Wild nights – Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile – the winds –
To a Heart in port –
Done with the Compass –
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden –
Ah – the Sea!
Might I but moor – tonight –
In thee!
Emily Dickinson
Dig
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Done with the Compass / Done with the Chart
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all else we had been and known
We must try to see one another in this way.
As suffering, limited beings—
Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.[…]
Our grief must be defeated; it must not become our master, and make us ineffective, and put us even deeper into the ditch.
[…]
We had forgotten so much, of all else we had been and known.
George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
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the while he has been /year after year, hacking and chopping
A world has been gutted by fire and disaster,
Nations wasted to ashes, the while he has been
Year after year, hacking and chopping
Dusky nuts from their sheaths of ivory and green.– Muna Lee
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in which we might be both singular and plural, both fully
Kushner often cites DeLillo as an influence, but Creation Lake most clearly bears the imprint of a handful of European writers, including the Italian novelist and poet Nanni Balestrini and the French crime novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette. The first chapter of Manchette’s 1976 novel Le Petit Bleu de la côte ouest (Three to Kill) begins, “And sometimes what used to happen was what is happening now,” before launching into a description of Manchette’s protagonist, Georges Gerfaut, a middle-class nobody caught up in murder:
“The reason why Georges is barreling along the outer ring road, with diminished reflexes, listening to this particular music, must be sought first and foremost in the position occupied by Georges in the social relations of production. The fact that Georges has killed at least two men in the course of the last year is not germane. What is happening now used to happen from time to time in the past.”
In her introduction to a 2016 English translation of Balestrini’s We Want Everything, an electric account of Italy’s “Hot Autumn” of workers’ strikes in 1969, Kushner observed that his narrators—who are often nameless—“are always one person speaking anonymously as a type.” Their “voices,” she continues,
“have all the specificity of an individual—a set of attitudes, moods, prejudices, back stories, but they each speak in a way that exemplifies what life was like for a person such as them, in a moment when there were many like them.”
Paradoxically, this anonymity works against the sense of alienation Lukács described—at least in the domain of literature. If capitalism creates a world in which human beings are violently atomized, cut off from one another by the daily demands of wage labor and the barriers of class society, the character who speaks at once for himself and for everyone like him represents the possibility of a world in which we might be both singular and plural, both fully, freely ourselves and part of a multitude of interdependent, mutually supportive lives.
The Secret Agent, Anahid Nersessian
Reviewed: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
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Paterson, Passaic, plicated
His [Robert Smithson] break from painting would eventually lead him to construct—with the help of bulldozers and pilots and his wife and collaborator, the late Nancy Holt—“Spiral Jetty,” his best-known project, completed in 1970. It’sa fifteen-hundred-foot-long, fifteen-foot-wide spiral of stone that extends out into the Great Salt Lake, in Utah. According to the catalogue for an exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum, entitled “Robert Smithson’s New Jersey,” it was Smithson’s visit to his pediatrician that helped steer him toward that new work, and began a new chapter for American landscape art. His pediatrician was William Carlos Williams.
[…]
When Smithson arrived at Williams’s home, the older poet had recently suffered several strokes but had just published the final volume of “Paterson,” his epic set in and around the Great Falls of the Passaic, the raging seventy-seven-foot-high cataract in Paterson. In an essay written by the exhibition’s guest curator, Phyllis Tuchman, we learn that Smithson looked at paintings by Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, and Ben Shahn in Williams’s home, and that, according to Smithson’s friends, the artist took to heart Williams’s axiom “No ideas, but in things.” In 1972, shortly before Smithson died, he would describe “The Monuments of Passaic” [an essay that ran in Artforum in December of 1967] in terms of “Paterson.” “In a way, this article that I wrote on Passaic could be conceived of as a kind of appendix to William Carlos William’s poem Paterson,” he said.
The Source of Robert Smithson’s Spiral
Robert Sullivan, The New Yorker, June 18, 2014
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