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Ruby Sky Stiler, No Title, (woven text book pages, spray paint), 2010 [Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY. © Ruby Sky Stiler]

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listen the first language they teach you to speak is loss

— Destiny Hemphill, from “prophecy for when you try to return,” Oracle: A Cosmology

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The immersive ugliness of the built environment in the USA is entropy made visible. It indicates not simple carelessness but a vivid drive toward destruction, decay and death: the stage-set of a literal “death trip,” of a society determined to commit suicide. Far from being a mere matter of aesthetics, suburbia represents a compound economic catastrophe, ecological debacle, political nightmare, and spiritual crisis — for a nation of people conditioned to spend their lives in places not worth caring about.”

― James Howard Kunstler,

The Geography of Nowhere

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Massacre is a dead metaphor that is eating my friends, eating them without salt. They were poets and have become Reporters With Borders; they were already tired and now they're even more tired. 'They cross the bridge at daybreak fleet of foot' and die with no phone coverage. I see them through night vision goggles and follow the heat of their bodies in the darkness; there they are, fleeing from it even as they run towards it, surrendering to this huge massage. Massacre is their true mother, while genocide is no more than a classical poem written by intellectual pensioned-off generals. Genocide isn't appropriate for my friends, as it's an organised collective action and organised collective actions remind them of the Left that let them down.

Massacre wakes up early, bathes my friends in cold water and blood, washes their underclothes and makes them bread and tea, then teaches them a little about the hunt. Massacre is more compassionate to my friends than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Massacre opened the door to them when other doors were closed, and called them by their names when news reports were looking for numbers. Massacre is the only one to grant them asylum regardless of their backgrounds; their economic circumstances don't bother Massacre, nor does Massacre care whether they are intellectuals or poets, Massacre looks at things from a neutral angle; Massacre has the same dead features as them, the same names as their widowed wives, passes like them through the countryside and the suburbs and appears suddenly like them in breaking news. Massacre resembles my friends, but always arrives before them in faraway villages and children's schools.

Massacre is a dead metaphor that comes out of the television and eats my friends without a single pinch of salt.

Ghayath Almadhoun, "Massacre", Adrenalin, trans. Catherine Cobham

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The modern question of pronoun usages is not just a conversation about self-actualization, it’s a battle about who gets to define language. And, in our contemporary times, if English is meant to maintain its function as a “universal” language, it will have to adapt to function in the more equitable world we are building, not just the colonial one it forged.

Shayla Lawson, "On Them (Amherst, Massachusetts)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

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“I still believe that I am right to claim that we must rigorously deny the possibility that human life can be lived without a future. For, as I see it, it is a distinctively human fact that we must always keep the future open and with it new possibilities. … It is true that we cannot see paths and solutions in advance, and yet we must ask ourselves if there will not always remain new possibilities.”

— Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Enigma of Health, 80-81

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"Le vrai est ce qu'il peut ; le faux est ce qu'il veut."

"The true is what it can be; the wrong is whatever it wants to be."

--- Claire de Kersaint, aka Madame de Duras (1777-1828)

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De Rerum Natura.

…For if atoms did not tend to lean, they would

Plummet like raindrops through the depths of space…

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Lover and beloved dynamics in Phaedrus' speech. Plato, The Symposium, c. 380 BCE.

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this is how Palestinian prisoners have passed messages to their families and loved ones for decades. most often, the piece of paper is tightly folded, wrapped in plastic and swallowed by a prisoner due to be released.

photo by me from a meeting with Khalid Ashour, Palestinian ex-prisoner who spent 12 years of his life in Israeli prisons.

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Alba Savoi, Di/aria, (mixed media canvas book, plexiglass), 1982 [Mart, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, donazione Mirella Bentivoglio. © Alba Savoi]

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Gjertrud Hals, Requiem, (knitted copper wire, metal objects), 2017 [© Gjertrud Hals. Photo: Sjur Fedje]

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We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give...we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us... To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves...there lies the great singular power of self-respect.

― Joan Didion

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The last lights were undulating on the standing green water of the pool. Discovering the sublime in the trivial, the invisible underneath the tangible—she herself completely disarmed as if in that instant she'd learned that her ability to uncover the secrets of natural life was still intact. And also disarmed by the slight anguish that came to her when she felt she could uncover other secrets too, perhaps a mortal secret. But she knew she was ambitious: she'd scorn easy success and want, though she was afraid, to rise higher and higher or descend lower and lower.

― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures.

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“The only alternative left for humankind is discipline. Discipline is the only deterrent. But by discipline I don’t mean harsh routines. I don’t mean waking up every morning at five-thirty and throwing cold water on yourself until you’re blue. Sorcerers understand discipline as the capacity to face with serenity odds that are not included in our expectations. For them, discipline is an art: the art of facing infinity without flinching, not because they are strong and tough but because they are filled with awe.”

— Don Juan Matus, The Active Side of Infinity (via modernshxmxn)

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Eavan Boland, “A Woman Painted on a Leaf”

[Text ID: “I want a poem I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.”]