dig

Dig

  • AG2026_1530672a or a place where play and experimentation could happen

    AG2026_1530672a

    The order of the day is a practice of self-help that unsettles the very idea of ‘the self’, treating it as a communal construction instead of an atomised agent.

    The goal of treatment in the asylum is the same as it is on the couch. Tosquelles believed that, whether a patient suffered from psychosis or neurosis, whether he was working-class or bourgeois, his purpose was to become who he really is. This in turn requires ‘a cultural change in worldview’. The point is not to stop being crazy since, on some level, everyone is crazy. The point is to be able to identify what in the world is making you sick, and to begin to reconstruct your personality in opposition to this toxic state of affairs. The self is always collective and so are its ills. We may experience suffering as discrete and private, but chances are that it is historical and, if not exactly public, at least widely felt.

    […]

    The ‘cultural change in worldview’ effected by good psychiatric treatment begins here, with the recognition of sex work as a form of social and psychological competence.

    […]

    … encouraging sick or even just normally suffering people to make art together

    […]

    The asylum became a refuge, but also a place where play and experimentation could happen”

    Sous les Asiles, la Plage, Anahid Nersessian. (Serpentine Galleries, 25.02.2026)

  • as a way to parse highlights of the day

    Lynne Golob Gelfman
    Works on paper, 1960’s to 2020
    Curated by Loriel Beltrán and Aramis Gutierrez
    CENTRAL FINE. Checklist.

    Parseword, a cryptic crossword by John Wardle. NewYorker.

    other mountains, adrift beneath the waves, an exhibition of works by Nadia Huggins and Tessa Mars, on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Panama (MAC Panama), runs from March 5th to August 16th, 2026. Curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel and Juan Canela.

    Sigma 60mm f/2.8 DN ART – Micro Four Thirds Fit
    Minolta AF 135mm f/2.8
    Acquired via mpb

    PXL_20260309_234847189

  • A poet of belatedness

    “His work is as much a form of behavior as a product of craft. It is restless, with the discontent of a dog that turns and turns, unable to feel just right about the place it has chosen to lie down. The main place Twombly has chosen since the ’50s is the New York School big painting, in its definitive combination of matter-of-fact touch and cosmic field.

    This site defines Twombly as a poet of belatedness. Brilliantly, he makes it a medium for fugitive traces of other lostnesses: Mediterranean aches, Roman poetries. There is wonderful tension between vatic reference and vernacular mark, the ineffable and the crude. Twombly conveys a peculiar state—reminiscent of the poems of C. P. Cavafy—of possessing in mind and heart a territory that his body cannot share, because the body cannot inhabit memory. His body’s gestures toward that zone—itchy, stammering, tender scrawls—deliciously hurt. Meanwhile, he checks a tendency to the precious with bold and practical experiments in picture-making form.”

    Size Down, Peter Schjeldahl, ArtForum, September 1994.

    colorquotidianbook_ws27R2- 1Aaa
    2003

  • AG2026_1530292a2 or slopes & peaks

    AG2026_1530292a2

    I love how it swells
    into a temple where it is
    held prisoner, where the god
    of blame resides. I love
    slopes & peaks, the secret
    paths that make me selfish.
    I love my crooked feet
    shaped by vanity & work
    shoes made to outlast
    belief. The hardness
    coupling milk it can’t
    fashion. I love the lips,
    salt & honeycomb on the tongue.
    The hair holding off rain
    & snow. The white moons
    on my fingernails. I love
    how everything begs
    blood into song & prayer
    inside an egg. A ghost
    hums through my bones
    like Pan’s midnight flute
    shaping internal laws
    beside a troubled river.
    I love this body
    made to weather the storm
    in the brain, raised
    out of the deep smell
    of fish & water hyacinth,
    out of rapture & the first
    regret. I love my big hands.
    I love it clear down to the soft
    quick motor of each breath,
    the liver’s ten kinds of desire
    & the kidney’s lust for sugar.
    This skin, this sac of dung
    & joy, this spleen floating
    like a compass needle inside
    nighttime, always divining
    West Africa’s dusty horizon.
    I love the birthmark
    posed like a fighting cock
    on my right shoulder blade.
    I love this body, this
    solo & ragtime jubilee
    behind the left nipple,
    because I know I was born
    to wear out at least
    one hundred angels.

