Maestro Without An Orchestra

22, Christian (but not very good at it)

[milkboydotnet]

MESSAGE OF NÉSTOR PAZ ON LEAVING TO JOIN THE GUERRILLAS IN TEOPONTE (July 17, 1970)

"Every sincere revolutionary must realize that armed struggle is the only path that remains" (Camilo Torres, January 7, 1966).

Following the glorious path taken by our own heroes, the guerrillas of the Peruvian highlands, and by the continental heroes, Simón Bolívar and Antonio José de Sucre, and the heroic commitment of Ernesto Guevara, the Peredo brothers, Darío, and many others who lead the march of the people's liberation, we take our place in the long guerrilla file, rifle in hand, to combat the symbol and instrument of oppression—the "gorilla" army.

As long as blood flows in our veins we will make heard the cutting cry of the exploited. Our lives do not matter if we can make our Latin America, la patria grande, a free territory of free people who are masters of their own destiny.

I realize that my decision and that of my companions will bring upon us a deluge of accusations, from the paternalistic "poor misguided fellow," to the open charge of "demagogic criminal." But Yahweh our God, the Christ of the Gospels, has announced the "good news of the liberation of man," for which he himself acted. We cannot sit and spend long hours reading the Gospel with cardinals, bishops, and pastors, all of whom are doing fine right where they are, while the flock wanders about in hunger and solitude. Doing this is called "non-violence," "peace," "Gospel." These persons, sadly, are today's Pharisees.

People no longer listen to the "Good News." Man is always betrayed by his "brother."

"Peace" is not something one finds by chance; it is the result of equality among people, as Isaiah says in his chapter 58. Peace is the result of love among people, the result of an end to exploitation.

"Peace" is not attained by dressing up in silk and living in a medieval palace, or by robbing the people in order to have a millionaire's salary, or by playing on the people's religious superstition in order to live at their expense.

"Greater love than this no man has than to lay down his life for his friends." This is the commandment which sums up the "Law."

For this reason we have taken up arms: to defend the unlettered and undernourished majority from the exploitation of a minority and to win back dignity for a dehumanized people.

We know that violence is painful because we feel in our own flesh the violent repression of the established disorder. But we are determined to liberate man because we consider him a brother. We are the people in arms. This is the only path that remains. Man comes before the "Sabbath," not vice versa.

They say violence is not evangelical; let them remember Yahweh slaying the first-born of the Egyptians to free his people from exploitation.

They say that they believe in "non-violence." Then let them stand clearly with the people. If they do, the rich and the "gorillas" will both demand their lives, just as they demanded Christ's. Let them take courage and try it; let us see if they are consistent enough to face a Good Friday. But all that is demagoguery, isn't it, you canons, generals, cursillistas, priests of the established disorder, you priests of the peace enforced by violence, of the massacre of San Juan, of the complicity of silence, of the 200-peso salaries, of the widespread tuberculosis, and of pie in the sky when you die. The Gospel is not mechanical moralism. It is a shell hiding a "life" which must be discovered if we are not to fall into pharisaism. The Gospel is "Jesus among us."

We have chosen this path because it is the only path left open to us, painful though it may be.

Fortunately, there are some, and their numbers are growing, who recognize the authenticity of our position and who either help us or have joined our ranks. We need only consider what the right-wing "gorilla" government of Brazil does to a committed Church: Father Pereira Neto was assassinated in a most cruel and inhuman manner. Or recall Father Ildefonso, a Tupamaro, assassinated in Uruguay. Or Father Camilo Torres, silenced by the government and the servile church. But Camilo Torres ratified with his blood what he had said about Christianity:

In Catholicism the main thing is love for one's fellow men: "... He who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the Law." For this love to be genuine, it must seek to be effective. If works of beneficence, almsgiving, the few tuition-free schools, the few housing projects — everything which is known as "charity" — do not succeed in feeding the majority of the hungry, in clothing the majority of the naked, or in teaching the majority of the ignorant, then we must seek effective means to achieve the well-being of this majority .... This is why the revolution is not only permissible but obligatory for those Christians who see it as the only effective and far-reaching way to make love for all people a reality.

I believe that taking up arms is the only effective way of protecting the poor against their present exploitation, the only effective way of generating a free man.

I believe that the struggle for liberation is rooted in the prophetic line of Salvation History.

Enough of the languid faces of the over-pious! The whip of justice, so often betrayed by elegant gentlemen, will fall on the exploiter, that false Christian who forgets that the force of his Lord ought to drive him to liberate his neighbor from sin, that is to say, from every lack of love.

