dig

Category: language

  • AG2025_1520719a or free from the private property of the image

    AG2025_1520719a

    Serious thoughts need different cultivation and time to grow; planted as seeds of living speech in the ground of an appropriate soul, they will take root, ripen, and bear fruit as knowledge in due season

    Written texts make available the notion that one knows what one has merely read.

    From Plato’s Phaedrus, via Anne Carson’s Eros the bittersweet.

    McKenzie Wark (2009): Détournement, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 14:1, 145-153

    Détournement attacks a kind of fetishism, where

    the products of collective human labour in the
    cultural realm become mere property. But what is
    distinctive about this fetishism is that it does not
    rest directly on the status of the thing as a
    commodity. It is, rather, a fetishism of memory.
    Not so much commodity fetishism as co-memory
    fetishism – collective remembrance as fetish. And
    what is distinctive about détournement is that it
    can restore to the fragment the status of being a
    recognisable part of the process of the collective
    production of meaning in the present, through
    the combination of the détourned fragment into a
    new meaningful ensemble    . Détournement frees
    the process of creation from the private property
    of the image.

  • AG2025_1110618a or As I walked out one evening

    AG2025_1110618a

    As I walked out one evening,
    Walking down Bristol Street,
    The crowds upon the pavement
    Were fields of harvest wheat.

    And down by the brimming river
    I heard a lover sing
    Under an arch of the railway:
    ‘Love has no ending.

    ‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
    Till China and Africa meet,
    And the river jumps over the mountain
    And the salmon sing in the street,

    ‘I’ll love you till the ocean
    Is folded and hung up to dry
    And the seven stars go squawking
    Like geese about the sky.

    ‘The years shall run like rabbits,
    For in my arms I hold
    The Flower of the Ages,
    And the first love of the world.’

    But all the clocks in the city
    Began to whirr and chime:
    ‘O let not Time deceive you,
    You cannot conquer Time.

    ‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
    Where Justice naked is,
    Time watches from the shadow
    And coughs     when you would kiss.

    ‘In headaches and in worry
    Vaguely life leaks away,
    And Time will have his fancy
    To-morrow or to-day.

    ‘Into many a green valley
    Drifts the appalling snow;
    Time breaks the threaded dances
    And the diver’s brilliant bow.

    ‘O plunge your hands in water,
    Plunge them in up to the wrist;
    Stare, stare in the basin
    And wonder what you’ve missed.

    ‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
    The desert sighs in the bed,
    And the crack in the tea-cup opens
    A lane to the land of the dead.

    ‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
    And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
    And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
    And Jill goes down on her back.

    ‘O look, look in the mirror,
    O look in your distress:
    Life remains a blessing
    Although you cannot bless.

    ‘O stand, stand at the window
    As the tears scald and start;
    You shall love your crooked neighbour
    With your crooked heart.’

    It was late, late in the evening,
    The lovers they were gone;
    The clocks had ceased their chiming,
    And the deep river ran on.

    As I Walked Out One Evening, W. H. Auden

  • AG2023_1066771a or in repose, distinct, hidden

    AG2023_1066771a

    I like to find
    what’s not found
    at once, but lies

    within something of another nature,
    in repose, distinct.
    Gull feathers of glass, hidden

    …

    I like the juicy stem of grass that grows
    within the coarser leaf folded round,
    and the butteryellow glow
    in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory
    opens blue and cool on a hot morning.

    Denise Levertov, Pleasures

    The Eightfold Fence is the fourth episode of the FX limited series, Shogun. The episode premiered on March 12, 2024. A reference steeped in Japanese mythology and the Shinto faith, handled poetically and with agency by several female characters.

    Teresa Gierzynska, Four pictures, 2004. via Mala Gallery.

    How to construct a picture that will communicate all the magic of spring: augury of something that will inevitably come – space, innocence?
    And what about the quintessence of the rich, ripe autumn?
    How to present euphoria and freshness contained in the summer.
    And, finally, or perhaps first of all: how to present the depressive winter: its moody and full of harmony aura in a way acceptable to us, allowing us to appreciate its qualities, making us to stop complaining and allowing us to rest – before summer euphoria?
    How to present it another way?

  • Dérive, Psychogeography, Détournement, Lefebvre

    Sadler, Simon. The situationist city. 1998

    As its name implied, psychogeography
    attempted to combine subjective and objective
    modes of study. On the one hand it recognized that
    the self cannot be divorced from the urban environ
    ment; on the other hand, it had to pertain to more
    than just the psyche of the individual if it was to be
    useful in the collective rethinking of the city. The
    reader senses Debord’s desperation to negotiate
    this paradox in his “Theorie de la dérive” (Theory of
    the derive), a key document first published in the
    Belgian surrealist journal Les levres nues in 1956
    and republished in Internationale Situationniste in
    1958. The drift, Debord explained, entailed the
    sort of “ playful-constructive behavior” that had
    always distinguished situationist activities from
    mere pastimes. The drift should not be confused,
    then, with “classical notions of the journey and the
    stroll”; drifters weren’t like tadpoles in a tank,
    “stripped . . . of intelligence, sociability and sexu
    ality,” but were people alert to “the attractions of
    the terrain and the encounters they find there,”
    capable as a group of agreeing upon distinct, spon
    taneous preferences for routes through the city.23

    […]

