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VOTE. VOTE. VOTE. DO NOT YET REJOICE IN HIS DEFEAT.

 

 

            Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
            Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
            The bitch that bore him is in heat again. 

Bertolt Brecht, “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”

2024

 

Remembrance of Things to Come: Le Souvenir d'un avenir

                        'Memory Saved Us’: How France Blocked the Far Right  

The French had a far-right government before, one that collaborated with the Nazis. When casting ballots even today, that is not an easy thing to forget.

Behind the surge is a collective memory of the national trauma of the Nazi occupation of France 80 years ago, which has been shaped by France’s centralized national education system and by what parents and grandparents have passed on to younger generations. Elected officials interviewed said it was not just distant memories of World War II but the experience of having lived under the collaborationist Vichy regime that helped mold voters’ perceptions in national elections.

“Happily, in France, we have that memory,” said Mr. Barusseau. “And I think it was memory that saved us. You see, we have already known that,” a reference to far-right government. “We had that collaborationist regime. And also happily, we have public education that is still vigorous. You can’t really understand until you have had a war on your own soil.”

“And by the way, Hannah Arendt is very much taught and appreciated, the ‘banality of evil,’” Ms. Mesnard said, referring to the German American political scientist and her most famous doctrine about Nazism.

She has vivid memories of her grandfather’s tales of being a police officer during the war, forced by the Germans to hunt members of the Resistance, and quietly refusing to do so. “He deliberately didn’t find any,” she said.

The war “is still relatively close,” said Maurice Perrier, the right-leaning mayor of nearby Loulay, pop. 760, who also swung to Mr. Barusseau’s side. “Something remains from that dark period. It’s the memories, the memories of my parents. They talked to me about all that. I was very afraid of arriving at a situation of authoritarianism,” he said. “So, it was out of the question that I vote for the National Rally. These are extremists.”

“It seems that nations on the verge of war make a point of parading their wealth.”Denise Bellon

Chris Marker, Le Souvenir d'un avenir. Film trailer

 

To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.

 

 

 

 

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” 

― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World 

 

 In the pictures of that day, I see totemism, tribal warfare, incompetence, half-madness, vengeance, white privilege, rage, cruelty. These pictures are what would happen if Facebook became flesh. These are people all speaking at once to everyone else, all claiming that their facts are real and everyone else’s are fake.

 

Inside the Trump Plan for 2025

Sorry this is a repost, who knew we would be here. Again. The Horror. The Horror.

 

title: Octavia Butler

Vulture
Bosch image

It doesn’t have to be this way.

 

 

History is a nightmare from which none of us can wake. Imagining it otherwise isn’t so much a challenge to the truth as it is a protest against necessity. It didn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t have to be this way.**

"Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink from that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who blessed the U.S.A., then at least some great good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?"
 - Walker Percy Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome

link

image: This week in authoritarian bromance/ Esquire, Dec 18, 2015

the heart of a hummingbird

 

 

Icarus, from "The Four Disgracers"

Hendrick Goltzius Netherlandish

1588

Elegy with Icarus and the Heart of a Hummingbird

Someone must’ve gone fetched him out,
towed the drowned, wing-wrecked bird
through a slick of his own feathery want,
though, more likely, he passed out
from knowing, and the falling distance
made the surface turn hard to his body.
It must’ve mattered to his father, who,
winged himself, had to watch fishermen
circle his son, like figures in a painting,
pondering as if there were meaning in water.
Is this any way to treat the ones who flee
and wash ashore, prodding their bodies
with toe, stick, a disbelieving finger?
This morning, walking along the road,
I found a hummingbird against the curb,
marveled at the glasswork of its stillness,
how the light was falling too, so I could
see shifting green and blue, the tiny cage,
the dark needle of its bill, the dark eyes
the ants will carry away. I can’t say
if it died from wanting too much
or from finding what it wanted too much.
Surely, Icarus had
 the heart of a hummingbird.
If they revived him, would he have risen
back into the sky, damaged wiser,
or, bratty, simply blamed his crap wings?
I nudged the bird with my shoe, not expecting,
but half wishing, a startling burst
through our myth-brightened world.
But the boy who ODed in a Porta-Potty,
was no bird at all. When his father found him,
his sun-jonesing heart large from hovering,
his friends—junk-caked, booze-skanked
themselves—turned away, puked in a ditch,
praying he’d break the surface of his misery.
Even outside the funeral home, dark coats
blocks long, dragging in suits they last wore
at graduation, for some sliver of rachis
and vane jutting out where wings might be,
they do not want to die, they only want
to feel less, less this. The way we, too,
standing in a line of pity and scorn, curse
all this away, we who love those
who love the air, the sudden lift and veer.

Image: MET 

Poem: Copyright © 2017 James Hoch

 

A ruin is not a catastrophe. It is the moment when things can start again.

 

 

A Story Can Change Your Life

On the morning she became a young widow, my grandmother, startled by a sudden shadow, looked up from her work to see a hawk turn her prized rooster into a cloud of feathers. That same moment, halfway around the world in a Minnesota mine, her husband died, buried under a ton of rockfall.

