Imagination, too, is old habit, assiduously maintained despite consequences.
And I accept the presence of dances invisible to me.
I racked up habitual sins. I desired, desire
Grand Tour: Poems, Elisa Gonzalez
Dig
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Imagination, too, is old habit
Studio view (122123) including Untitled (Field Guide; “what’s not found at once, but lies within something of another nature”) i and iii.
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AG2024IMG_20221127_161716_HDRa or always looked like agony to me
Untitled, 2022
People talk of “good” or “peaceful” deaths as if they’ve seen one, but it’s always looked like agony to me, despite the morphine. “
The Dream Won’t Come True, Kathy Fagan
“The flatness I have in mind is also a form of rejoinder to a calamitous present. It, too, short-circuits the expectation that subjects will authenticate themselves through confession or breakdown, that they will call forth hidden but unfeigned intensities of feeling through their own meticulous artistry. Crucially, although a far cry from the honnêteté lofted by the crosscurrents of courtly and early commercial society, it retains what Pascal identified as an intimacy with judgement. Materializing in scenes and histories of violence, it ultimately sidesteps or leapfrogs an understanding of such contexts as traumatic, to land on the simple verdict that they are wrong. Without saying that this is a more radical approach to a political poetics, I would nonetheless suggest that it is a crucial and overlooked style of critique. In the us in particular, such flatness confronts a public culture that has long appealed to unexamined and unmanaged feeling to supercharge repressive programmes and paranoias.”
[…]
” A recessive poetics doesn’t have to be radical: it might be timid, callous or boring. As Eisen-Martin’s work suggests, because flatness is embedded in a sense of the present as not only cruel but monotonous, it has definitively seceded from more exuberant or animated forms of expression; if it didn’t, it would not be flatness but melancholy. One might accuse it, then, as one might accuse these poets, of refusing or being unable to present a model of social life that is ecstatic, and through which human life might finally uncover the full range of its capacities for experience. But flatness is also, or might be, an ethical withdrawal from the impulse to dictate how any other person should encounter themselves. There is no cult of flatness, though there has long been a cult of lyric agitation; and since the latter is in no danger of dissolving, perhaps it might be good to have some alternatives to it.”
Notes on Tone, Anahid Nersessian, New Left Review 142
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AG2023_1150374a or softened drama of fury and frenzy
“you speak softened
drama of fury and frenzy,
quiet underbelly, light
beaming into peaceful
dark interrupted by
minor collisions
bodies were built
to withstand.”Untitled for a Reason, Tara Betts
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AG2016_1040680 or to be a fool
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things[…]
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world -
AG2024_1089181aab or rehearse freedom in our day-to-day lives
The Channeler, Anahid Nersessian, interviewed by Merve Emre, Episode Four of “The Critic and Her Publics”, March 12, 2024.
“One of my aims is to create a space where a reader can take twenty minutes to engage with an object. Not to be too idyllic about it, but to me that’s freedom, and the more we can experience or rehearse freedom in our day-to-day lives, the more we can know what it might be on a grander scale.”
“That reading would have to be something like the old saw from academic discourse around what’s called secularism. Nowadays nobody believes in God, in fairies, nymphs, anything, so we look at the world and see trees instead of animate beings that have souls. And this is very depressing for everyone. So, this seems to be an expression of that same idea—I don’t see magic in the world.”
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AG2024_1089047a or needs in order to constitute itself
“the thing that cannot be fitted into a system but which nevertheless the system needs into order to constitute itself as a system” – Hubert Damisch through Rosalind Krauss on Agnes Martin via Nersessian’s Apostrophe : Clouds.
“clouds synchronize the concrete with the immaterial” – AN
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Do your thing
Isaac Hayes, Shaft, Do your thing, 19:38. 1971
Soul Men, 2008.
In so returning to ourselves from the realm of projection, we are tasked with finally mapping and traversing the inner landscape of the psyche, with all its treacherous terrain and hidden abysses. Hollis writes:
“It takes courage to face one’s emotional states directly and to dialogue with them. But therein lies the key to personal integrity. In the swamplands of the soul there is meaning and the call to enlarge consciousness. To take this on is the greatest responsibility in life… And when we do, the terror is compensated by meaning, by dignity, by purpose.
[…]
Our task at midlife is to be strong enough to relinquish the ego-urgencies of the first half and open ourselves to a greater wonder.”
In the remainder of The Middle Passage, Hollis goes on to illustrate … how personal complexes and projections play out in everything from parenting to creative practice to love, and how their painful renunciation swings open a portal to the deepest and most redemptive transformation.
The Marginalian -
AG2024_1089292a
“That’s all man is: a creature you can feel pity for.”
“So it’s death, then, and nothing more, that is the disappointing truth of every life?”
The Most Secret Memory of Men: A Novel, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, translated from French by Lara Vergnaud