Category: landscape

---

Looking intensely at one image, then doing so again and again, is more or less the premise of the writer and critic Brian Dillon’s latest book, Affinities (2023), a text that endeavours to analyse attraction. […] For Dillon, affinity is an unreasoned impulse; the magnetic draw of an image, the way it imprints on our psyches, the way it holds time still cannot be academically delineated. But the more one surrenders to affinity, the more one can see – and the more one can learn. One can learn how to tease out a narrative, absent of language. Grace Linden, Psyche, 051723.

---

---

“Beauty had this penalty—it came too readily, came too completely.” (VW)

---

“like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.”

---

“Say maiden wilt thou go with me
Through the valley-depths of shade,
Of night and dark obscurity

[…]

To live in death and be the same
Without this life

[…]

The present mixed with reasons gone
And past, and present all as one.”

---

“What constitutes infrastructure, in contrast, are the patterns, habits, norms, and scenes of assemblage and use.

This is what it means to invent alter-life from within life,

heterotopian impulse” (LB)

“Spinelessness takes hold of this divided heart. And, with it, the usual trickery, the taste for “schemes”; thus blossoms in the Antilles this flower of human baseness, the colored bourgeoisie.

And when, abruptly, in the Caribbean night, all decked out in love and quiet, there bursts forth the call of drums, the Blacks ready themselves to respond to the desire of the earth and of the dance,

It is thus that the Caribbean conflagration blows its silent fumes, blinding for the only eyes that know how to see,”

“The Great Camouflage”, trans. Keith L. Walker, in Césaire, The Great Camouflage, 2012, pp 39-46. monoskop.org