“you speak softened
drama of fury and frenzy,
quiet underbelly, light
beaming into peaceful
dark interrupted by
minor collisions
bodies were built
to withstand.”
Untitled for a Reason, Tara Betts
AG2023_1150374a or softened drama of fury and frenzy
AG2016_1040680 or to be a fool
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
[…]
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
AG2024_1089181aab or rehearse freedom in our day-to-day lives
The Channeler, Anahid Nersessian, interviewed by Merve Emre, Episode Four of “The Critic and Her Publics”, March 12, 2024.
“One of my aims is to create a space where a reader can take twenty minutes to engage with an object. Not to be too idyllic about it, but to me that’s freedom, and the more we can experience or rehearse freedom in our day-to-day lives, the more we can know what it might be on a grander scale.”
“That reading would have to be something like the old saw from academic discourse around what’s called secularism. Nowadays nobody believes in God, in fairies, nymphs, anything, so we look at the world and see trees instead of animate beings that have souls. And this is very depressing for everyone. So, this seems to be an expression of that same idea—I don’t see magic in the world.”
AG2024_1089047a or needs in order to constitute itself
“the thing that cannot be fitted into a system but which nevertheless the system needs into order to constitute itself as a system” – Hubert Damisch through Rosalind Krauss on Agnes Martin via Nersessian’s Apostrophe : Clouds.
“clouds synchronize the concrete with the immaterial” – AN
Do your thing
Isaac Hayes, Shaft, Do your thing, 19:38. 1971
Soul Men, 2008.
In so returning to ourselves from the realm of projection, we are tasked with finally mapping and traversing the inner landscape of the psyche, with all its treacherous terrain and hidden abysses. Hollis writes:
“It takes courage to face one’s emotional states directly and to dialogue with them. But therein lies the key to personal integrity. In the swamplands of the soul there is meaning and the call to enlarge consciousness. To take this on is the greatest responsibility in life… And when we do, the terror is compensated by meaning, by dignity, by purpose.
[…]
Our task at midlife is to be strong enough to relinquish the ego-urgencies of the first half and open ourselves to a greater wonder.”
In the remainder of The Middle Passage, Hollis goes on to illustrate … how personal complexes and projections play out in everything from parenting to creative practice to love, and how their painful renunciation swings open a portal to the deepest and most redemptive transformation.
The Marginalian
AG2024_1089292a
“That’s all man is: a creature you can feel pity for.”
“So it’s death, then, and nothing more, that is the disappointing truth of every life?”
The Most Secret Memory of Men: A Novel, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, translated from French by Lara Vergnaud
030724
“The name says something about the being” Sarr
AG2024_1089047a
“Art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human soul” Kandinsky via Popova.