Shine your light for the world to see

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January 19, 2023, Joey Bada$$ covers Yasiin Bey’s ‘UMI Says.’

Umi said shine your light on the world
Shine your light for the world to see

[…]

I want black people to be free, to be free, to be free
All my people to be free, to be free, to be free
All black people to be free, to be free, to be free

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No quantifiable practical result

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“Ecology without class struggle is gardening” — Chico Mendes, via Marcela Cantuária’s The South American Dream at PAMM.

Gardens are nodes “where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result” may coalesce, but those aspects may align and “fit into the life of someone, perhaps of anyone, who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.” (RS)

Mendes was assassinated in 1988. He might have added nuance to this quote, that seems too easily quotable.

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macandal

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Cameron Rowland, macandal, 2023 Oxalic acid 37.5 x 30.5 x 67 cm Packets of materials that could invoke spirits, protect against punishment, and poison slave masters were called macandals. They were at the center of a plot in 1757 to poison all the white people in Haiti. The plot was organized by hundreds of enslaved and free black people. All macandals were subsequently outlawed. Their trade and use continued despite their criminalization. Enslaved people throughout the Atlantic world used arsenic, manioc juice, ground glass, and oxalic acid to poison overseers, masters, masters’ children, and livestock. Oxalic acid is a stain remover and household cleaner.

Cameron Rowland: Amt 45 i

Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany
10 February 2023 – 15 October 2023

Negations of accumulation manifested in theft, fugitivity, praise meetings, and plots.[53] Stealing the crops, eating the livestock, and refusing to work diminished the output of the plantation.[54] The formation of fugitive communities emptied the plantation of its value.[55] Sharing information evaded supervisory control.[56] Coordinated poisonings of masters and overseers instilled fear of the slave population.[57] Arson destroyed sugar mills, masters’ houses, and entire fields, inflicting property damage and halting production.[58] These black negations are unwritten losses. They are neither failed nor successful. Their impact is incalculable. They operate beyond the rubrics of value and production. Rather they were grounded in “the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality” of blackness.[59]

Cameron Rowland: Amt 45 i

Maxwell Graham / Essex Street. Image via C&.

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“[summarized] thoughts of Marx: by mixing our labor with the earth, we change the external world and thereby change our own nature. That’s what drama is; that’s what geography is: making history, making worlds.”

RWG

Don’t Be Voyeur with Me – by Michael Giacchino | The Batman, 2022.

Hidden aptitudes

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…their hidden aptitudes unlocked

only by time and the heat of a burbling mélange;

(Rita Dove, Soup)

sharp, of course. more variously:

crisp or peircing, clean or fuzzy.

(RD, The Terror and the Pity)

Five p.m. I never thought

I’d find relief

in the old joke that it’s always darkest

before it goes pitch black,

but at least then

it will be dark and then

thank god, black.

(RD, No Color)

“It could not be predicted. The condition had a name, the kind of name usually associated with telethons, but the name meant noting … (Joan Didion, The white Album)

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness, to wisdom, we only make promises; pain we obey. (Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain)