There is nothing to save, now all is lost,
but a tiny core of stillness in the heart
like the eye of a violet.
Nothing to Save, D. H. Lawrence
AG2024_1112220a or a tiny core of stillness
Category: language
In Public
Public Art Tour, PortMiami, led by Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places–celebrating 50 years.
talked to spend desire,
worn exhausted from regret.
Continue our relationship apart
under surveillance, torture
In Public, John Wieners.
can be better or worse; just not simple
“Life can be different; it can be better or worse. Just not simple,
[…]
forms of life that shift the pressures of being in relation.
[…]
engender dissociation and prefer the inconclusiveness of life in ellipsis.”
Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People (Writing Matters!)
AG2024_1112252a or prompt to try gobeyond
or—more simply—the speaking voice prompting the reader/witness/man who first sees the body in the thames to imagine adam—to try gobeyond the page/thames and understand who adam is.
The Lyric Adam, Gboyega Odubanjo, 2024.
Quelle joie de vous voir
Tokyo Rumando, via Galerie Echo 119.
Noguchi Rika, Small Miracles. Via Les Rencontres d’Arles. Aperture.
call for the general good
“Today, Biden, just as Lear does at the end, seems to have made his peace with the necessity of accepting the sheer injustice of his condition and his predicament, while seeking comfort in the saner corners of his life. Now, with the knowledge that he has finally made the right call for the general good, we can look back in sympathy with his personal predicament. It is unjust; he did a good job. The injustice extends to the reality that, while Biden is old and frail, his opponent is, and sounds, old and nuts. To reflect on Trump’s speech to the Republican National Convention is to see true madness …
[…]
Biden, … deserves to be ennobled, not ejected.”
Adam Gopnik, New Yorker.
AG2024_1100041a or small nodes
“Work out. Ten laps.
Chin ups. Look good.
Steam room. Dress warm.
Call home. Fresh air.
[…]
Hard nodes. Beware.”
Heartbeats, Melvin Dixon
To succeed in life a man must be adaptable.
Claudia Roth Pierpont’s The Florentine, in the New Yorker (2008), came back at the right time. Niccolò Machiavelli’s writings are central to the moral-ethical-effective discourses on power and how to rule.
““The Prince” offered the first major secular shock to the Christianized state in which we still live. Long before Darwin, Machiavelli showed us a credible world without Heaven or Hell, a world of “is” rather than “should be,” in which men were coolly viewed as related to beasts and earthly government was the only hope of bettering our natural plight.
[…]
Erasmus, whose “Education of a Christian Prince” was written two years after Machiavelli’s work—he presented his treatise first to Charles of Aragon and, after it failed to elicit the desired financial result, to Henry VIII—spun his pious counsel around the central thesis “What must be implanted deeply and before all else in the mind of the prince is the best possible understanding of Christ.” Machiavelli, on the other hand, proposed the best possible understanding of the methods of Cesare Borgia.
[…]
To succeed in life a man must be adaptable. This is a prime lesson of “The Prince,” and Machiavelli appears to have been determined to live by it. A republican during the republic, a royal servant when princes rule: “He who conforms his course of action to the quality of the times will fare well.”
[…]
But a corollary, if contradictory, lesson of “The Prince” is that, try as he might, “man cannot deviate from that to which nature inclines him.” In composing his Medici-commissioned history, Machiavelli agonized over how to present the Medici, and the result is anything but the work of a courtier. Recounting how the family’s desire to “wield exclusive power” had led it to crush all political opposition, leaving other parties with no alternative except plots and murderous conspiracies, he concluded bluntly that under the Medici regime “liberty was unknown in Florence.”
