m

i lost my password on my main account don't mind me

[nibelmundo]

Alas, we musn't despair, we grieve on the road.

Nia Òla, Scary Slut Manifesto

[nibelmundo]

Whereas the grand coffeehouse flourished in wealthier districts, the beverage remained successful in working-class neighborhoods, even near the workplace. An engraving by William Bartlett titled Coffee Kiosque on the Port depicts different architectural qualities while featuring a similar layout (see Appendix Three). This waterside café lacked high ceilings and windows and was in fact without walls. Although this coffeehouse was not lavish, it continued to serve the same purpose as the grand coffeehouse. Lanterns hung from the ceilings to accommodate a nighttime crowd. Customers drank coffee on benches around the perimeter and conversed with one another while enjoying a view of the water. The Ayasofya mosque, an iconic feature of the Ottoman capital, is displayed in the background, suggesting that the coffeehouse was similarly a symbol of Turkish culture. Although the seaside coffeehouse was an outdoor space with fewer amenities, it continued to serve coffee and foster a sense of community within the public space. Regardless of where coffee was served – in the grand coffeehouse, a seaside café, or in a middle-class neighborhood – the drink quickly became an important component of Ottoman culture. Augier Ghislain de Busbecq, who was living in Istanbul the year the first coffeehouse was opened, reported that coffee was so popular it caught the attention of the Sultan. Sultan Süleyman was so impressed by the beverage that he appointed a kahvecibasi, or chief coffee-cook, to his permanent staff. After Süleyman created the position, it became traditional for a Sultan to appoint a personal coffee-cook. When assuming leadership, Sultans constructed physical structures that would serve as reminders of their power after their lifetime. Often expressed in the form of a mosque or madrasa, the most famous of these displays of power was the Blue Mosque commissioned by Sultan Ahmed in the 17th century. After the introduction of coffee to Istanbul, building a grand coffeehouse became one of the first constructions commissioned by the Sultan in newly conquered territories to demonstrate the civility of their rule. Sultans built coffeehouses in Istanbul and throughout the Ottoman Empire as an expression of a fundamentally Turkish symbol.

Marita Ervin, Coffee and the Ottoman Social Sphere (2014, 12-3)

[nibelmundo]

The Parisian coffeehouse of the late eighteenth century was fundamental in giving the French populace the public space they needed to gather and foment the ideas that brought about a revolution. More than an establishment to buy a cup of coffee and find a quiet place to read, French cafés were places of debate, as well as the exchange of information. In the years before, and even during the French Revolution, the cafés became places where liberal thoughts were put forth, radical ideology was preached, and revolutionary action was spurred.

Eddy Kyle Gilpin, Café Liberté: The Role of the Coffeehouse in the French Revolution (2020)

[nibelmundo]

I’d done much of my reporting and research over the years in St. Louis. And so, when I read that of the first dozen confirmed coronavirus deaths in St. Louis, all twelve of them were of Black people, I was sad but not at all surprised. All over the United States, early data showed that Black people were dying of COVID-19 at alarmingly high rates. Research was also showing that Latinx people and Native Americans were dying disproportionately from the disease, as well. And as the maps began to emerge showing where in New York the people being infected by and dying from the novel coronavirus lived, I realized that they were very familiar maps to me. The maps showing where people were most likely to become HIV positive (and to be harassed by police, or be killed by police, or be incarcerated, or have their HIV progress to an AIDS diagnosis, or have their AIDS diagnosis proceed to death) were maps of the same spaces where people were most likely to get the coronavirus and die of COVID-19. When we follow the virus—any virus, really—we follow the fault lines of our culture. Like all pathogens, the novel coronavirus was not a “great equalizer,” as some initially called it, but a magnifier of the divisions already present in our world.

(...) viruses show us where the cracks in our society are; they offer a stark revelation of inequality. In times of mass crisis, those cracks get wider and more people fall into them. (...) this precariousness and instability affect people’s financial, spiritual, mental, and biological health. The people living in these valleys are dwelling in the kinds of metaphysical spaces the ancient Greeks might have referred to as Hades or the underworld. Get Out filmmaker Jordan Peele might describe the psychological and physiological dimensions of this domain as “the sunken place.” I call it the viral underclass.