She told me this story sixty years ago.
I don’t know if it’s true but it ought to be.
She was a hard old woman, and though she knelt on Sundays when the acolyte’s silver bell announced the moment of Christ’s miracle,
it was the darker mysteries she lived by: shiver-cry of an owl, black dog by the roadside,
a tapping at the door and nobody there.
The moral of the story was plain enough: miracles become a burden and require a priest
to explain them. With signs, you only need
to keep your wits about you and place your trust in a shadow world that lets you know hard luck and grief are coming your way. And for that —so the story goes—any day will do. 

 ****Anselm Kiefer: A ruin is not a catastrophe. It is the moment when things can start again.

 PETER EVERWINE 

 

what it wanted too much

 

 

Elegy with Icarus and the Heart of a Hummingbird

Someone must’ve gone fetched him out,
towed the drowned, wing-wrecked bird
through a slick of his own feathery want,
though, more likely, he passed out
from knowing, and the falling distance
made the surface turn hard to his body.
It must’ve mattered to his father, who,
winged himself, had to watch fishermen
circle his son, like figures in a painting,
pondering as if there were meaning in water.
Is this any way to treat the ones who flee
and wash ashore, prodding their bodies
with toe, stick, a disbelieving finger?
This morning, walking along the road,
I found a hummingbird against the curb,
marveled at the glasswork of its stillness,
how the light was falling too, so I could
see shifting green and blue, the tiny cage,
the dark needle of its bill, the dark eyes
the ants will carry away. I cant say
if it died from wanting too much
or from finding what it wanted too much.
Surely, Icarus had the heart of a hummingbird.
If they revived him, would he have risen
back into the sky, damaged wiser,
or, bratty, simply blamed his crap wings?
I nudged the bird with my shoe, not expecting,
but half wishing, a startling burst
through our myth-brightened world.
But the boy who ODed in a Porta-Potty,
was no bird at all. When his father found him,
his sun-jonesing heart large from hovering,
his friends—junk-caked, booze-skanked
themselves — turned away, puked in a ditch,
praying he’d break the surface of his misery.
Even outside the funeral home, dark coats
blocks long, dragging in suits they last wore
at graduation, for some sliver of rachis
and vane jutting out where wings might be,
they do not want to die, they only want
to feel less, less this. The way we, too,
standing in a line of pity and scorn, curse
all this away, we who love those
who love the air, the sudden lift and veer. 

*James Hoch

*Matisse

 

myths and monsters

 

myths and monsters

 

“In every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends.”

“Our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities.”

 

The Perils of Abstraction from Simone Weil: An Anthology

Boo, Forever

 

Boo, Forever

Spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a
   top,
I’m haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
   you.

Richard Brautigan (1968)

 

image: A Ghost Story

October 20, 2020 Peter, Dreaming

                                               Ross Gay                                                            

 

 

Peter, Dreaming

 

Say this is the architecture of a dream. The square frame of night in an empty parking lot. A horizontal resistance. The lines between darkness cut by an arc of tall lights.
 Not a star left.

No wait. Say there is a single car. 
A boy sleeping the deepest sleep inside, maybe dreaming.

 

Listen, later. A phone ringing and ringing. (a person just waking up) "wind in the distance."

A rush of starlings fills the sky before a storm moves into the title.

 

But suppose a sheet of sunlight slices back through the shadows. Maybe it is the still time of dusk in the hours before.

Say she approaches the car and taps on the glass. A window opens. The boy looks up.

That the deep foundation of the world be considered in the sorrow of her creatures.

 Cormac McCarthy, July 20, 1933 – June 13, 2023

In the end, she had said, there will be nothing that cannot be simulated. And this will be the final abridgment of privilege. This is the world to come. Not some other. The only alternative is the surprise in these antic shapes burned into concrete. 

 

 

mourning a great loss

image: Blood Meridian,Cormac McCarthy,

text:  The Passenger,Cormac McCarthy,

Nobody is ever missing. MIA/war. November 9th.

 

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart

só heavy, if he had a hundred years

& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time

Henry could not make good.

Starts again always in Henry's ears

the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

 

And there is another thing he has in mind

like a grave Sienese face a thousand years

would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of.  Ghastly,

with open eyes, he attends, blind.

All the bells say: too late.  This is not for tears;

thinking.

 

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,

end anyone and hacks her body up

and hide the pieces, where they may be found.

He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing.

Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.

Nobody is ever missing.

 

 image: The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy

poem: Dream Song 29, John Berryman

transits of affect

 myth vs memory

 

for Peter: November 3

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

 

“Once you are real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always.”
 

 

 

 

 

― The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams

 

Día de los Muertos

1. The dead surround the living. The living are the core of the dead. In this core are the dimensions of time and space. What surrounds the core is timelessness.

2. Between the core and its surroundings there are exchanges, which are not usually clear. All religions have been concerned with making them clearer. The credibility of religion depends upon the clarity of certain unusual exchanges. The mystifications of religion are the result of trying to produce such exchanges systematically.

