[a-quiet-green-agreement]

It was a hard blow for me. But, after all, what could I do about it? I went on my way, in the midst of the world’s transformations, being transformed myself.

– Italo Calvino, from “The Aquatic Uncle,” Cosmicomics (Harcourt, 1968)

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Mining companies buy land in Greenland with the knowledge that melting ice will reveal new mineral and oil reserves. Private security firms prepare to defend wealthy clients from civil unrest caused by droughts, floods, and famines. Dutch engineering companies sell flood-management expertise and plans for floating cities. Wealthy investors buy vast swathes of farmland in the Global South in hope of cashing in when droughts make arable land scarce. Many millions will die from the effects of global warming and capitalists are counting on it.”

— Kai Heron and Jodi Dean, Revolution or Ruin

[0x1-deactivated20220826]

Communism does not need to be called from the womb of the future; it is here, in our being, in the immanent life of common knowledge.

But the present situation is paradoxical — simultaneously exciting and despairing. Capitalism has never been so close to its final collapse, but social solidarity has never been so far from our daily experience. We must start from this paradox in order to build a postpolitical and postrevolutionary process of disentangling the possible from the existent.

The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance

[jca-archive]

Komaro Hoshino, from International Photography Exposed, Vol. 2 (1985)

[saintlaurentgirl-deactivated201]

Patti Smith & Sam Shepard photographed by Judy Linn

[babypleasebaby]

COMME DES GARÇONS PUBLICATIONS

[weil-weil-lautre]

“As I write them down, I am convinced once more that, however paradoxical it may sound, the greatest drawback about writing is that one has to use words. It is a problem. For I should prefer a more direct form of communication, that tacit understanding one often finds between people. If I could write by carving on wood or by stroking a child’s head or strolling in the countryside, I would never resort to using words. I would do what so many people do who are not writers, and with the same joy and torment as those who write, and with the same bitter disappointments which are beyond consolation. I would live and no longer use words. And this might be the solution. And as such, be most welcome.”

— Clarice Lispector, Selected Crônicas, 140

[edwordsmyth]

“Depression may be described as the condition in which, no longer investing desire in daily experience, the conscious organism loses the ability to find meaning in its surrounding world. Actually, meaning does not lie in things, or in the signs of language. It is generated by the endless shift from one interpretation to the next, from the uncertain and ambiguous exchange of gestures. Desire is the energy that enables this continuous activity of interpretation. Meaning is the effect of affective communication among language agents. Since meaning emerges in the dimension of affective conjunction, the possibility of meaningful exchange rapidly dissolves when the community of bodies disaggregates. This is the starting point of depression. ~~~ When breathing together grew dangerous, everybody was obliged to breathe alone and the rhythm of individual respiration was obliged to follow the pace of economic competition. ~~~ The subatomic self has fractalized, losing the ability to conjoin with the Other. In a lonely dance in which friendship is forbidden, the inner self is obliged to instead synchronize with the pure abstraction of digital time.”

— Bifo // Breathing - Chaos and Poetry (via grandpasessions)

[azspot]

“The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

— Alvin Toffler

[tamsoj]

“But that night my dream of glory turned gray, because I saw that the best the “white world” has to offer was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, music; not enough night.”

— Jack Kerouac, from his journal entry; August, 1949.

[the-night-picture-collector]

Saul Leiter, Untitled, 1963

[tamsoj]

Odysseus Elytis, from Poetry (June 1951), “Poem”

[tamsoj]

“Already its August— / Season of snipers in the heartland […] / It’s a miracle we were able, ever / To put one foot in front of the other and keep on walking”

— Meena Alexander, from ‘Atmospheric Embroidery’

[adrasteiax]

“This August I began to dream of drowning. The dying went on and on (…)”

— Anne Sexton, from Imitations Of Drowning in “The Complete Poems Of Anne Sexton”

[antigonick]

Not everything the eye sees should be spoken by the mouth.

Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (via antigonick)

[theoptia]

A drop of blood, of honey, on the fingertips.

Pierre Reverdy, from The Book; translated by Dan Bellm (via tamsoj)

[virgin-of-babylon]

““As the English novelist Samantha Harvey recalls in her memoir “The Shapeless Unease,” a French friend saw her haggard face one morning and asked if she’d had “une petite nuit”—the French expression for a sleepless night. Ms. Harvey said “oui,” but inwardly she railed at the cruelly oblivious “petite.” “French has it all wrong,” she thought: “Nights awake are the longest, largest, most cavernous of things. There is acre upon acre of night, and whole eras come and go, and there isn’t another soul to be found on the journey through to morning.””

— Laura Kolbe