell via Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses

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a place of deep silence and brooding shadows, and the gods who lived here had no names.

GRRM

The shuttling between grief and grievance has been lost in pursuit of what is possible within a liberal legal conception of law and property. What is sacrificed in this approach, what cannot be heard, is the black noise that animated Cugoano’s earlier polemic. It is to this sound that the remaining essays in this volume are attuned. Black noise represents the kinds of political aspirations that are inaudible and illegible within the prevailing formulas of political rationality; these yearnings are illegible because they are so wildly utopian and derelict to capitalism (for example, ‘‘forty acres and a mule,’’ the end of commodity production and restoration of the commons, the realization of ‘‘the sublime ideal of freedom,’’ the resuscitation of the socially dead).²⁰ Black noise is always already barred from the court.²¹

—
20. Seyla Benhabib and Paul Gilroy would term this noise ‘‘the politics of transfiguration,’’
by which they mean a notion of utopian politics that exceeds the frame of prevailing
conceptions of political rationality. See Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge,1993), 37;
and Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York, 1986), 13, 41. On ‘‘black
mo’nin’,’’ see Fred Moten, In the Break (Minneapolis, 2003), 192–211.
21. What we call ‘‘black noise’’ Robin Kelley would describe as a ‘‘freedom dream,’’ or
Fred Moten would describe as ‘‘the surreal utopian ‘nonsense’ of a utopian vision, the
freedom we know outside of the opposition of sense and intellection’’; see Robin D. G.
Kelley, Freedom Dreams, and Fred Moten, ‘‘Uplift and Criminality,’’ unpublished manu-
script, 23.

Fugitive Justice, STEPHEN BEST, SAIDIYA HARTMAN, Representations (2005) 92 (1): 1–15.

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Narrative restraint, the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure, is a requirement of this method, as is the imperative to respect black noise – the shrieks, the moans, the nonsense, and the opacity, which are always in excess of legibility and of the law and which hint at and embody aspirations that are wildly utopian, derelict to capitalism, and antithetical to its attendant discourse of Man.

Hartman, Saidiya, Venus in Two Acts, small axe 26, June 2008, p. 1 – 14

 Is there a person to whom I could ask such a question and would that person have an answer that would make sense to me in a rational way (in the way even I have come to accept things as rational), and would that person be able to make the rational way imbued with awe and not so much with the practical; I know the practical, it will keep you breathing; awe, on the other hand, is what makes you (me) want to keep living.

JK

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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

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Fate of the Kingdoms | Ramin Djawdi.

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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.’

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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

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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