Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, on The Daily, discusses his diagnosis and how to chart a path back to power for National Democratic Party. He is correct in his analysis.
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Category: landscape
A web of loss
Gauzy film between
evergreens is a web
of loss. Get closer. Reach
to touch the shimmering
gossamer and your finger
pushes through. Remember
filling that space with desire?
Someone else might grieve
the spider who abandoned
this home; others grow anxious
waiting for a deer’s walk
to wreck it. But you—
you grieve the net of thought
spun inside your own womb:
intricate and glossy and strong.
Miscarriage, Christine Stewart-Nun?ez
In the quiet, Vera could hear its sharp puffs of breath—low and fast—a complete and utter confusion. A denial. The eyes like blank boxes, but there, in their depths, a sense of something moving. A frantic dancing. Erratic. Vera felt her heart pumping awkwardly, palpitating. “Please wait,” Vera whispered.
And then it died. Just like that, she felt it go. Something horrible and also strangely thrilling in it.
Roughage, India Ennenga (Verso)
AG2024_1077693a or I can’t get the hang of it
My failure to evolve has been causing me a lot of grief lately. I can't walk on my knuckles through the acres of shattered glass in the streets. I get lost in the arcades. My feet stink at the soirees. The hills have been bulldozed from whence cameth my help. The halfway houses where I met my kind dreaming of flickering lights in the woods are shuttered I don't know why. "Try," say the good people who bring me my food, "to make your secret anguish your secret weapon. Otherwise, your immortality will be an exhibit in a vitrine at the local museum, a picture in a book." But I can't get the hang of it. The heavy instructions fall from my hands. It takes so long for the human to become a human! He affrights civilizations with his cry. At his approach, the mountains retreat. A great wind crashes the garden party. Manipulate singly neither his consummation nor his despair but the two together like curettes and peel back the pitch-black integuments to discover the penciled-in figure on the painted-over mural of time, sitting on the sketch of a boulder below his aching sunrise, his moody, disappointed sunset.
Vijay Seshadri, The Descent of Man
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Elvan Zabunyan, Réunir les bouts du monde. Art, histoire, esclavage en mémoire, Le Crédac. B42.
Roots to Fruits, Nº3 Congada, 2024. Memórias Congadeiras. Over the course of five decades, self-taught musician and ethnomusicologist Spirito Santo (1947) has produced hundreds of hours of audio recordings containing music, reports and interviews, many meters of black & white negatives and colored slides using amateur photographic equipment, such as polaroids, point-and-shoot cameras and K7 recorders, capturing unique moments of the cultural history of the Central African diaspora in Minas Gerais, Brazil.
Brownout by Phoenecia released April 19, 2001.
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flung so high, spreading its radiance
A Lighthouse for Dark Times, Maria Popova (The Marginalian)
“Cultures and civilizations tend to overestimate the stability of their states, only to find themselves regularly discomposed by internal pressures and tensions too great for the system to hold. And yet always in them there are those who harness from the chaos the creative force to imagine, and in the act of imagining to effect, a phase transition to a different state.
We call those people artists — they who never forget it is only what we can imagine that limits or liberates what is possible.
[…]
[Hermann] Hesse observes that artists feel these painful instabilities more deeply than the rest of society and more restlessly, and out of that restlessness they make the lifelines that save us, the lifelines we call art.
[…]
Hesse insists that artists nourish the goodness of the human spirit “with such strength and indescribable beauty” that it is “flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment.”
Trouble in mind
Red everywhere, in 2024 elections. Florida (Miami-Dade, 43.9% blue, 55.4% red).
Not one good thing can come from this.
is only something on which to hang
your long overcoat; the slender snake asleep
in the grass; the umbrella by the door;
the black swan guarding the pond.
This ? has trouble in mind: do not ask
why the wind broods, why the light is so unclean.
It is summer, the rhetoric of the field,
its yellow grasses, something unanswerable.
The dead armadillo by the roadside, indecent.
Who cares now to recall that frost once encrusted
the field? The question mark—cousin to the 2,
half of a heart—already has begun its underhanded inquiry.
?, Randall Mann