dig

Category: language

  • AG2023_1033822a

    AG2023_1033822a

    L’imaginaire de mon lieu est relié à la réalité imaginable des lieux du monde, et tout inversement. L’archipel est cette réalité source, non pas unique, d’où sont sécrétés ces imaginaires : le schème de l’appartenance et de la relation, en même temps.

    Glissant, Édouard, Philosophie de la Relation, Paris, Gallimard, 2009.

    “the imaginary of my place is related to the imaginable reality in all places …”

    Releted(?) : heterotopias–“In Of Other Spaces Foucault coined the term “heterotopias” to signify “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture” which “are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” For Foucault, heterotopic spaces were first of all spaces of crisis, or transformative spaces …”

  • Conclusio and Marche

    Nicholas Britell, Song of Hal: Conclusio in C Minor, The King, 2019.

    Nicholas Britell, Marche – Agincourt, The King, 2019.

    AG2023_1033761a

    “The order that matters most is not spatial but temporal […] time itself as patterns, recurrences, the rhythmic passage of days, […] lunar cycles and the tides, birth and death” (RS)

  • AG2023_1033481a

    AG2023_1033481a

    “Becoming American would remain an incomplete project” (HH); especially with a preference for Congo peas.

  • No quantifiable practical result

    “Ecology without class struggle is gardening” — Chico Mendes, via Marcela Cantuária’s The South American Dream at PAMM.

    Gardens are nodes “where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result” may coalesce, but those aspects may align and “fit into the life of someone, perhaps of anyone, who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.” (RS)

    Mendes was assassinated in 1988. He might have added nuance to this quote, that seems too easily quotable.

    AG2023_1033493a

  • AG2023_1033596a or reach

    AG2023_1033596a

    Reach passed the “imposed conditions of apartness” (IF)

  • Hidden aptitudes

    …their hidden aptitudes unlocked

    only by time and the heat of a burbling mélange;

    (Rita Dove, Soup)

    sharp, of course. more variously:

    crisp or peircing, clean or fuzzy.

    (RD, The Terror and the Pity)

    Five p.m. I never thought

    I’d find relief

    in the old joke that it’s always darkest

    before it goes pitch black,

    but at least then

    it will be dark and then

    thank god, black.

    (RD, No Color)

    “It could not be predicted. The condition had a name, the kind of name usually associated with telethons, but the name meant noting … (Joan Didion, The white Album)

    Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness, to wisdom, we only make promises; pain we obey. (Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain)

  • AG2023_1033326a or as it comes

    AG2023_1033326a

    Aubade: East

    Harlem, a.m.

    Today’s the day, I can taste it.

    Got my gray sweats pouting in a breeze

    so soft, I feel like I’m still wrapped for sleeping

    as I head uptown in my undercover power-suit,

    bitch sunlight fingering the spaced-out tenements.

    This morning there ain’t nothing I can’t do.

    This is my territory, I know all of it—

    ten long blocks flanked by mighty water.

    Walking any Avenue is like riding

    a cosmic surfboard on the biggest wave

    of the goddam century, the East River

    twerking her bedazzled behind

    while sky spills coin like a luck-crazed

    Vegas granny flush at the slots. Today

    I’m gonna make out like a bandit myself:

    hook up with my buds to drop

    a few shots on the courts, ogle the ladies,

    then play the rest of the day

    as it comes                see where it goes

    feeling good

    feeling good

    somewhere over the Hudson

    the sun                      heading home

    Rita Dove, via The Georgia Review, Spring 2016 and Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems.

    ““Aubade East,” is set in Harlem, N.Y. The cocky speaker, out for a walk, squints into the “bitch sunlight fingering the spaced-out tenements.” This is a hat-tip to Toni Morrison, who famously — famously in my house, anyway — wrote in “Sula,” “The sun was already rising like a hot white bitch.”” Dwight Garner, Houston Chronicle.

  • AG2023_1033319a

    AG2023_1033319a

    “… one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a [enchanted] lever, a means of inspiring fear” (JB)