...writing

In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself: ‘Must I write?’ 

-Ranier Maria Rilke

Howard Zinn

Excerpted from "Artists in Times of War" An edited version of a talk given at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, Mass., October 10, 2001.

"When I think of the relationship between artists and society–and for me the question is always what it could be, rather than what it is–I think of the word transcendent. It is a word I never use in public, but it is the only word I can come up with to describe what I think about the role of artists. By transcendent I mean that the artist transcends the immediate. Transcends the here and now. Transcends the madness of the world. Transcends terrorism and war.
The artist thinks, acts, performs music, and writes outside the framework that society has created. The artist may do no more than give us beauty, laughter, passion, surprise, and drama. I don't mean to minimize these activities by saying the artist can do no more than this. The artist needn't apologize, because by doing this, the artist is telling us what the world should be like, even if it isn't the way it is now. The artist is taking us away from the moments of horror that we experience everyday–some days more than others– by showing what is possible.
But the artist can and should do more. In addition to creating works of art, the artist is also a citizen and a human being..."

-Howard Zinn

Teaching...

The most powerful teachers are those that ask the best questions.

-unknown

Paz

There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.

- Octavio Paz

...love...

It is... good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation... Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person... it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances

-ranier maria rilke

So...

sometimes wishes come true and we have to bear all their consequences– and so it was the case with our little fairy.

-julia hölzl

D & G

We are always afraid of losing. Our security, the great molar organization that sustains us, the arborescences we cling to, the binary machines that give us well-defined status, the resonances we enter into, the system of overcoding that dominates us–we desire all that... "in flight from flight." We flee from flight, rigidify our segments, give ourselves over to binary logic; the harder they have been to us on one segment, the harder we will be on another... The more rigid the segmentarity, the more reassuring it is for us. That is what fear is, and how it makes us retreat into the first line.

-Deleuze & Guttari, A Thousand Plateaus, Chapter 9. 1933:
Micropolitics and Segmentarity (p. 227)

Only the Lull I Like

"I believe in you in my soul....the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loaf with me on the grass....loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music, not rhyme I want....not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning;
You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,

And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my barestripped heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet."

-Walt Whitman

Scraps

On Exactitude in Science . . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

-Jorge Luis Borges

Ruminating...

If the Americans had never committed genocide against the Indians; if they had never incited wars of annihilation between the native peoples of the land, if there had never been a Trail of Tears; if America had never organized and commercialized the kidnapping and sale into slavery of a gentle and defenseless African people; if it had never developed the most widespread brutal, exploitative system of slavery the world has ever known; if it had never attacked a gallant, defenseless Puerto Rico and never turned that lovely land into a cesspool to compete with the cesspool it created in Panama; if it had never bled Latin America of her wealth and had never cast her exhausted people onto the dung heap of disease and ignorance and starvation; if it had never pushed Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the jaws of hell –if America had never done any of these things– history would still create a special bar of judgment for what America did to the Philippines.

-Nelson Peery, Black Fire

glittering charms

"Despite all efforts to tame it, manage it, control it, outsmart it, language resists your best efforts; language is still a bunch of sturdy, glittering charms in the astonished hand.

A utopia of possibility. A utopia of choice.

And I am huddled around the fire of the alphabet, still."

- Carole Maso, Rupture, Verge, and Precipice
Precipice, Verge, Hurt Not

{Badiou}

The militant of a truth is not only the political militant working for the emancipation of humanity in its entirety. He or she is also the artist creator, the scientist who opens up a new theoretical field, or the lover whose world is enchanted.

-Alain Badiou

Cixous! Cixous! Cixous!

Writing: as if I had the urge to go on enjoying, to feel full, to push, to feel the force of my muscles, and my harmony, to be pregnant and at the same time to give myself the joys of parturition, the joys of both the mother and the child. To give birth to myself and to nurse myself, too. Life summons life. Pleasure seeks renewal.

-Hélène Cixous

Fun with Foucault

"I can’t help but dream of a kind of criticism that would not try to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the seafoam in the breeze and scatter it. It would not multiply judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes––all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightening of possible storms."

-Michel Foucault, The Masked Philosopher

Watch this space...