    Anodyne, Yusef Komunyakaa

  • La survie en attendant

    Rebecca Solnit Says the Left’s Next Hero Is Already Here. (NYTimes) The Beginning Comes After the End (Haymarket Books)

    “I remain hopeful partly as defiance. But what you’re addressing is narrative itself. Most stories are: Something goes wrong, and then we have to address it. When nothing goes wrong, there’s no story. But also, a lot of what’s right are stories of incremental change.

    The wonder and horror for climate is that the great majority of people on Earth support climate action. The obstacles are not technological. They’re political.“

    The light retreats and is generous again.
    No you to speak of, anywhere—neither in vicinity nor distance,

    so I look at the blue water, the snowy egret, the lace of its feathers
    shaking in the wind, the lake—no, I am lying.

    There are no egrets here, no water. Most of the time,
    my mind gnaws on such ridiculous fictions    .

    My phone notes littered with lines like Beauty will not save you.
    Or: mouthwash, yogurt, cilantro.

    A hummingbird zips past me, its luminescent plumage
    disturbing my vision like a tiny dorsal fin.

    But what I want does not appear. Instead, I find the redwoods and pines,
    figs that have fallen and burst open on the pavement,

    announcing that sickly sweet smell,
    the sweetness of grief, my prayer for what is gone.

    You are so dramatic, I say to the reflection on my phone,
    then order the collected novels of Jean Rhys.

    She, too, was humiliated by her body, that it wanted
    such stupid, simple things: food and cherry wine, to touch someone.

    On my daily walk, I steal Meyer lemons from my neighbors’ yard,
    a small pomegranate. Instead of eating them,

    I observe their casual rot on the kitchen counter,
    this theatre of good things turning into something else.

    Waiting for Your Call, Aria Aber

    https://triumph-of-adaptation.tumblr.com/post/810497907105087488/boghz-persian

    Boghz. Grief, anger, and humiliation accumulate without release.

    Sunny Shokrae.

    La survie en attendant la libération.

  • AG2026_1530270a or richesse left, not got with pain

    AG2026_1530270a

    Martial, the things that do attain
      The happy life be these, I find:—
    The richesse left, not got with pain,
       The fruitful ground; the quiet mind;

    The equal friend; no grudge, no strife;
       No charge of rule nor governance;
    Without disease the healthful life;
       The household of continuance;

    The mean diet, no delicate fare;
       True wisdom join’d with simpleness;
    The night dischargèd of all care,
       Where wine the wit may not oppress;

    The faithful wife, without debate;
       Such sleeps as may beguile the night:
    Contented with thine own estate,
       Ne wish for death, ne fear his might.

    The Means to Attain Happy Life, Martial, born Marcus Valerius Martialis, translated from the Latin by Henry Howard

  • AG2026_1520972b or there

    AG2026_1520972b

    There, there’s only order, beauty: abundant, calm, voluptuous.

    Invitation to a Voyage, Charles Baudelaire

  • Go through this sad non-identity

    AG2024_1123082a2
    AG2024_1123082a2

                                1

    Wilt thou go with me sweet maid
    Say maiden wilt thou go with me
    Through the valley-depths of shade,
    Of night and dark obscurity    ,
    Where the path has lost its way
    Where the sun forgets the day
    Where there’s nor life nor light to see
    Sweet maiden, wilt thou go with me?

                                2

    Where stones will turn to flooding streams
    Where plains will rise like ocean waves
    Where life will fade like visioned dreams
    And mountains darken into caves
    Say maiden wilt thou go with me
    Through this sad non-identity
    Where parents live and are forgot
    And sisters live and know us not?

                                3

    Say maiden wilt thou go with me
    In this strange death of life to be
    To live in death and be the same
    Without this life, or home, or name
    At once to be, and not to be
    That was, and is not—yet to see
    Things pass like shadows—and the sky
    Above, below, around us lie? 

                                4

    The land of shadows wilt thou trace
    And look—nor know each other’s face,
    The present mixed with reasons gone
    And past, and present all as one.
    Say, maiden can thy life be led
    To join the living to the dead?
    Then trace thy footsteps on with me
    We’re wed to one eternity.

    An Invite to Eternity, John Clare