We believe in a "New Man," made free by the blood and resurrection of Jesus. We believe in a New Earth, where love will be the fundamental law. This will come about, however, only by breaking the old patterns based on selfishness. We don't want patches. New cloth can't be used to mend old garments, nor can new wine be put into old wineskins. Conversion implies first an inner violence which is then followed by violence against the exploiter. May both men and the Lord together judge the rightness of our decision.

At least no one can imply that we look for profit or comfort. These are not what we find in the struggle; they are what we leave behind.

The Lord said, "He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me" (Matthew), and "He who does not hate even his own life cannot be my disciple" (Luke). We believe that the Lord is referring to the person tied to his "own little world" and his "own little problems." The "other person" is out there beyond our "own comfort."

There are those who defend themselves with lyrical discourses about the "revolution"; yet at the moment of truth, because of their cowardice, they take the side of the oppressor. The sin of omission is the fault of our Church, just as it was of the "lukewarm" members (Rev. 3:14-22), just as it is of those who do not want "to get their hands dirty." We don't want to bequeath to our children a vision of life based upon competition as a means of possession, or on possessions as a measure of man's value.

We believe in a man who has value for who he is, and not for what he has. We believe in a completely liberated man who will live and build brotherly structures through which love may be expressed.

I am certain that we can achieve this goal, for the Lord "is ready to give us far more than all we can ask or think" (Ephesians 3:20).

"The duty of every Christian is to be a revolutionary. The duty of every revolutionary is to bring about the revolution."

Victory or Death.

[improvisedliturgy]

If enslavement was the reduction of life to the time of the plantation (“lifetime converted into labour time”), a mode of production that rendered human life as “work,” the improvisatory nature of Black music was moving away from time as this singular experience. The play, the sound, was a reminder that “labour time was not life-time.” To reach for life was to create something else with time, beyond that labor time.

Joshua Myers, Of Black Study

[questcequecestqueca]

He had vanished into mountains where entire armies had failed to track him down… And yet, the formidable Apache leader Geronimo spent his final days behind prison walls, far from the land he had sworn to defend.

For decades, Geronimo led a relentless resistance against Mexican and American forces across the searing deserts and rugged canyons of the American Southwest.

Soldiers spoke of merciless pursuits, of Apache warriors crossing impossible terrain only to dissolve into the desert heat like phantoms.

But in September 1886, after years of pursuit, hardship, and exhaustion, Geronimo was finally compelled to surrender near Skeleton Canyon, in the Arizona Territory.

Many Apaches still believed that, once peace was restored, they would one day be allowed to return home… But that promise was never fulfilled.

Under armed guard, they were deported thousands of miles away from their sacred mountains and turned into prisoners of war.

As the years passed, Geronimo was held in a succession of military forts, including Fort Pickens and Fort Sill. The contrast was heartbreaking: the man who had once ridden freely through canyon lands now lived hemmed in by soldiers, fences, and prison walls.

In the final photographs taken of him, his face—etched by time—still bore the piercing gaze of the warrior he had once been. Visitors came from far away simply to look upon him, as though he were a living remnant of a vanishing world.

Yet behind that public fascination lay a profound tragedy: Geronimo pleaded again and again to be allowed to return home… and every plea was denied.

In February 1909, old and weakened, he was thrown from his horse while traveling through freezing rain. Left exposed to the cold for hours, he developed pneumonia. On February 17, 1909, Geronimo died at Fort Sill, far from the mountains and desert that had shaped the whole of his life.

According to tradition, one of his final regrets was his surrender. He is said to have declared: “I should never have surrendered. I should have fought until the last man alive.”

And perhaps that is what makes his story so haunting even now… The warrior no one could capture in the open mountains did not die beneath the vast sky of his homeland, but old, watched, and imprisoned—far from all he had tried to protect.

[the--framed--maelstrom]

καὶ Ήρὰκλειτός τὸ ἀντίξουν συμφέρον καὶ ἐκ τῶν διαφερόντων καλλίστην ἁρμονίαν καὶ πάντα κατ’ ἔριν γίνεσθαι

The counter-striving is convergent; from what differs emerges the most beautiful harmony; and all things come to be through strife.

— Heraclitus, Fragment B8

συμφέρον (sympheron) — "coming together," "converging," "bearing together." The root of the later notion of what is "advantageous" or "beneficial," but here it signifies the hidden belonging-together of opposing forces.

διαφερόντων (diapherontōn) — "things that differ," "things carried apart," "what diverges." Difference is not treated as a defect but as the very condition of unity.

