You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
“Nothing felt more natural than directing his thoughts to an unseen realm” (ZS)
“… It occurs
when the divine realm manifests?—?or the word intrudes?—?
into our quotidian realm. The natural one, an untidy
fleshliness of the ordinary. Or the sacred and profane
is another way to say this.”
On Hierophany by Karen An-hwei Lee (From Ancient Greek ????? (hieros), “sacred, holy sign” + ????? (phainô), “show, appear”.)
Jacqueline Charles reports, for Miami Herald, on the closed border between Dominican Republic and Haiti.
“What is fundamental in all of this is the color of the skin, which shows that even… the Black Dominican population is in danger,” said [Edwin] Paraison.
But the fear that anyone who is of a darker hue can be arrested and detained because authorities think they are Haitian isn’t isolated to Black Dominicans. Last November, after the country launched mass deportations of Haitians, the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo warned African-American visitors they could be mistaken for being Haitian and be detained and deported to Haiti.
Dominican officials rejected the U.S. criticism and said the travel alert had negatively affected tourism. Testifying before a congressional committee four months later, Secretary of State Antony Blinken defended the warning.
[…]“… there is a reality that exists, it’s racism. But the authorities don’t acknowledge it and they hate it when people talk about it,” she said. “And when you speak about it, you become the person who is in danger, who is targeted.” That means, she said, the Dominican Republic remains unable to tackle the issue of racism.
“Cristina is not the first Dominican who has been confused with being Haitian and then sent to Haiti,” she said. “But what has made this case even more grave is that she is someone who suffers from mental problems and the authorities did not take this into consideration. It shows how Dominican immigration works.”
CLR James in conversation with Stuart Hall, 1984(?).
Mariners, Renegades and Castaway: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In.
Studs Terkel Radio Archive.
Striving for Clarity and Influence: The Political Legacy of CLR James, Selma James.
For me …, CLR created two masterworks … One of them was The Black Jacobins
The second masterwork was the Johnson-Forest Tendency which aimed to create another kind of Marxist organization.
[…]
The study of Marx and Lenin and of Hegel had led to uncovering a reading of Marx where the revolution was dependent on the self-activity of the working class, not on the leadership of a vanguard party.
C.L.R. James and the Fate of Marxism, Cornelius Castoriadis. More at libcom.
Infinity, exhibition and book by Natsuko Zanma, at Poetic Scape, 3 June – 16 July, 2023.
For many years, Zanma has been producing photographic works, mainly with plants as her subjects. The photographs are repeatedly taken in places she has photographed many times in the past, such as her own garden or a botanical park she has visited for nearly 20 years. However, Zanma says that the locations are not always the same, as the season, time of day and her own state of mind changes.
“I don’t know why, but the place in front of me is good enough , I don’t need other places”.?from her own notes on her work, same for the rest of quotations?
Zanma was deeply moved when a friend told her about Giorgio Morandi, a painter who spent his life painting still lifes in his birthplace of Bologna. Instead of visiting different places, Zanma prefers to visit the same place over and over again, and “I want to be deeply involved (with the place), layer by layer”. This attitude has not changed since her student days.
In several of her recent works, plants, which should be the main subject of the work, are placed on the periphery rather than at the centre of the work. Zanma says that what is visible to her has neither a main subject nor a background, she feels everything is equivalent.
“The plants, which are often seen as the main characters, the background, the soil on the ground, the dead grass on top, the grains of the ground that no one pays attention to, the air, the light and my own presence as the photographer, all float in space at the same time and overlap”.
For the past few years, we have been forced to live with restricted movement. These difficult times are coming to an end and people are returning to their days of hurriedly moving from one place to another. Meanwhile, Zanma has long ago shared a long time with the familiar places. And the moment she is aware of the beauty that slowly becomes visible as her body is accepted by the places, she feels a sense of welcome in the world.
“What I want to say with photography is that you can choose what you see, and that the possibilities of what you see are endless, and it’s up to you to decide what you want to show yourself.”
“There is a tree, by day,
That, at night,
Has a shadow,
A hand huge and black,
With fingers long and black.”
Angelina Weld Grimké, Tenebris
“Keep stealing, my friends! From life for fiction, and from fiction for life.” (ZS)
“As long as we profess to believe … these moments of grace” (ZS)
“… in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.”
Adrienne Rich, What Kind of Times are These