dig

Category: language

  • 050124

    “Every moment, every element of one’s life—tiny observations, banal occurrences, numberless meals—is fodder for instant affirmation.”

    Johnathan Thomas at David Krut Projects.

    Promising!!!

  • 042824 or mediations

    Art constitutively thwarts immediacy, urgency, and utility; its most direct use rests in this indirection—but today’s immediatist art aspires to void itself, and theory has been following in its wake. Recalling a different vocation for both art and theory requires esteeming mediation at the outset. Adorno writes: “By the affront to needs, by the inherent tendency of art to cast different lights on the familiar, artworks correspond to the objective need for a transformation of consciousness that could become a transformation of reality.”

    …

    Like art itself, critical theory defamiliarizes and reconceptualizes in order to build. In refracting the pressing need to address social calamities into the multidimensional need to reconstitute the social, mediations wield their own formedness—their qualities as artistic detour, their aspects of theoretical abstraction—toward forming, reforming, transforming. Artforms and theory alike demand the slow and uncertain work of making sense, countering immediacy with mediation.

    …

    We creative types can generate dialectical images and poems and novels and art that precipitate new passages from the mesmeric imaginary to the sticky symbolic.

    Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, Anna Kornbluh
    Eamon Ore-Giron at Whitney Museum

  • AG2024_1100536a marshals some fixity

    AG2024_1100536a

    Confluent inchoate figures marshal some fixity or rather a persistency within the formless.

    New York Martinis. Tempting!

  • AG2024_1100367a2 or fathom fortitude

    AG2024_1100367a2

    I seek for rhythmic whisperings
    Where noises bandy—
    For life I listen wistfully
    In footless banter.

    I cast wide nets and tentative
    In lakes of sorrow.
    I go toward final tenderness
    By pathways sordid.

    I look for dewdrops glistering
    In falsehood’s gardens.
    I save truth’s globules glistening,
    From dust-heaps garnered.

    I fain would fathom fortitude
    Through years of wormwood—
    And pierce the mortal fortalice,
    Yet live, a worldling.

    My cup, through ways impassable,
    To bear, untainted;
    By tenebrous bleak passages
    To joy attaining.

    Zinaida Gippius, translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky

    What must be valued
    I’m learning,

    in clarity and in error,
    are spaces

    where
    feelings are held.

    Spaces, Jenny Johnson

  • AG2024_1100541a or Menm si nou pliye, nou pap kase

    AG2024_1100541a

    The Haiti That Still Dreams. The country is being defined by disaster. What would it mean to tell a new story? By Edwidge Danticat. New Yorker, April 23, 202

    “Nou se wozo / Menm si nou pliye, nou pap kase.” Even if we bend, we will not break.

  • AG2024_2060768b or embarrassment of content

    AG2024_2060768b

    when a gaze picks out
    the shape of a deer
    from the surrounding moor
    it is as if something
    within the deer
    an embarrassment of content
    had risen to the surface
    […]

    Flight Across the Heather, Thomas A. Clark

  • AG2024_2060768a or pause to breathe

    AG2024_2060768a

    For the sword outwears its sheath,

       And the soul wears out the breast,

    And the heart must pause to breathe,

       And love itself have rest.

    So We’ll Go No More a Roving    , Byron

  • AG2022_2040228a or of wonder

    AG2022_2040228a

    “a kind of purple/blue that makes you think not of sadness but of wonder” Kincaid