This is not the year for palliatives. It is not the year for knowing what to do.
This is the year the planet grew smaller
and no country would consent to its defeat.
AG2024_2110799a
Category: language
in these repeated refrains of nature
AG2024_1122377a bears witness to something
“Despite all this looking, few people, aside from Claudia, bear witness to much. To do so would be to think critically about the society that formed them and be moved to effect change.”
Hilton Als on Toni Morrison’s début novel, “The Bluest Eye.” New Yorker, 2020.
I am aiming at what Henry James called “perception at the pitch of passion.
Colm Tóibín’s The Pitch of Passion, adapted from On James Baldwin.
In essays and interviews Baldwin needed to unloose himself from easy categories, but it was also central to his procedures as an artist to share James’s interest in consciousness as shifting and unconfined but also hidden and secretive, and his concern with language as both pure revelation and mask. Baldwin was fascinated with eloquence itself, the soaring phrase, the rhythm pushed hard, the sharp and glorious ring of a sentence, as much as with the plain, declarative line.
[…]
For Baldwin, the past was bound up with place, and since his sense of place was bound up with displacement, the past did not come simply. What is strange is how stories from the past represent the very center of Go Tell It on the Mountain, enough to make it a novel about how the displacement caused by the Great Migration entered into the spirit of these characters and their relationships. The novel has a shadow world where the past happened, where the earlier generation came from, and where much that was unresolved had been left behind.
AG2024_1122329a or beneath that water
Lord,
when you send the rain,
think about it, please,
a little?
Do
not get carried away
by the sound of falling water,
the marvelous light
on the falling water.
I
am beneath that water.
It falls with great force
and the light
Blinds
me to the light.
Untitled, James Baldwin
even if dancing just once
[…]
I imagine him waiting
for the cover of darkness
to let down his hinged drawbridge.
He wanted, after so many
protracted years of caution,
to dance naked and nimble
as a flame under the moon—
even if dancing just once
was all that the teeth
of the forest would allow.
Jeff Worley, On Finding a Turtle Shell in Daniel Boone National Forest
awake and assured in your own private world
I want to be a passenger
in your car again
and shut my eyes
while you sit at the wheel,
awake and assured
in your own private world,
seeing all the lines
on the road ahead,
down a long stretch
of empty highway
without any other
faces in sight.
I want to be a passenger
in your car again
and put my life back
in your hands.
December, Michael Miller