    Psychogeography thus produced a social
    geography of the city, especially important at a
    time when social geography was still struggling to
    emerge from the shadow of academic geography.
    Against academic geography’s “scientific” taxono
    my of the physical factors that supposedly deter
    mine the character of a space, social geography
    theorized space as the product of society84 It was
    an approach pioneered in the late nineteenth cen
    tury by the former Communard [Elysée] Reclus, who recog
    nized in geography “nothing but history in
    space.”85 Situationists were naturally inclined
    toward the goals of social geography, which opposed
    academic geography’s reduction of the city to “the
    undifferentiated state o f the visible-readable realm “
    (to use Lefebvre’s d is dainful phrase) and to the
    homogenization o f the conflicts that produce capi
    talist space 86 Fragmented yet tied together by their
    arrows, situationist maps explored the very same
    “three orders of facts”— “class struggle, the quest
    for equilibrium , and the sovereign decision of the
    individual”— that Reclus claimed were revealed by
    the pursuit of social geography. 87

    […]

    The experiments in detournement that
    situationists carried out on literature, political the
    ory, and film (all of Debord’s films were built
    around detournement) were intended as just the
    start. The situationists aimed to eventually
    “detourn” bits of city.
    This inclination to transgress the boundaries
    found in culture and cities also characterized the
    work o f Henri Lefebvre, which was so seamlessly
    assimilated by situationism , and vice versa, that for
    the purposes of this discussion it is hardly possible
    or useful to distinguish the two.

    […]

    Above all, they sought to understand that
    moment when people gain insight into the rational
    ized and alienated patterns o f their everyday lives.
    Lefebvre’s interpretation of the eruptive “moment”
    as embodying “fleetin g but decisive sensations (of
    delight, surrender, disguise, surprise, horror or out
    rage) which were somehow revelatory of the totality
    of possibilities contained in daily existence” could
    stand just as well for the situationists’ notion of the
    “situation.”88 Both Lefebvre and the situationists
    looked to the declaration of the Paris Commune as
    history’s sublime “moment” and “situation,” when
    ordinary citizens decided to become self-governing.
    “The Commune was the biggest festival o f the
    nineteenth century,” the second situationist thesis
    on the Paris Commune declared. “Underlying the
    events of that spring of 1871 one can see the
    insurgents’ feeling that they had become masters
    of their own history, not so much on the level of
    ‘governmental’ politics as on the level of their
    everyday life.”

  • A plan for social transformation

    Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.

    Annette Gordon-Reed in NYR, 2018.

    Figures like King, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks have now become “safe” in ways they never were when they were operating at the height of their powers. Stripped of their radicalism, they are welcomed as sources of inspiration in the curricula of almost every elementary school in the country.

    […]

    King started to speak even more openly and insistently about the “second phase,” which would be a “struggle for ‘economic equality,’” with unions as the linchpin of this effort. King, along with his aide Bayard Rustin, had long thought that there should be a “‘convergence’ between unions and the civil rights movement.” Everything was at stake for King here: if the second phase of his plan for social transformation was successful, “everyone could have a well-paying job or a basic level of income, along with decent levels of health care, education, and housing.”

    He soon found, however, that “union racial politics remained contradictory and complicated.” The same racism that permeated American society also had a firm grip on the union movement. As had been true throughout American history, many poor and working-class whites had no interest in solidarity with blacks against white elites.

    […]

    With the Poor People’s Campaign, King hoped to reprise his triumphant 1963 March on Washington by leading thousands of poor people to the nation’s capital to demand a “radical redistribution of economic power.” The effort was fraught from the start, as his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had neither the funds nor the infrastructure to organize the huge event he envisioned. The task was not only physically draining, it was psychologically difficult. For as King crisscrossed the country to promote the effort, “the right-wing hate campaign against him escalated.” While in Miami to speak to a group of ministers, King remained in the conference hotel because the police could not ensure his safety.

    https://www.tumblr.com/birdbird/773238894983512064/mlk
    Marrakesh. Image grabbed on 012025, CO’s fb.

    Signal, worthwhile and preferred–open source, end to end encryption, cryptographically secure.

  • Dedication

    […], Fady Joudah, Milkweed Editions. 2024.

  • AG2024_1134136a holds unknown

    AG2024_1134136a
    Flows and veils; garden syntactic arrangements of forms; they hold unknown, and therefore dangerous possibilities

    Richard Brody wrote an appreciation of David Lynch.

    “Many films are called revelatory and visionary, but Lynch’s films seem made to exemplify these terms. He sees what’s kept invisible and reveals what’s kept scrupulously hidden, and his visions shatter veneers of respectability to depict, in fantasy form, unbearable realities.”

    Also, Dennis Lim (2015),

    “Lynch’s mistrust of words means that his films often resist the expository function and realist tenor of dialogue, relying instead on intricate sound design to evoke what lies beyond language.”

  • AG2020_1880804a or a minutiae

    AG2020_1880804a

    we cheer him on,

    winter softened in the tropic of his strength.

    Declan Ryan

    Patrick Kavanagh’s poem “Epic” has talismanic importance to older Irish poets who took from the following lines license to write about the minutiae of their own locales:

                                            I inclined
    To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
    Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
    He said: I made the Iliad from such
    A local row. Gods make their own importance.

    To be from a small country and to write intimately about your own affairs is to risk making your poetry impenetrable, irrelevant, or both, even when writing in a global language like English. And yet to exclude your own affairs, to eliminate the parochial from your “epic” entirely risks self-censorship or a denial of one’s own truth.

    An American poet can mention the film Predator, Henry Kissinger, or the town of Ferguson and an informed and cultured Irish person will know the references. Conversely, if an Irish poet chose to write about Wanderly Wagon, Pádraig Flynn, or the town of Granard even a cultured American reader, unless a specialist in Irish Studies, would be lost.

    Patrick Cotter, Introduction, Poetry, September 2015