Good-bye!—no, do not grieve that it is over,
The perfect hour;
That the winged joy, sweet honey-loving rover,
Flits from the flower.
Grieve not—it is the law. Love will be flying—
Yes, love and all.
Glad was the living—blessed be the dying.
Let the leaves fall.
A Farewell, Harriet Monroe
Upon a second viewing, Tenet is interesting mostly in its narrative sequences and choreography of bodies, moving and running, for the camera.
“Above all, there is Barbara’s instruction, as she ushers the Protagonist into the wonders of temporal inversion. “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it,” she says to him. The echo is clear: “Do not try to understand. Just believe.” That is what the hero of Cocteau’s “Orpheus” (1950) is told as he prepares to pass through a mirror into the underworld. Like Nolan, Cocteau sprinkles his film with reverse-motion images, but each one of them gives off a lyrical shimmer, and when a dead woman, lying on a bed, is ordered to rise, her body springs to the perpendicular as if reborn, and the hearts of viewers lurch and lift in response.” Antony Lane, New Yorker, 2020.
“For minoritarian subjects, the discourse of attention has little relevance because it is structurally difficult to occupy the position of attentiveness, historically, we have always been the objects of others’ attention”
“Distraction is not opposed to attention but is a type of attention -it’s not individual and intrinsic but social and relational”
“medication seeks to treat biologically a set of behavioural and environmental conditions”
“greater collective happiness in all its wild plurality”
“This book … admits that it fiddles while Rome burns”
Disordered Attention, How We Look at Art and Performance Today, Claire Bishop (Verso)
Joe Brainard’s C Comics ran for only two issues, but it remains a testament to the absorbing pleasure of making art with your friends.
you
who’ve read Dante in folio
you let yourself drift
through those little drawings
so-called illuminated miniatures
and you swallowed it all
all
from ay
to bi
but it’s a lie
that hellish bin of complications is pure rubbish
made on purpose to make you waste time
calculating in which circle
the bones of your soul
will end up
and you know something?
this famous inferno
has an admirable simplicity
it’s not for nothing, the master’s cunning
you get there and they tell you
you’re free
go ahead and do as you like
The [preceding] poems come from Rebekah Smith’s […] translation (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) of Susana Thénon’s 1987 book Ova Completa.
god help us or god don’t help us
or god half help us
or he makes us believe that he’ll help us
and later sends word that he’s busy
or he helps us obliquely
with a pious “help yourself”
or cradles us in his arms singing softly that we’ll pay for it
if we don’t go to sleep immediately
or …
Kikirikyrie, Susana Thénon, translated from Spanish by Rebekah Smith (UDP)
Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
Ars Poetica #100: I Believe, Elizabeth Alexander
Into the Sublime, Tank Magazine, Issue 95. Anahid Nersessian interviewed by Nell Whittaker.
“Will we choose to believe in an art that launders pain and calls that an ethics? Or will we opt for something else, not knowing necessarily what it might be but certain it will involve the loss of something precious – an elegant idea, a charming concert, a way of being effortlessly in the world?”
“[Poetry] … it does surround and enraptures us.”
