Category: language

AG2021_2020689

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Nature (the natural!) is the setting for our humanity. Being attentive to one’s presence near the natural generates joy.

Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,”

There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

Rachel Carson.

“The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendour of life, yields a new thought with every petal, […] The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live.” – Richard Jefferies

via Popova

The natural world can offer us more than the means to survive, on the one hand, or mortal risks to be avoided, on the other: it can offer us joy.

[…]

There can be occasions when we suddenly and involuntarily find ourselves loving the natural world with a startling intensity, in a burst of emotion which we may not fully understand, and the only word that seems to me to be appropriate for this feeling is joy.

[…]

we need constantly reminding that we have been operators of computers for a single generation and workers in neon-lit offices for three or four, but we were farmers for five hundred generations, and before that hunter-gatherers for perhaps fifty thousand or more

[…]

It is time for a different, formal defence of nature. We should offer up not just the notion of being sensible and responsible about it, which is sustainable development, nor the notion of its mammoth utilitarian and financial value, which is ecosystem services, but a third way, something different entirely: we should offer up what it means to our spirits; the love of it. We should offer up its joy.

The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy, Michael McCarthy

On Liberation –

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Haiti’s participation in extending the notion of liberation is still relevant to our understanding of freedom and of being free, to being a citizen, sovereign and a subject.  Liberation moved from the conceptual and was situated in the corporeal.

Sort of related:

“I never let a statue tell me how nice I am”

Phife Dawg, “Award Tour,” from Midnight Marauders.

050721

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back at it.

Un-related —

Dot-Band Class, Attic, active 520 – 500 BCE Black-Figure Vessel (Amphora) Depicting the Struggle between Apollo and Herakles for the Delphic Tripod and African Attendant with Horse, late 6th century BCE Archaic Period Greece, Attica region, possibly Athens Terracotta 8 3/8 × 6 × 5 3/8 in. (21.3 × 15.2 × 13.7 cm) 3-D Object/Sculpture 1983-035 DJ Photo: Paul Hester, via Menil.org

Works from the Menil’s “Image of the Black” project explore the history between Africa and Europe.

AG2021_2050839a

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“Some soldiers with nuns behind them served as an example to explain what the punctum was to me… but when Bruce Gilden photographs a nun and some drag queens (New Orleans, 1973), the deliberate contrast produces no effect on me, except perhaps one of irritation. Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly, intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful… it does not necessarily attest to the photographer’s art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object.”

Fried quoting Barthes’s Camera Lucida, framing his argument linking punctum and anti-theatricality.

“That is it; that is all Barthes has to say with respect to the punctum, about the point of view, the activity, of the photographer as distinct from the response of the viewer… it is enough to situate Camera Lucida in relation to the central current or tradition of anti-theatrical critical thought and pictorial practice that I have tried to show… Understood in this context, Barthes’s observation… that the detail that strikes him as a punctum could not do so had it been intended as such by the photographer is an anti-theatrical claim in that it implies a fundamental distinction, which goes back to Diderot, between ‘seeing’ and ‘being shown’.”

Fried argues.

In the garden, we perform the act of possessing

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Jamaica Kincaid via newyorker, published in the print edition of the September 7, 2020, issue, with the headline “A Heap of Disturbance.”

And so there I was, a sickly child who could read but had no sense of consciousness, had no idea of how to understand and so make sense of the world into which she was born, a world that was always full of a yellow sun, green trees, a blue sea, and black people.

and brought it into her own garden and tended to it in a careless, everyday way,

For her, the wild and the cultivated were equal and yet separate, together and apart.

the Tree of Life is agriculture and the Tree of Knowledge is horticulture. We cultivate food, and when there is a surplus of it, producing wealth, we cultivate the spaces of contemplation, a garden of plants not necessary for physical survival. The awareness of that fact is what gives the garden its special, powerful place in our lives and our imaginations. The Tree of Knowledge holds unknown, and therefore dangerous possibilities; the Tree of Life is eternally necessary, and the Tree of Knowledge is deeply and divinely dependent on it.

Ownership of ourselves and of the ground on which we walk, ownership of the other beings with whom we share this and see that it is good, and ownership of the vegetable kingdom are all uncertain, too. Nevertheless, in the garden, we perform the act of possessing. To name is to possess;

The garden makes managing an excess of feelings—good feelings, bad feelings—rewarding […]. The garden is a heap of disturbance

“[…] (where did the people in a Rembrandt painting get all that stuff they are piling on?)” :: Horticultural surplus!

[…] in thickets of words.

“where did plants, annual and perennial, pristinely set out in something called a border, and arranged sometimes according to color and sometimes according to height, come from?” :: Eden! (a notion of)

I had acquired (and read) so many books that it put a strain on my family’s budget. Resentment, a not unfamiliar feeling relating to the garden, set in.

“A new primrose is more special than meeting any conqueror.” :: True!!!

reading—learning to read and reading books, the words a form of food, a form of life, and then knowledge.

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Roses on North Flores St.

Related :

“carry it always / on my person, concealed.”

Roger Robinson, A Portable Paradise; Poetry Unbound.