You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
“allusions to the infinite”
“remained embedded in the symbolic content of the place”
“We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes”
“a barely perceptible irregularity glimpsed intermittently through squinted eyes”
“beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification”
“crimes are universally understood to be news to the extent that they offer, however erroneously, a story, a lesson, a high concept”
Didion
I know the practical, it will keep you breathing; awe, on the other hand, is what makes you (me) want to keep living. (JK)
A garden is the place to tend to the subtler, life-sustaining regiment of our lives. A place to cultivate the imaginary, hope, and expectations held in budding plants, intimated by the unfurling of new flower, the subtler and supporting reasons to toil and labor, should be the right of every citizen.
Thought, sunshine, and flowers: time to think and imagine, to take in the sun and breathe unhurriedly, and to tend to plants within their temporality. (RS)
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
… habit of indirection; … to delight in a margin; … not something to do, but something to be experienced, and something to go through (ZS)
“The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing.”
“Grace, that dictionary. A place where every thing was attached to a meaning.”
“Fear made me work hard, get better. It’s a dirty fuel, but it works.”
“… read an Odyssey in a gasp, a Shahnehmeh in a sigh”
“I did know real, deep joy. […] my lifetime’s allotment”
–Kaveh Akbar
I give my life to art because it stays.
It’s what time doesn’t ruin.
“Lord, increase my bewilderment.”
— (KA)
Rosa de la Cruz. Thank you.
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
That’s when she found the tree,
the dark, crabbed branches
bearing up such speechless bounty,
she knew without being told
this was forbidden. It wasn’t
a question of ownership—
who could lay claim to
such maddening perfection?
[…]I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land, Rita Dove
Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940 organized by Curator María Elena Ortiz, at Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, March 10, 2024 – July 28, 2024.
Centered on the intersection of Caribbean aesthetics, Afrosurrealism, and Afrofuturism, Surrealism and Us explores how Caribbean and Black artists interpreted a modernist movement. Artworks, framed within a pre-existing history of Black resistance and creativity, illustrate how Caribbean and Black artists reinterpreted the European avant-garde for their own purposes.
“such silence
still divine presence
echoes immortal migrants
a cardinal framed in the glass
red light
calling away despair
eternal promise
everything changes and ends”
8., bell hooks