καλλίστη ἁρμονία (kallistē harmonia) — "the most beautiful harmony." Harmony (harmonia) originally means a fitting-together, a joining, a tensioned arrangement, as in the fitting of a bow or lyre. Harmony is therefore not the absence of opposition but its accomplished integration.

ἔρις (eris) — strife, contention, conflict. Not merely war or hostility, but the productive contest through which things emerge into their determinate form.

[acrobata-s]

For me, writing is a gesture of the body, a gesture of creativity, a working from the inside out. My feminism is grounded not on incorporeal abstraction but on corporeal realities. The material body is center, and central. The body is the ground of thought. The body is a text. Writing is not about being in your head; it’s about being in your body. The body responds physically, emotionally, and intellectually to external and internal stimuli, and writing records, ­ orders, and theorizes about these responses. For me, writing begins with the impulse to push boundaries, to shape ideas, images, and words that travel through the body and echo in the mind into something that has never existed.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Gestures of the Body—­ Escribiendo para idear

[achillesinhighheels]

female bodybuilders across india

captured by keerthana kunnath

[feignedremote]

René Depestre, Hadriana in All My Dreams, trans. Kaiama L. Glover

[funeral]

Everything which once aspired to transcendence, to discovery, to the infinite, has subtly altered its aim so that it can go into orbit: learning, technology, knowledge, having lost any transcendent aspect to their projects, have begun planning orbital trajectories for themselves. 'Information' is orbital, for example—a form of knowledge which will never again go beyond itself, never again achieve transcendence or self-reflection in its aspiration towards the infinite; yet which, for all that, never sets its feet on the ground, for it has no true purchase on, nor referent in, reality. Information circulates, moves around, makes its circuits (which are sometimes perfectly useless—but that is the whole point: the question of usefulness cannot be raised)—and with each spiral, each revolution, it accumulates.

Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil

[yama-bito]

The 12th century Andalusian polymath Ibn Tufayl describing a similar preceding problem:

“ [ecstatic transcendental] states, as Avicenna describes them, are reached not by theorising, syllogistic deductions, postulating premisses and drawing inferences, but solely by intuition.

But on the other hand you may desire a discursive, intellectualised introduction […] but it is rarer than red sulphur, especially in our part of the world. For the experience is so arcane that only one lone individual and then another can master the most trifling part of it. 

Do not suppose the philosophy which has reached us in the books of Aristotle and Farabi or in Avicenna’s Healing will satisfy you if this is what you need, or that any Andalusian has written anything adequate on this subject. The reason is that before the spread of philosophy and formal logic to the West all native Andalusians of any ability devoted their lives to mathematics. They achieved a high level in that field but could do no more. The next generation surpassed them in that they knew a little logic. But study logic they may, they could not find in it the way to fulfilment. It was one of them who wrote: 

‘How can it be that life’s so small. Two sciences we have - that’s all. One is truth beyond attaining; The other vain and not worth gaining’ ”

— Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, A Philosophical Tale, tr. Lenn Evan Goodman

[ilions-end]

okay i've come to appreciate seneca for his banger lines but wow already on the FIRST PAGE of his medea???

MEDEA: Bring death on this new wife, death on the father-in-law and the whole royal stock. For the bridegroom I have a worse prayer in store: may he live. May he wander through unknown cities in want, in exile, hated and homeless may he seek out other men's doors, by this time a notorious guest; may he long for me as his wife and—I can make no worse prayer—for children resembling their father and resembling their mother. My revenge is born, already born: I have given birth.

[evillesbianvillain]

"What does this have to do with politics??" *Posts soviet suprematist painter Malevich*

[tgirlmaomao]

