Category: language

A lecture on Corners

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Anne Carson. Presented on May 10, 2018, by GC Public Programs and the Critical Theory Certificate Program.

32:20 “Our house is our corner of the world,” Bachelard says.

32:29 With its dialectic of inside and outside, the house is a container holding an answer to some question that is posed …

Related : visualizing theory conference. Interview in the Paris Review, 2004. Stillness Complicated by Corners – CI.

in the land of NOPE

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NOPE (a manifesto) by E. Jane

I am not an identity artist just because I am a Black artist with multiple selves.

I am not grappling with notions of identity and representation in my art. I’m grappling with safety and futurity. We are beyond asking should we be in the room. We are in the room. We are also dying at a rapid pace and need a sustainable future. 

We need more people, we need better environments, we need places to hide, we need Utopian demands, we need culture that loves us. 

I am not asking who I am. I’m a Black woman and expansive in my Blackness and my queerness as Blackness and queerness are always already expansive. None of this is as simple as “identity and representation” outside of the colonial gaze. I reject the colonial gaze as the primary gaze. I am outside of it in the land of NOPE.

via Glitch Feminism, A Manifesto by Legacy Russell.

X

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Malcolm X directed by Spike Lee, released November 18, 1992.

Related (I think) —

Vaughn Spann, AlmineRech; David Castillo.

Marked man (Mitchell), 2019. Mixed media on wooden panel. 60 x 48 inches. Acquired by Pérez Art Museum Miami.

The X is a notable and instantly recognizable letter and symbol. Spann described his own experience being stop and frisked by the police—the way his body became an X as it occurred. The X is also a target, a place to aim, to focus your attention. The series provides plenty of room for the viewer to project their own interpretations as well, given the X’s broad historical implications and associations. The first time I encountered Marked Man (Mitchell) (2019), I related it all to Spann’s personal anecdote, noting the connection between his and where my own mind took me upon encountering this work. The two are separate but the link is clear—the broader experience, the commentary on contemporary life—it comes alive for anyone paying attention to the intricacies of modern Black life. The viewer is to come forward prepared to bring with them their own world and unique purview. Spann’s paintings are not merely a reflection of his own but instead an invitation to share yours. The works function as a catalyst, allowing the viewer imaginative freedom.

Smoke Signals, September 03 — October 10, 2020. AlmineRech, Brussels. Press Release, text by Maritza Lacayo.

Untitled (Thrives in full sun)

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via The Sunny Project
via @thesunnyprjct

I grew up here. This is a formative place, where I learned how to be, to imagine, and even how to cut a figure. I am grateful for all I was given, especially the encouragement to embrace the possible. I was placed in ideal conditions, in a bright and favorable position, that I shared with my siblings.

I blossomed. I became who I am, grounded and raised in a tended cultural plot. I was afforded a southeasterly view, of the world!? We could not help it–we have lived in other places, have known other conditions, have learned to participate in the ecosystem that we are in, and always remembered what dreams are for.

Here still works for me. It is a place of imaginings and comfort. It cultivates warm memories, and unfurled reflections. I prefer to thrive in full sun.

Related:

Balla Et Ses Balladins ?– Objectif Perfection, Editions Syliphone Conakry, 1980.

Paulette, la confiance est un habit difficile à porter.

LP back cover.

Poetry, Permeability, and Healing

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Essay by Jane Hirshfield from 2018 via poets.org.

At the etymological root of both healing and health is the idea of “wholeness.” To heal, then, is to take what has been broken, separated, frag­mented, injured, exiled and restore it to wholeness.

[…]

Many things beyond physical illness and physical fracture need healing. Some are personal, some are collective, and these two realms are not disconnected. We don’t live in compartments; we live in our lives.

[…]

kintsugi, done well, offers damage made visible as part of the cup’s his­tory, damage made beautiful because the cup was repaired without denial.

[…]

Poems are words that live in the fractures, […] they make new by rejoining parts into a visibly changed whole.

[…]

a person who can ask words to do things words have not done before is not powerless. To make phrases that increase what is possible to think and feel is both exhilaration and liberation. To expand reality is to counter despair, depression, and impotence.

[..]

[Poems] loosen us from the loneliness of separation and the erasures of generality. The particularity and unexpectedness of poetry’s language shake us from sleepiness, complacency, habitual mind. Empathy breaks us from the hypnosis of ego’s grip on its own sense of purpose.

[…]

The rational mind, untempered by poetry, divides; […] fierce rational power, in isolation, is inhuman. Art dwells at the crossroads between what in us is body, what in us is emotion, what in us is history, and what in us is mind. To step into wholeness of seeing and feeling, under any conditions, is in itself restorative.

Jane Hirshfield