rulan's reads

collecting passages from readings / about

[firstfullmoon]

mary oliver, “franz marc’s blue horses” / ada limón, “what it looks like to us and the words we use”

[illustratus]

I saw a man this morning

Who did not wish to die:

I ask and cannot answer,

If otherwise wish I.

Fair broke the day this morning

Against the Dardanelles;

The breeze blew soft, the morn’s cheeks

Were cold as cold sea-shells.

But other shells are waiting

Across the Aegean Sea,

Shrapnel and high explosive,

Shells and hells for me.

O hell of ships and cities,

Hell of men like me,

Fatal second Helen,

Why must I follow thee?

Achilles came to Troyland

And I to Chersonese:

He turned from wrath to battle,

And I from three days’ peace.

Was it so hard, Achilles,

So very hard to die?

Thou knewest, and I know not —

So much the happier I.

I will go back this morning

From Imbros over the sea;

Stand in the trench, Achilles,

Flame-capped, and shout for me.

"Achilles in the Trench" by Patrick Shaw Stewart at Gallipoli in 1915

[feignedremote]

At some time in the past, I thought, I must have made a mistake, and now I am living the wrong life.

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

[retrocausality]

The Final Act When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut | x, x

[apoemaday]

A Poison Tree

by William Blake

I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath–my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe; I told it not–my wrath did grow, And I watered it in fears, Night and morning with my tears, And I sunned it with smiles And with soft deceitful wiles, And it grew both day and night ‘Til it bore an apple bright, And my foe beheld it shine, And he knew that it was mine– And into my garden stole When the night had veiled the pole; In the morning, glad, I see My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

[arielseaworth]

“Perhaps you have forgotten. That’s one of the great problems of our modern world, you know. Forgetting. The victim never forgets. Ask an Irishman what the English did to him in 1920 and he’ll tell you the day of the month and the time and the name of every man they killed. Ask an Iranian what the English did to him in 1953 and he’ll tell you. His child will tell you. His grandchild will tell you. And when he has one, his great-grandchild will tell you too. But ask an Englishman—” He flung up his hands in mock ignorance. “If he ever knew, he has forgotten. ‘Move on!’ you tell us. ‘Move on! Forget what we’ve done to you. Tomorrow’s another day!’ But it isn’t, Mr. Brue.” He still had Brue’s hand. “Tomorrow was created yesterday, you see. That is the point I was making to you. And by the day before yesterday, too. To ignore history is to ignore the wolf at the door.”

- A Most Wanted Man, John le Carré

[lionfloss]

"Our grandfathers were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of the spring?"

- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949)

[decayalectical-deactivated20230]

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve. Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm. – The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable."

-Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History,

[shewalksinbeautylikethenight13]

“She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged.” - Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

[quotespile]

“The American reader cannot bear a surprise. He knows that this is the greatest country on earth…and evidence to the contrary is not admissible. That means no inconvenient facts, no new information. If you really want the reader’s attention, you must flatter him. Make his prejudices your own. Tell him things he already knows. He will love your soundness.”

— Gore Vidal, Burr

[beguines]

To know oneself means to be oneself, to be master of oneself, to distinguish oneself, to free oneself from a state of chaos, to exist as an element of order but of one's own order and one's own discipline in striving for an ideal. And we cannot be successful in this unless we also know others, their history, the successive efforts they have made to be what they are . . . And we must learn all this without losing sight of the ultimate aim: to know oneself better through others and to know others better through oneself.

Antonio Gramsci, "Socialism and Culture", The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1935, ed. David Forgacs

[victorrichardson]

Before Action

By all the glories of the day And the cool evening’s benison,  By that last sunset touch that lay  Upon the hills when day was done,  By beauty lavishly outpoured  And blessings carelessly received,  By all the days that I have lived  Make me a soldier, Lord. 

 By all of all man’s hopes and fears,  And all the wonders poets sing,  The laughter of unclouded years,  And every sad and lovely thing ;  By the romantic ages stored  With high endeavour that was his,  By all his mad catastrophes  Make me a man, Lord. 

 I, that on my familiar hill  Saw with uncomprehending eyes  A hundred of Thy sunsets spill  Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice, Ere the sun swings his noonday sword  Must say good-bye to all of this ;  By all delights that I shall miss,  Help me to die, O Lord.

(written by Lieutenant William Noel Hodgson on 26 June 1916 - 5 days before he died in the Battle of the Somme)

[missedstations]

"Home Service" - Geoffrey Faber

“At least it wasn’t your fault” I hear them console When they come back, the few that will come back. I feel those handshakes now. “Well, on the whole You didn’t miss much. I wish I had your knack Of stopping out. You still can call your soul Your own, at any rate. What a priceless slack You’ve had, old chap. It must have been top-hole. How’s poetry? I bet you’ve written a stack.” What shall I say? That it’s been damnable? That all the time my soul was never my own? That we’ve slaved hard at endless make-believe? It isn’t only actual war that’s hell, I’ll say. It’s spending youth and hope alone Among pretences that have ceased to deceive.

