“Today’s the day, I can taste it.
[..]
there ain’t nothing I can’t do
[…]
play the rest of the day
as it comes
(RD, Aubade East)
Category: language
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AG2023_1034051b and its necessity
“The danger and its necessity focused them, made them calm.” (Toni Morrison, Paradise)
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“I’ve long admired photographers/artists, … , who’d write directly on their prints.” Moyra Davey. Exposé·es at Palais de Tokyo.
Moyra Davey, Visitor (detail), 2022. Courtesy of Galerie Buchholz.
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canopy, late night, nourished dreams of a free territory
Untitled (Suburban canopy, late night) 2018.
“In the context of social death, everyday practices explored the possibility of transfigured existence and cultivated an imagination of the otherwise and elsewhere, cartographies of the fantastic utterly antagonistic to slavery.
[…]
At secret meetings and freedom schools, hidden away in loopholes of retreat and hush arbors, gathered at the river or dwelling in the swamp, the enslaved articulated a vision of freedom that far exceeded that of the liberal imagination. It enabled them to conceive other ways of existing, flee the world of masters and invite its fiery destruction, anticipate the upheaval that would put “the bottom rail on top,” nurture a collective vision of what might be possible when no longer enslaved, and sustain belief in the inevitability of slavery’s demise.
[…]
The arrangement of stars in the night sky, the murmur and echo of songs traveling across a river, the revered objects buried near a prayer tree, the rumors of fugitives in the swamp or maroons in the hills nourished dreams of a free territory, or an existence without masters, or a plot against the plantation, or reveries of miraculous deliverance.” (SH, Scenes of Subjection)
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AG2023_1034232a or merely a question of distance
“When we want to see blue, we look up at the sky. The Earth is blue to anyone looking down at it from the sky. Is blue in itself a color or merely a question of distance? Or a question of profound nostalgia? The unreachable is always blue.” Clarice Lispector, Too Much of Life.
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every decision matters, though not in ways we could have anticipated
“One of the tragedies that plot brings to light is the degree to which our inner lives and intentions can simply come to nothing—unrealized despite our best efforts, misunderstood and fruitless, as the story we played our part in generating goes on without us. It is only by elevating human choice that we can see how often our choices don’t matter, after all. Or maybe it would be better to say that our choices matter only unpredictably. There’s no way of knowing what will really count until later, and by then it’s too late. Better choose.”
B.D. McClay reviews Birnam Wood and on Catton’s use of plot, in New Yorker.
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“The presence of the sublime tells us that to break the world and open access to the universal sense, we have to shatter how we know.” (LB)
“to split open [this] dreary world to expose an enchanted one” (TM)
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as you wish. But be drunk.
You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.
But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking . . . ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”
From Modern Poets of France: A Bilingual Anthology, translated and edited by Louis Simpson, published by Story Line Press, Inc. Copyright © 1997
So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth
[…]
On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.Be drunk, Charles Baudelaire
