Category: landscape

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Can you hear the familiar pitch
of olive harvest the old tune
of older farmers gathered
for processions yet to come
a voice of closeness
to the earth

A Thistle Will Do, Omar Berrada

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It is a glance down into time, at realities you once knew, as staggeringly beautiful as the glance of your beloved

‘Now’ is a gift of the gods and an access onto reality.

… assimilate ‘now’ in such a way that it prolongs itself over the whole of life, and beyond.

Anne Carson

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In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,
a bird’s sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.
I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.
I belong there.

I belong there, Mahmoud Darwish

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When the first star with brilliance bright,
Gleams lonely o’er the arch of night;
When the bright moon dispels the gloom,
And various are the stars that bloom,
And brighten as the sun at noon,
                                    Forget me not.

When solemn sighs the hollow wind,
And deepen’d thought enraps the mind;
If e’er thou doest in mournful tone,
E’er sigh because thou feel alone,
Or wrapt in melancholy prone,
                                    Forget me not. 

When bird does wait thy absence long,
Nor tend unto its morning song;
While thou art searching stoic page,
Or listening to an ancient sage,
Whose spirit curbs a mournful rage,
                                    Forget me not.

[…]

“Should sorrow cloud thy coming years,
And bathe thy happiness in tears,
Remember, though we’re doom’d to part,
There lives one fond and faithful heart,
                        That will forget thee not.”

Forget me not, Ann Plato

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Just Forget It, Anahid Nersessian. Bookforum Winter 2025. John Kelsey’s injured romanticism

“I Forget, a long poem published by Semiotext(e) in its pamphlets series. An homage of sorts to Joe Brainard’s beloved 1975 book I Remember, Kelsey’s I Forget inverts its mnemonic formula, which has Brainard writing hundreds of short sentences or miniature paragraphs beginning with that titular phrase.

[…]

Remembering offers to put us back together, to re-member and re-assemble us even against the attritive onslaught of time. Forgetting would seem to do the opposite, to mangle or disfigure our identity by stripping it of its experiences. This is the forgetting of dementia, which Kelsey alludes to in a passage that describes his father’s “unfocused eyes and hanging mouth,” “his memory, his mind” beginning to liquefy. But in the lyrical love story that weaves in and out of Kelsey’s catalogue of lost things, we glimpse another forgetting, the kind that clears the way for its familiar cognate, forgiveness.”

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Thal Tales, Ryan Ruby. Bookforum Fall 2024. On Rachel Kushner’s novel of a radical French collective, espionage, and Neanderthal revivalism.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live, after all. If that seems self-evident in the case of a narrative genre like the novel, it is no less the case for a discursive genre like theory. Bruno’s theories, for example, are elaborate but transparent attempts to rationalize his personal sorrows: after the failure of May ’68, he rejects the urban in favor of the rural; after his daughter’s death in the tractor accident, he rejects agriculture; and so on. But skepticism about the sincerity of people’s political motives tends to be fired in only one direction: at critics of the social order by those who uphold it. The reason for this is that those who would like to change the social order must explicitly articulate their criticisms of it, which then read as political or ideological, whereas those who uphold the status quo are allowed to presume that their views are natural or simply go without saying. In fact, the real mystery is the deeper motives of the people who identify with a social order that oppresses them and exploits them, and controls them so completely that they are unable to see that their compliance with it is very much a political activity, indeed the most widespread form of politics there is.

[…]

We have just seen, in the case of Creation Lake, how Kushner’s choice of narrative perspective and character have the effect of disaggregating a collective into its component individuals and reducing political convictions to personal interests. We should add that these are political outcomes baked in to the literary form of their representation, not into reality itself. The charge that Sadie levels at Lucien and that Bruno levels at Pascal—that their respective attachments to ’60s- and ’70s-era figures like Godard and Debord are forms of nostalgia and romanticism—could also be leveled at Creation Lake, which reads like a literary-fiction adaptation of the aforementioned Jean-Patrick Manchette, whose Debord-influenced crime thrillers about female assassins, anarchist collectives, undercover cops, and political demonstrators were written half a century ago, in the early years of the neoliberal counterrevolution. In other words, Creation Lake may describe a period of political restorationism, but is itself an instance of aesthetic restorationism. As such, it not only formally mirrors the political impasses of its own time, it reproduces them. It may be easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but it is no less difficult, it seems, to imagine a new form for the novel. Perhaps these two difficulties are not unrelated.”

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Plumbing the depths inside yourself is not easy work. It is difficult work.

the way to break free of what we are is to find out who we might have been, and to try to restore some kernel of our lost essence. (RK)

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Allons! through struggles and wars!
The goal that was named cannot be countermanded.

Have the past struggles succeeded?
What has succeeded? yourself? your nation? Nature?
Now understand me well—it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.

My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion,
He going with me must go well arm’d,
He going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty, angry enemies, desertions.

Song of the Open Road, 14, Walt Whitman

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What I do is live. And because of the way I have lived, I know what is possible. (RK)

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noisome image

Me, I adhere to my salt. I draw strength from it, use it. I keep watch over my salt, and when it serves me, I keep watch over other people’s salt. I mine my salt, and sometimes, I mine the salt of others. Which is to say: I cooperate with the part of them that they can’t reach, are not in touch with, cannot see, but that sometimes, when I am lucky, I can see quite well.

For nuance and verve, English wins. We took a Germanic language and enfolded it with Norman French and a bunch of Latin and ever since we keep building out. Our words, our expanse of idioms, are expressive and creative and precise, like our music and our subcultures and our street style, our passion for violence, stupidity, and freedom. The French might have better novels (Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert) and they have better cheeses (Comté, Roquefort, Cabécou). But in the grand scheme that’s basically nothing.

Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner

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Alexander Pope’s 1711 “An Essay on Criticism,” which hails the critic as “the Muse’s judge and friend.”

[…]

“An Essay on Criticism” is written in heroic couplets and divided into three parts. Part One begins rather acidly: “’Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill / Appear in writing or in judging ill.” Poets may test our patience, Pope claimed, but critics—partial, arrogant, defensive—“mislead our sense.” Their writing was distorted by “false learning,” “pretending wit,” “vain ambition,” and “needful pride.” The drive to censure turned them into drones, “half-form’d insects” that swarmed by the dozens to a single dull verse. Like Johnson’s critics, Pope’s critics were fallen creatures, moderns with no compass to guide their judgment other than the “glimm’ring light” of their own minds, which too often bent sinister. But it was not always so, Pope assured us. High on Parnassus, the precepts of art were derived from the poetry of the ancients, which the first critic brought down to earth. He was like Prometheus, only guile­less and gentlemanly: “The gen’rous critic fann’d the poet’s fire, / And taught the world with reason to admire.”

“The gen’rous critic,” as Pope reconstructed him in Parts Two and Three of the essay, had a great capacity for “gen’rous pleasure” and a highly developed sense of commensurability, which allowed him to “regard the writer’s end / Since none can compass more than they intend.” The generous critic identified and accepted the work’s intentions, its conventions.

[…]

Running underneath Pope’s account of the commensurability between the generous critic and the text was a wonderfully com­plex and democratic theory of pleasure. Pleasure, for Pope, arose neither from the critic’s purely subjective reaction nor from the poem’s objective perfection. It derived from the mingling of admi­ration and reason—“a happiness as well as care.” Reason reconciled wholes and parts, intentions and expectations, to show “the joint force and full result of all.”

The Critic as Friend, Merve Emre