Steven W. Thrasher, The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide (2022, 20-2)

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Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957, 56)

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It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a sky-scraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count. When Norman O. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as “religious” as any other, this is what he meant: “civilized” society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973, 28)

[nibelmundo]

One of the key concepts for understanding man’s urge to heroism is the idea of “narcissism.” As Erich Fromm has so well reminded us, this idea is one of Freud’s great and lasting contributions. Freud discovered that each of us repeats the tragedy of the mythical Greek Narcissus: we are hopelessly absorbed with ourselves. If we care about anyone it is usually ourselves first of all. As Aristotle somewhere put it: luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow. Twenty-five hundred years of history have not changed man’s basic narcissism; most of the time, for most of us, this is still a workable definition of luck. It is one of the meaner aspects of narcissism that we feel that practically everyone is expendable except ourselves. We should feel prepared, as Emerson once put it, to recreate the whole world out of ourselves even if no one else existed. The thought frightens us; we don’t know how we could do it without others—yet at bottom the basic resource is there: we could suffice alone if need be, if we could trust ourselves as Emerson wanted. And if we don’t feel this trust emotionally, still most of us would struggle to survive with all our powers, no matter how many around us died. Our organism is ready to fill the world all alone, even if our mind shrinks at the thought. This narcissism is what keeps men marching into point-blank fire in wars: at heart one doesn’t feel that he will die, he only feels sorry for the man next to him. Freud’s explanation for this was that the unconscious does not know death or time: in man’s physiochemical, inner organic recesses he feels immortal.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973, 25)

[nibelmundo]

No prediction by any expert can tell us whether we will prosper or perish. We may choose to increase or decrease the dominion of evil. The script for tomorrow is not yet written.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973, 15)

[nibelmundo]

how easily we will shed blood to purchase the assurance of our own righteousness

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973, 14)

[nibelmundo]

Adonis (Ali Ahmed Saïd Esber), West and East in Selected Poems trans. Khaled Mattawa (2010, 103)

[ID: text: “I turn this map around, / for the world is all burned up: / East and West, a heap / of ash gathered / in the self-same grave.” /end ID]

[nibelmundo]

for I am fire’s first lover

Adonis (Ali Ahmed Saïd Esber), This Is My Name in Selected Poems trans. Khaled Mattawa (2010, 110)

[nibelmundo]

My country is a refugee inside of me

Adonis (Ali Ahmed Saïd Esber), This Is My Name in Selected Poems trans. Khaled Mattawa (2010, 110)

[nibelmundo]

We will speak plainly: There is something called presence in the world, and something called absence. Let’s tell the truth: We are absence The sky did not birth us, neither did dust We are foam spewing from a river of words Rust in the sky and its planets, rust in life (a secret manifesto)

Adonis (Ali Ahmed Saïd Esber), This Is My Name in Selected Poems trans. Khaled Mattawa (2010, 109)

[nibelmundo]

My time has yet to come, but the graveyard of the world is already here

Adonis (Ali Ahmed Saïd Esber), This Is My Name in Selected Poems trans. Khaled Mattawa (2010, 108)

[nibelmundo]

Come closer, wretched of the earth, cover this age with your rags and tears, cover it with a body seeking its own warmth The city is arcs of madness

Adonis (Ali Ahmed Saïd Esber), This Is My Name in Selected Poems trans. Khaled Mattawa (2010, 107)

[nibelmundo]

I bear a city under my sorrows I have what turns the green branches into snakes

Adonis (Ali Ahmed Saïd Esber), This Is My Name in Selected Poems trans. Khaled Mattawa (2010, 107)

[nibelmundo]

Shall I cry out that the flood is coming? Let’s begin

Adonis (Ali Ahmed Saïd Esber), This Is My Name in Selected Poems trans. Khaled Mattawa (2010, 107)