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Category: language

  • A fine fixed point

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    "Give me a place to stand," Archimedes said, 
    "and I can move the world." Paradoxical, clever, 
    his remark which first explained the use of the lever 
    was an academic joke. But if that dead

    sage could return to life, he would find a clear 
    demonstration of his idea, which is not 
    pure theory after all. That putative spot 
    exists in the love I feel     for you, my dear.

    What could be more immovable or stronger? 
    What becomes more and more secure, the longer 
    it is battered by inconstancy and the stress

    we find in our lives? Here is that fine fixed point 
    from which to move a world     that is out of joint, 
    as he could have done, had he known a love like this.

    Sonnets on Love XIII by Jean de Sponde, translated by David R. Slavitt.

    Jason Hirata on Louise Lawler. Dia. Birdcalls (1972/1981) (Audio recording and text, 7:01 minutes).

    “Yáng Shu?ng-z?’s Taiwan Travelogue has won the 2026 International Booker Prize.” “It succeeds as both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel.” (NPR)

  • Survival is insufficient

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    In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
    A stately pleasure dome decree:
    Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
    Through caverns measureless to man
        Down to a sunless sea.
    So twice five miles of fertile ground
    With walls and towers were girdled round:
    And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
    Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
    And here were forests ancient as the hills,
    Enfolding sunny spots of greenery

    Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

    “Because survival is insufficient.” (Emily St. John Mandel)

  • 051726 or to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding

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    Bertrand Russell on useless knowledge and idleness via The Marginalian.

    “a certain richness and freedom in art and speculation”
    “Perhaps the most important advantage of “useless” knowledge is that it promotes a contemplative habit of mind. There is in the world too much readiness, not only for action without adequate previous reflection, but also for some sort of action on occasions on which wisdom would counsel inaction…”
    “A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than in action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power, a means of preserving serenity in misfortune and peace of mind among worries.”
    “it is a matter of individual psychology, is to be found in history, biology, astronomy, and all those studies which, without destroying self-respect, enable the individual to see himself in his proper perspective. What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information, but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, acquaintance with the lives of heroic individuals, and some understanding of the strangely accidental and ephemeral position of man in the cosmos — all this touched with an emotion of pride in what is distinctively human, the power to see and to know, to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding. It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs.“

  • 051626

    The Draw Project. A series of traveling exhibition of drawings and works-on-paper.

    Poor, impious Soul! that fixes its high hopes
    In the dim distance, on a throne of clouds,
    And from the morning’s mist would make the ropes
    To draw it up amid acclaim of crowds—
    Beware! That soaring path is lined with shrouds;
    And he who braves it, though of sturdy breath,
    May meet, half way, the avalanche and death!

    O poor young Soul!—whose year-devouring glance
    Fixes in ecstasy upon a star,
    Whose feverish brilliance looks a part of earth,
    Yet quivers where the feet of angels are,
    And seems the future crown in realms afar—
    Beware! A spark thou art, and dost but see
    Thine own reflection in Eternity!

    Aspiration, Adah Isaacs Menken

  • and make some room

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    In-between the sun and moon,
    I sit and watch
    and make some room
    for letting light and twilight mingle    ,
    shaping hope
    and making single glances last eternity    ,
    a little more,
    extending love beyond the doors of welcoming,
    while wedding all the parted people,
    even sons to violent mothers,
    and searching all the others finding light
    where twilight lingers,
    in-between the sun and moon.

    In-between the sun and moon, Pádraig Ó Tuama

  • Earned, by practice

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    “earn—by practice and careful contemplation—the right to express it”

    “The danger and its necessity focused them, made them calm.”

    (TM)

  • The sea-god’s other bones

    A sea-god, whose father had been a mortal, becomes a skeleton.

    The skin of the sea was thick, to-night,
    And the tone of the sea was dull;
    When I found by the edge of the sullen sea
    The half of a sea-god’s skull.

    Half of a sea-god’s skull was there,
    Half of a sea-god’s tail.
    When I dug them out of the clutch of the sand
    The peering moon went pale.

    The peering moon went pale, because
    Her other eye had seen
    The other half of the sea-god’s bones
    Ten thousand fathom green . . .

    Ten thousand fathom green with sea,
    The sea-god’s other bones
    Swayed in a dead sea-goddess’s arms
    On a pile of sea-washed stones.

    The skin of the sea was thick, to-night,
    And the tone of the sea was dull,
    While I buried away from the sinister sea
    All the mortal part of a skull.

    Skull Song, Genevieve Taggard

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  • operate within it

    … Perhaps this, my skin engulfed
    in morning dew and music,
    is the true human romance.
    Immune to purpose.

    Ashna Ali

    “AI-generated images no longer serve as evidence of anything, having been detached from their material origin. Imagine, then, the surprise of Maja Malou Lyse upon learning that the viewing of pornography through VR technology enhances male fertility by as much as 50%, as recent studies suggest. Fertility, futurity, and pornography thus become deeply entangled.

    Maja Malou Lyse has conceived a paradoxical environment that suggests we are not simply at the end of the image, but at the beginning of a new world in which images persist, yet their meaning, function, and credibility are fundamentally altered. In her work, images no longer describe reality; they operate within it. Images function as an affective technology: they produce sensations, they produce time, they produce the species. They are rehearsals for possible futures rather than records of the present. “

    Chus Martínez, Curator via kunst.dk