Category: language

… habit of indirection; … to delight in a margin; … not something to do, but something to be experienced, and something to go through (ZS)

“The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing.”
“Grace, that dictionary. A place where every thing was attached to a meaning.”
“Fear made me work hard, get better. It’s a dirty fuel, but it works.”
“… read an Odyssey in a gasp, a Shahnehmeh in a sigh”
“I did know real, deep joy. […] my lifetime’s allotment”

–Kaveh Akbar

That’s when she found the tree,

the dark, crabbed branches

bearing up such speechless bounty,

she knew without being told

this was forbidden. It wasn’t

a question of ownership—

who could lay claim to

such maddening perfection?

[…]

I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land, Rita Dove

Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940 organized by Curator María Elena Ortiz, at Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, March 10, 2024 – July 28, 2024.

Centered on the intersection of Caribbean aesthetics, Afrosurrealism, and Afrofuturism, Surrealism and Us explores how Caribbean and Black artists interpreted a modernist movement. Artworks, framed within a pre-existing history of Black resistance and creativity, illustrate how Caribbean and Black artists reinterpreted the European avant-garde for their own purposes.

“such silence
still divine presence
echoes immortal migrants

[…]

a cardinal framed in the glass
red light
calling away despair
eternal promise
everything changes and ends”

8., bell hooks

“each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.”
“The clarity of a physical emotional response.”

-(KA)