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.
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
1.
I was the starlight
I was the moonlight
I was the sunset,
Before the dawning
Of my life;
I was the river
Forever winding
To purple dreaming,
I was the glowing
Of youthful Springtime,
I was the singing
Of golden songbirds,—
I was love.
2.
I was the sunlight,
I was the twilight,
I was the humming
Of winged creatures
Ere my birth;
I was the blushing
Of lily maiden,
I was the vision
Of youthful striving,
I was the summer,
I was the autumn,
I was the All-time—
I was love.
Revery, Fenton Johnson
Reading List: Publishers for Palestine. (Afterall)
“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!
Dr. Martin Luther King
Today is the federal holiday that honors Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. via DemocracyNow.
“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.”
Robin Kelley, Freedom Dreams
“It was far-reaching: this much she knew. It had layers and strata, like a landscape.”
“trying to live as best they can in the presence of such enormous, distracting absences”
(Maggie O’Farrell)
Toxic, Jeff Russo · Lisa Hannigan, Fargo Year 5 (Soundtrack from the MGM/ FXP Series)
“Marxism has always claimed that being can determine consciousness precisely to determine being anew.’”
“Consciousness is no longer the mere product of social being but is at once a condition of its practical existence and, further, one of its central productive forces.
Raymond Williams
The day, with all its pain ahead, is yours.
The ceaseless creasing of the mourning sea,
the fluttering gamboge cedar leaves allegro
Derek Walcott
Some people, born inside out, are prone to unravelling.
Among our vestigial traits: coccyx, wisdom tooth, death.
Every day, piecemeal evolution. Soon I will be pure wonder.
You step into the river of your history, wrinkle, step out.
Fruit is the fruit of the tree; rot is the fruit of the fruit.
Annelyse Gelman, Conch