You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
Make even everyday moments memorable via Improve your memory.
paying undivided attention to important events and interactions
Make even everyday moments memorable–assigns vivid images to whatever one’s trying to remember
study or reflect on things you want to remember, the more likely these memories will be strengthened–commit the scene to memory by journaling
“a memory uncertain about a sentence
a certain observation of an indefinite object”
Lauren Berlant on the Critical Lede, August 25, 2012. They introduced Cruel Optimism (2011).
“… forms of optimism, I’m very interested in, are the kind with which you attached your endurance in the world, with which you attached your continuity in the world
… what it means to have a life […] there’s so many people but one normative model of having a life […] it’s the job of politically engaged critical work to try to imagine other ways of having a life”
all of that is about the way that the labor of the reproduction of life in the historical present is sustain by the fantasy of the good life but is lived as an ongoingness
you make your political claim in the present
the present […] as a place where people are figuring out life
affect works in the present, it’s the bodies response to the world
attempts to change people’s political consciousness, not by changing their ideology, but by changing their affective relation to inhabiting the public
what ought to be in the collective imaginary for flourishing”
… optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving; and, doubly, it is cruel insofar as the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming.
via Encountering Berlant part two: Cruel and other optimisms
Joshua Rothman on forms of thinking, in New Yorker.
“our inner voices are powerful tools that must be tamed. […] The idea is to manage the voice that you use for self-management.
[…]
Schwitzgebel thinks it’s a mistake to categorize dreams one way or the other. “We should also consider the possibility that our dreams are neither color nor black-and-white,” he writes. Dreams are unreal, and might not lend themselves to being described during waking life. In describing them, we give them a fixity they may not have.
[…]
Daniel Dennett argued that a layer of fiction is woven into what it is to be human. In a sense, fiction is flawed: it’s not true. […] Fiction, Dennett writes, has a deliberately “indeterminate” status: it’s true, but only on its own terms. The same goes for our minds.”
Walking long and far help my thinking process.
Stand and stare some place, recalling or thinking through what comes to mind.
Drawn into “the lull of a certain infinity” (OM).
We sing the familiar because it feels soft and always.
Corazón in Fall, Emma Trelles
when something taken for granted
is suddenly over, the pause when you take stock
and realize you’ll never have as much,
that change is always a lessening
The Way Words Echo in Our Heads, James Cihlar
The relief of having something to focus our attention.
[…]
The future refuses [or is slow] to happen, so where else should I turn?
Prefer crossed out, scribbled over monuments
Berlant’s work is underpinned by a pressing desire for new forms of relationality and alternative ways to flourish. There is an urgency to their writing: feelings are political, affective life sustains the possibilities for other life-worlds.
[…]
What Berlant proposes then is ‘an affective register which recognises the relationship between the joy-giving parts and the parts that require a kind of patience with the way things do not fit. The out-of-synchness of being matters’ (Berlant & Hardt, 2012, n.p.
[…]
queer theory presumes the affective incoherence of the subject with respect to the objects that anchor it or to which they’re attached. (Berlant & Hardt, 2012, n.p.)
[…]
Berlant helps us think about affective life through the lens of ambivalence, contradiction, and incoherence, rather than certainty and singularity. It is this that makes Berlant’s social theory so generative: an invitation to always ask questions, to unravel our own objects of attachment and fantasies of political transformation.
[…]
think capaciously about the affective dimensions it will take to rebuild the world from the fragments of the present.
Eleanor Wilkinson, 11 | AMBIVALENT LOVE, Encountering Berlant part 1: Concepts otherwise.
Kehinde Wiley, The Painter and his court in New Yorker.
Wiley, who once described himself as a manufacturer of “high-priced luxury goods for wealthy consumers,” never promised anyone empowerment. In a way, his has been the classic fate of the court painter: conscripted as a propagandist—by the royalists, the reformers, and the revolutionaries—when his real passion is for capturing the fleeting postures of his era.
[…]
Last winter at the National Gallery in London, I saw Wiley’s exhibition “The Prelude,” an exploration of nature and the sublime which envisions Black wanderers amid the mountains and seascapes of such nineteenth-century Romantics as J. M. W. Turner, Winslow Homer, and Caspar David Friedrich. For most of his career, Wiley conspicuously omitted landscape from his paintings, pointedly substituting decorative patterns for the land and chattels that loom behind many Old Master portraits. It was a liberation of style from property and privilege. Recently, though, he’s abandoned the constraint. The shift is a call for Black people to take up space in the world, which doubles as a wink at his own vertiginous climb.
Julian Lucas, Newyorker January 2 & 9, 2023.