You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
“the place in your head. I saw it once, a long time ago, a whole country in there, a landscape.”
“She wants, more than anything, to stretch this moment, to expand the time before he knows, to shield him from what has happened for as long as she can.”
“listening for the knock and keen of bad spirits trying to find a way in.” (MO)
“I leave the present and its fretful claims
And seek the dim past where my memories stay.
I dream an old, forgotten, far-off dream,
And think old thoughts and live old scenes anew
“i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship
and i taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.
“It was there, inside the song, that you had permission to lose yourself and not be wrong.”
“maybe all names are illusions” –(OV)
The Modern Jazz Quartet, Valeria. No date for this recording (probably not from a MJQ studio album). Label : Amor Indiano (probably acquired the rights to re-issue the recording).
“of these optimists, the poet and scholar Fred Moten turns directly to Fanon’s writing on Césaire. In particular, Moten is interested in Fanon’s frustration with Césaire’s use of pidgin and words of his own coinage: “The new speech, which animates Césaire’s poetry as well as Fanon’s invocation of Césaire in the interest of disavowing the new speech, is where we discover, again and again, the various and unrecoverable natality that we share.” Connecting Fanon’s quarrel with Césaire to Hannah Arendt’s belief that all human activity, and especially political activity, carries the promise of new creation—a promise latent in the unrepeatable nature of each person’s birth, hence “natality”—Moten helps us to see the new dimensions that this debate has acquired over time. Césaire was self-consciously preoccupied with making something new in art and politics alike, but reading his poetry today (with a stronger sense of the historical specificity of his writing) provides the present with the kind of historical investigation of blackness that Fanon felt was unavailable. But more important, the fact that Césaire did so through the materiality of language indicates blackness’s power for a new “communicability” not rooted in an essentialized idea of race, but in new methods of critiquing the cultural machinery that essentializes. For Césaire, new words hold the promise of new worlds. Poetry isn’t the only expressive mode where this kind of language work can happen, but it still is the best.
[…]
Davis’s Journal (Journal of a Homecoming … a new translation appeared from N. Gregson Davis, a professor of ancient Greek and Latin poetry at Duke University who grew up in Antigua.) provides the most powerful articulation of Césaire’s “new speech,” along with the necessary contextualizing tools to recognize and appreciate this power. In doing so, Davis has not merely translated a great work of modernist poetry and an essential document in postcolonial history; he has created a present-day source of timely dissent.”
— (The New Worlds of Aimé Césaire by David B. Hobbs, The Nation, July 3, 2018)
“works that take us to another place, envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling. […] a world of pleasure, not just to escape the everyday brutalities of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, but to build community, establish fellowship, play and laugh, and plant seeds for a different way of living, a different way of hearing.” (RK)
“Life can be different; it can be better or worse. Just not simple” […] “a zone of attention in which heterotopic forms of life might build out.” (LB)
[The detective engaged in] “chasing the spirit of the truth.”
“The world owes me nothing, he thought, certainly not a perfect ending.” (ML)
“Grace Lee Boggs … to participate in creating a vision of the future that will enlarge the humanity of all of us … When people come together voluntarily to create their own vision, they begin wishing it to come into being with such passion that they begin creating an active path leading to it from the present.” (RK, Freedom Dreams)
keep my heart forever filled anew
With dreams and wonders
