Landscape exerts a subtle power over people, eliciting a broad range of emotions and meanings that may be difficult to specify. This indeterminacy of affect seems, in fact, to be a crucial feature of whatever force landscape can have. As the background within which figure, form, or narrative act emerges, landscape exerts the passive force of setting, scene, and sight.
“Human lives are led in the weighty and dazzling presence of things”
[…]
For all her [Chamberlain] initial misgivings, she has no doubt of the continuing centrality of art and the powers of the imagination to our essential humanness:
[Rilke] was trying to find a new sensibility for the twentieth century, at a time when a certain style of philosophy had not yet made “the meaning of life” a naive question. His poems concern our gender and sexuality, our sense of what we ought to be doing with our lives, the possibility of the existence of God, the charmed kinship with animals which brings us such happiness, the importance of childhood, the attraction of the physical objects we make and buy and choose to live among, the landscapes we respond to, the books we read and the paintings in whose company we live. There is no object under Rilke’s gaze that resists transformation into a feature of a marvellous universe that envelops us in a world that might otherwise leave us restless and afraid.
John Banville reviews Rilke: The Last Inward Man by Lesley Chamberlain. The New York Review, November 3, 2022.
…reshapes the world. So … it is because of this shaped, elevated, patterned language that Grendel is able to contemplate beauty, recognize love, feel pity, crave mercy, and experience shame.
[…]
Conflict is the clash of incompatible forces, … a disharmony calling for adjustment, change, or compromise. Conflict recognizes legitimate oppositions, honest but different interpretations of data, contesting theories.
Conflict is a condition of intellectual life, and, I believe, its pleasure.
Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities
GRRM
INCERTEZA VIVA (Live Uncertainty), proposes to look at notions of uncertainty and the strategies offered by contemporary art to embrace or inhabit it.
[…] artistic projects has been especially commissioned […] to unfold the creative principles of uncertainty in many different directions. Numerous artworks look directly at nature and biological, botanical or alchemical processes, which can teach us about diversification and multiplicity. Other works incorporate or examine the multitude of narratives and forms of knowledge. Others critically examine political, economic and media structures of power and representation. And again others trigger the imagination and test alternative paths forward.
Jochen Volz, Gabi Ngcobo, Júlia Rebouças, Lars Bang Larsen and Sofía Olascoaga–32nd Bienal de São Paulo
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. . . . Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.”
a place of deep silence and brooding shadows, and the gods who lived here had no names.
GRRM
The shuttling between grief and grievance has been lost in pursuit of what is possible within a liberal legal conception of law and property. What is sacrificed in this approach, what cannot be heard, is the black noise that animated Cugoano’s earlier polemic. It is to this sound that the remaining essays in this volume are attuned. Black noise represents the kinds of political aspirations that are inaudible and illegible within the prevailing formulas of political rationality; these yearnings are illegible because they are so wildly utopian and derelict to capitalism (for example, ‘‘forty acres and a mule,’’ the end of commodity production and restoration of the commons, the realization of ‘‘the sublime ideal of freedom,’’ the resuscitation of the socially dead).20 Black noise is always already barred from the court.21
— 20. Seyla Benhabib and Paul Gilroy would term this noise ‘‘the politics of transfiguration,’’ by which they mean a notion of utopian politics that exceeds the frame of prevailing conceptions of political rationality. See Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge,1993), 37; and Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York, 1986), 13, 41. On ‘‘black mo’nin’,’’ see Fred Moten, In the Break (Minneapolis, 2003), 192–211. 21. What we call ‘‘black noise’’ Robin Kelley would describe as a ‘‘freedom dream,’’ or Fred Moten would describe as ‘‘the surreal utopian ‘nonsense’ of a utopian vision, the freedom we know outside of the opposition of sense and intellection’’; see Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, and Fred Moten, ‘‘Uplift and Criminality,’’ unpublished manu- script, 23.
Narrative restraint, the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure, is a requirement of this method, as is the imperative to respect black noise – the shrieks, the moans, the nonsense, and the opacity, which are always in excess of legibility and of the law and which hint at and embody aspirations that are wildly utopian, derelict to capitalism, and antithetical to its attendant discourse of Man.
Hartman, Saidiya, Venus in Two Acts, small axe 26, June 2008, p. 1 – 14