When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed, "Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert. . . . Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!" "Withering" words were sought to drive off the symbol of the "desert" so that one might behold on the "dead square" the beloved likeness of "reality" ( "true objectivity" and a spiritual feeling). The square seemed incomprehensible and dangerous to the critics and the public... and this, of course, was to be expected. The ascent to the heights of nonobjective art is arduous and painful... but it is nevertheless rewarding. The familiar recedes ever further and further. into the background... The contours of the objective world fade more and more and so it goes, step by step, until finally the world-"everything we loved and by which we have lived" becomes lost to sight. No more "likeness of reality," no idealistic images-nothing but a desert! But this desert is filled with the spirit of nonobjective sensation which pervades everything. Even I was gripped by a kind of timidity bordering on fear when it came to leaving "the world of will and idea," in which I had lived and worked and in the reality of which I had believed. But a blissful sense of liberating nonobjectivity drew me forth into the "desert," where nothing is real except feeling... and so feeling became the substance of my life. This was no "empty square" which I had exhibited but rather the feeling of nonobjectivity. I realized that the "thing" and the "concept" were substituted for feeling and understood the falsity of the world of will and idea. Is a milk bottle, then, the symbol of milk? Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art which, in the course of time, had become obscured by the accumulation of "things." It appears to me that, for the critics and the public, the painting of Raphael, Rubens, Rembrandt, etc., has become nothing more than a conglomeration of countless "things," which conceal its true value the feeling which gave rise to it. The virtuosity of the objective representation is the only thing admired. If it were possible to extract from the works of the great masters the feeling expressed in them-the actual artistic value, that is-and to hide this away, the public, along with the critics and the art scholars, would never even miss it. So it is not at all strange that my square seemed empty to the public. If one insists on judging an art work on the basis of the virtuosity of the objective representation-the verisimilitude of the illusion and thinks he sees in the objective representation itself a symbol of the inducing emotion, he will never partake of the gladdening content of a work of art.

Suprematism

Kasimir Malevich, 1927

Чистый Красный Цвет (Pure Red Color)

A. Rodchenko, 1921

And so the Constructivists working with the surface plane, despite themselves, confirmed the representational, of which their constructions were an element. And when the artist really wanted to get rid of representation, he achieved this only at the cost of destroying painting and only at the cost of destroying himself as a painter. I am referring to the canvas which Rodchenko offered to the attention of an astonished public at one of this season's exhibitions [5x5 = 25, 1921]. This was a smallish, almost square canvas painted entirely in a single red colour. This canvas is extremely significant for the evolution of artistic forms which art has undergone in the last ten years. It is not merely a stage which can be followed by new ones but it represents the last and final step of a long journey, the last word, after which painting must become silent, the last 'picture' made by an artist. This canvas eloquently demonstrates that painting as a figurative art - which it has always been - is outdated. If Malevich's Black Square on a White Background, despite the poverty of its artistic meaning, did contain some painterly idea which the author called 'economy', 'the fifth dimension', then Rodchenko's canvas, which is devoid of any content, is a meaningless, dumb and blind wall. However, as a link in the chain of development, viewed not as a self-contained value (which it isn't) but as a stage in evolution, it is historically significant and 'marks an epoch.’

From the Easel to the Machine

Nikolai Tarabukhin, 1922

[a-h-mad-hish]

“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens,'said Gimli. 'Maybe,'said Elrond,'but let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

[huariqueje]

All kinds of spring Herbs and Grasses - Paula von Goeschen-Rösler , 1917.

German , 1875-1941

Gouache in lime green, dark green, and brown, black pencil, silhouetted and mounted on Japanese paper, 34.9 x 38.9 cm.

[moradadabeleza]

Ryan McGinley

Black Star, 2009

[fr3nstimu1ator]

[pmamtraveller]

Claude Monet by Thomas Bossard

[sivavakkiyar]

not actually the whole album but it’s weirdly hard to find the tracks I specifically wanted to post. extremely beautiful and more than worth hearing

[proustian-dream]

Baudelaire was a lover of depth, understood in the strictly spatial sense. He waited, like some marvel always ready to flare into being, for certain moments in which space eluded its customary flatness and began to reveal itself in a potentially inexhaustible succession of stage wings. Then things – every single negligible object – suddenly took on an unexpected significance. In those moments, he wrote, ‘the exterior world offers itself with a powerful emphasis, a clearness of outline, a wealth of exquisite colors.’ As if to say that thought was possible only when the world presented itself in this way. These were also ‘the moments of existence in which time and extension are more profound, and the sentiment of existence has grown enormously.’ So, in Western terms, Baudelaire was getting close to describing what for Vedic seers, and later for Buddha, was bodhi, the ‘awakening.’ And in an equally literal Western spirit, he made this coincide with physiological awakening, with the moment in which ‘the eyelids have just been unburdened of the sleep that sealed them.’ This is what drugs are for: opium makes space deep (‘Space is deepened by opium’), while hashish ‘spreads over the whole of life like a magic varnish’ (perhaps similar to Vauvenargues’s comment ‘clarity is the vernis des maîtres’?). Yet Baudelaire also pointed out that drugs are only a surrogate for physiology, since ‘every man carries within himself the right dose of natural opium, which he unceasingly secretes and renews.’

Roberto Calasso, 'The Natural Obscurity of Things', La Folie Baudelaire