[rulanreads]

[…] because as long as we can keep both eyes on the road, we do not need to look at the landscape, and as long as there’s gas and asphalt and rubber trees, we can keep driving without destination, a word we know not what to do with, a word and idea, we’re really pretty sure, that somebody else was supposed to take care of, while we leased SUVs and ate maki rolls and attained thorough knowledge of Wall Street’s big gainers, and since we know nothing, since the directions were lost, since all manner of order was tossed out the window, as we enter this century grasping at straws and pointing with fingers, I urge, while you can, listen less and see more, before what lies ahead turns to dots in the rearview, before life is a marker long passed and well gone — steal those candlesticks, fill your coat up with forks, and hurry along into the night; do not let this world catch up with you, ever, and if it knocks, do not let it in.

— Charles McLeod; National Treasures

[rulanreads]

You’ve [Mike Davis] been organizing for social change your whole life. How do you deal with a future that feels so bleak? For someone my age who was in the civil rights movement, and in other struggles of the 1960s, I’ve seen miracles happen. I’ve seen ordinary people do the most heroic things. When you’ve had the privilege of knowing so many great fighters and resisters, you can’t lay down the sword, even if things seem objectively hopeless. I’ve always been influenced by the poems [Bertolt] Brecht wrote in the late 30s, during the second world war, after everything had been incinerated, all the dreams and values of an entire generation destroyed, and Brecht said, well, it’s a new dark ages … how do people resist in the dark ages? What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other. You have to fight. Can you share some of the messages you’ve received? [Davis picks up one stack of papers from his printer, and opens a drawer and pulls out another stack, and begins to read passages aloud.] “We’ve never met but like many people out there I’ve been changed by your work. I’m a brown kid from Orange county who spent many years trying to understand and articulate the complex but unshakable love I have for our home, its haunted uncanniness, its beauty, its cruelty …” “I hear you are in the final stretch of, well, all of this. I write to you from Paris a few hours before I fly back home to LA, and I know that when we make the final descent into the LA basin this afternoon, I will cry softly, as I always do, so in love with the place I call home …” “You came on my podcast back in late 2020 and we talked a lot about rural America. Right now my community is in shambles, because last week eastern Kentucky was hit really bad by a one-in-a-thousand-year flood. I’m having a real hard time time finding any hope anywhere. But I read this interview you did, and it made me feel, not necessarily more hopeful, but more at peace ...” “It is pretty common for people to underestimate their own legacy. So allow me just to say that I’m glad that you did not die on the barricades too soon, before we had your wonderful books. After all, aren’t they a kind of barricade for the ages?” There is so much un-mobilized love out there. It’s really moving to see how much. What are you and your family doing with the time you have left? Avoiding this trap where writers feel they must weigh in with famous last words or a long essay on dying. We’re watching a lot of Scandinavian noir on HBO. In the last month, I’ve started consuming immense amounts of military history, an infantile throwback. I find the counterfactuals – this battle, what did it decide, what was the alternative – deeply fascinating. You can’t expect to die at a very heroic moment. It’d be nice to die in 1968, or with the liberation of Europe in 1945. You’re on the barricades in 1917, 1919. Go out of life with the red flags flying. But despair is useless.

— snippets from an interview with Mike Davis, by Lois Beckett for The Guardian; Aug 31, 2022 (x)

This summer [summer 2022], the 76-year-old stopped treatment for esophageal cancer and began palliative care, giving him an estimated six to nine months to live.

[ruckuscauser]

“What does the Nuremberg Declaration say? There’s no higher order that can cancel your conscience. Nations will be judged by the standard of the individual. Look: the President makes choices, the Congress makes choices, the Chiefs of Staff make choices, the officers make choices. All those choices percolate down to the individual trooper with his finger on the trigger; the individual pilot with his thumb on the button that drops the bomb. If that trigger doesn’t get pulled, if that button doesn’t get pushed, all those other choices vanish, as if they never were, they’re meaningless. So what is the critical choice? What is the one we’ve got to think about and get to?

...Humans are able to make moral decisions, moral and ethical decisions. When we tell the trooper who pulls the trigger, or the soldier who turns the wheel that releases oil into the Persian Gulf, that they’re not responsible - “just following orders, just doing my duty, have no choice” - bypassing them, making them a part of the machine, we deny them their humanity, their responsibility for those actions and the consequences of those actions.

Look, I’ve been a soldier. I don’t want any moral loophole. I need to take personal responsibility for my actions. And if we don’t learn how to do this, we’re going to keep on going to war, again, and again, and again.”

- Utah Phillips, “The Violence Within”

[metamorphesque]

— Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1

[ text ID: If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time. ]