“Perhaps what we’re all looking for, … truth as possibility” Sarr
AG2024_1088828a
Category: landscape
AG2022_2110558b or au même endroit
“All authors wear disguises.”
“author’s ability to place all those book fragments end to end, blending them into his own prose and the narrative”
“a woman (or a goddess: the word is the same in the Bassari language)”
The Most Secret Memory of Men: A Novel,
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, translated by Lara Vergnaud
Chacun a sa blessure et son tresor au même endroit – Christian Bobin (readingwild).
AG2024_2060920a or quite unnoticed this was
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
As I think of it now, it must have started
As a game to please a boy: but games without humor
Become the occupation of a lifetime.
– Marcia Carlson
AG2024_2060917a or peace dwelt, sanity reigned
“peace dwelt, sanity reigned and the sun for ever shone” Woolf, To The Lighthouse
Let’s aim for peace and sanity. 25000 Palestinians killed by IDF, so far (The Guardian).
Betye Saar
Celestial Universe (1988), which has been part of a number of installations over the decades. Hand-painted on silk taffeta, this large, dark blue banner displays a star map from 1840 complete with zodiac signs and figures of the constellations originating from Greco-Roman mythology. Suspended from the ceiling to hover like a canopy above a candle-lined canoe, the work premiered in ‘Voyages: Dreams and Destinations’at the National Taiwan Museum of Art in Taichung in 1988, evoking the use of constellations for nautical navigation.
[…]
…the night sky of Celestial Universe may symbolize a space of liberatory potential that reaches beyond the limited map of the past and present
Stephanie Seidel in Frieze
AG2021_2030457a or avenues of grace
When we ask about the ends of criticism, we’re also asking how criticism ends. I don’t think it does, any more than love. Both things—criticism, love—are better off, and better done, if we let them admit their perversions, their failures and travesties and pratfalls. They are, both things, an unending negotiation of the limits of what is bearable. They are, at their best, avenues of grace within fucked-up time, languages of perpetual inquiry and curiosity, poses of submission and dominance and everything in between, a practice of turn-taking in a world that runs on theft and greed. They believe, rightly or wrongly, that there is always room to try again. And maybe there is.
Anahid Nersessian, Originally published in Mousse 86
Maybe it’s chance. Maybe it’s fate. But the two aren’t necessarily contradictory. Chance is merely a fate unknown to us, a fate written in invisible ink.
[…]
And that’s exactly what you should always follow: life and its unpredictable paths. They all lead to the same place, the same destination for all of us, but to get there, they take routes that can be beautiful or terrible, paved with flowers or bones, night roads we often travel alone, but where we have the chance to put our souls to the test.
The Most Secret Memory of Men: A Novel
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, translated from French by Lara Vergnaud
AG2021_1880278aa or and for running after spinning top
Untitled (A place to stand and stare, recalling tunes of ballads in a minor key)
It is “the running after the spinning top” or “To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.” Carson via Enns.
AG2024_1820407 or a poetics that leavens
Ordinary Unhappiness, Anahid Nersessian on The Lights by Ben Lerner.
“If the aim of this art is to map in language “the motion,” as John Ashbery put it, “by which a life / May be known and recognized,” it must confront what happens when life begins to take a shape whose patterns are warped or aborted by an anomalous present and the anticipation of an even worse future.
In The Lights, the pervasive unreliability of the world is visible on the page, where it takes many forms”
[…]
“The title The Lights seems to refer to what Lerner calls “sources / of lift,” those unexpected instants when someone … or something … leavens without eliminating the difficult immensity of being alive. It doesn’t always work.”
[…]
“Kindness, it turns out, does not mean trying to argue someone into sanity by exposing her delusions nor does it mean ignoring them. Instead, it might mean finding a way to enter unobtrusively into madness as if in a collaborative spirit and to make it non-catastrophic together.”
[…]
“The madness of the world might not be malleable and yet there is no ethical choice but to try and reshape it. If Lerner’s language aspires to be a medium in which experience is, however briefly, suspended before it is shorn down into clarity or cliché, that language has no illusions about its power. It knows that poetry—like sex or parenting or friendship—is a discipline of barely getting by. We fuck up, we act like clowns, we cause pain without thinking or because we cannot control ourselves. But we also show up and repair what we must and save who we can.”
“I selected
sleep, but could not
I decided to change everything
Composed entirely of stills
or fade into the trees
[…]
In a perfect world, this would be
April, or an associated concept
Green to the touch
several feet away
[By any measure], Ben Lerner