Category: language

Our relationship to this domain–beauty

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Merve Emre with László Krasznahorkai (New Yorker)

Everything that is beautiful—whether natural or created by human beings, whether created by God or by life itself—exists in an inviolable domain, which never changes. Only we change, only our relationship to this domain changes, our chances of connecting to it change. In the Renaissance, our chances improved, and now in our modern age they have been ruined, our chances of making this perfect beauty appear, of stepping into relation to it, for it to hold our souls.

[…]

The first movement of despair, when a person is uncertain, when they feel frail, is to start looking for a form that will free them from this uncertainty, and then these political ideologies start coming very easily, without any kind of serious philosophical background, or even without any philosophical background whatsoever.

I don’t need anything from here.

László Krasznahorkai, translated, from the Hungarian, by Ottilie Mulzet.

Red International and Black Caribbean, Communists in New York City, Mexico and the West Indies, 1919-1939, Margaret Stevens

Good habits for eye care. (CNET) The American Optometric Association recommends using the 20-20-20 rule to prevent computer vision syndrome. Every 20 minutes, look at something at least 20 feet away for 20 seconds.

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how this land really is, of how it has always been

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TRACKS-ARTE on politics and criticality in the recent Puerto Rican music.

there needs to be a map of how this land really is, of how it has always been, of what lies beneath whatever order or disorder others might impose upon it. There must be a way to create such a document.

To map is to assume power. We can redraw the very land we walk upon, record it how it is, how it was, how it will be. We will not use their names, their estate lines, their plantation boundaries, their barracks: these shall be erased. The very essence of the land, the soil is exactly—”

Land, Maggie O’Farrell

Not “overtly racial”

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The matter of race was central to the T.P.S. case, Adam Liptak writes. Trump has a history of derogatory statements against Haitians: He has accused them of “poisoning the blood” of the nation, accused them of “eating the pets” of their neighbors, and described their home country as a “shithole” that is “filthy, dirty, disgusting.”

If discrimination was “a motivating factor” in Trump’s determination, the leading precedent said, it would violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause. But Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, concluded that Trump’s comments had not cleared that bar. The president’s statements, he wrote, were not “overtly racial.”

Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent, was incredulous. “The references — of filth, disease and primitiveness — are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes,” she wrote. (NYTimes)

Mullin v. Doe (25-1083), Supreme Court.

passed through a rent into another realm

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ReRiddle - Guerrier11635
re.riddle-Guerrier11635.jpg, Courtesy of the artist and re.riddle. Photo by Lucas Saugen.
  • he makes the-crossroads-under-the-bluff-where-once-a-hailstorm-killed-a-cockerel read “Bluff’s Cross” and renders the-strand-where-the-yellow-periwinkles-gather-in-spring into “Yellowcove.” 
  • It is a necessary but unenviable part of his current task to distil into inked symbols and ordered lines what has taken place here
  • passed through a rent into another realm
  • It made her cry out in something like pleasure, to see the peninsula there upon the page, as it had been, to look down upon it, as if she were up in the air, a bird, or a heavenly angel, and it seemed to her a brand of sorcery, to be presented with this version of the place
Land, Maggie O’Farrell

sell them the world

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Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

Good Bones, Maggie Smith

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terrible … keep this from my children … make it better

Daoist philosophy argues against meritocracy and for the conditions that would make us better. (aeon.co)