3. The rarity of clear exchange is due to the rarity of what can cross intact the frontier between timelessness and time.

4. To see the dead as the individuals they once were tends to obscure their nature. Try to consider the living as we might assume the dead to do: collectively. The collective would accrue not only across space but also throughout time. It would include all those who had ever lived. And so we would also be thinking of the dead. The living reduce the dead to those who have lived, yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.

5. The dead inhabit a timeless moment of construction continually rebegun. The construction is the state of the universe at any instant.

6. According to their memory of life, the dead know the moment of construction as, also, a moment of collapse. Having lived, the dead can never be inert.

7. If the dead live in a timeless moment, how can they have a memory? They remember no more than being thrown into time, as does everything which existed or exists.

8. The difference between the dead and the unborn is that the dead have this memory. As the number of dead increases, the memory enlarges.

9. The memory of the dead existing in timelessness may be thought of as a form of imagination concerning the possible. This imagination is close to (resides in) God, but I do not know how.

10. In the world of the living there is an equivalent but contrary phenomenon. The living sometimes experience timelessness, as revealed in sleep, ecstasy, instants of extreme danger, orgasm, and perhaps in the experience of dying itself. During these instants the living imagination covers the entire field of experience and overruns the contours of the individual life or death. It touches the waiting imagination of the dead.

11. What is the relation of the dead to what has not yet happened, to the future? All the future is the construction in which their “imagination” is engaged.

12. How do the living lie with the dead? Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete. Thus living and dead were interdependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of egotism has broken this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as eliminated.

 

On the Economy of the Dead, John Berger

image: Catherine Hessling, La fille de l’eau, Jean Renoir, 1924.

"And you will dream of me." for Peter, October 20,2020

 

Guy does not rise into heaven after being consumed by the bear. Instead Sendak writes:

Guy sank upon a couch of flowers

In an ice-ribbed underworld

Awash in blossoming gold from a new sun

Tumbling out dark long-ago clouds,

In caverns and corridors paved with painted petals

Wound round a wild cherry tree dusted pink.

and for 'the brothers':

And Jack slept safe
Enfolded in his brother’s arms
And Guy whispered ‘Good night
And you will dream of me.’

I hear no one like him...

title, image

Maurice Sendak, My Brother’s Book

*New York Times: 

a hole in the shape of a heart

  A child of, say, six knows you’re not the shape 

she’s learned to make by drawing half along a fold,
cutting, then opening. Where do you open?
Where do you carry your dead? There’s no locket
for that—hinged, hanging on a chain that greens
your throat. And the dead inside you, don’t you
hear them breathing? You must have a hole
they can press their gray lips to. If you open—
when you open—will we find them folded inside?
In what shape? I mean what cut shape is made
whole by opening? I mean besides the heart.

image: Jim Dine

text: Maggie Smith, Heart, Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017)

they'll rouse the country for him as the Great Liberator (and meanwhile Big Business will just wink and sit tight!)

 

 

 

The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store. Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.”

  “and they'll all be convinced that, even if our Buzzy maybe has got a few faults, he's on the side of the plain people, and against all the tight old political machines, and they'll rouse the country for him as the Great Liberator (and meanwhile Big Business will just wink and sit tight!)"

He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric refrigerator,[...] in being chummy with all waitresses at all junction lunch rooms, [...] and the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. 

He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an “aching lover, and in
between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect. 

 ― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here 

the historic victory for white life

 

“Legislating reproductive rights remains a hallmark of authoritarian and fascist governments.”

By 1869, the Civil War was over. Black people were briefly enfranchised until Jim Crow took back their rights. White women pushed hard for suffrage and access to the professions, including medicine. They loudly asserted the right to “voluntary motherhood.” The doctors resisted. They lobbied legislatures to ban abortion as a dangerous procedure and a moral vice. Horatio Storer, head of Physicians Against Abortion repeatedly worried about changing demographics. What if Anglo-Saxons lost their political power? He wondered aloud whether the Western territories would “be filled with our own children or those of aliens.”

The music should sound familiar. “I want to thank you,” a Republican lawmaker, Mary E. Miller, said, addressing Donald Trump at a rally last Saturday, “for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday.”

 image: MOMA

Racism, Patriarchy, and Power: Siri Hustvedt on the Toxic Thinking Behind the Supreme Court’s Destruction of Abortion Rights

7.4.2022

 

 

 

image: poster at a demonstration

As soon as our pro‐lifers figure out they can have a tambourine, it’s over.

 

 

None of the doctors, nurses, or specialists ever breathed a word about abortion. Because twenty‐six weeks was already too late? Because it was Ohio, and the governor’s pen was constantly hovering over terrible new legislation? Because the hospital was Catholic, and in the lobby there was a statue of Jesus holding a farm animal? They never exactly knew.

It was anti‐abortion singing, led by a woman in a long, cobwebby skirt, and a man in a white collar was standing next to her with a tambourine. Behind them were two ginger- haired, freckled young men with Down syndrome, embracing each other with both arms and their cheeks pressed close.

Oh, my God, she had thought back then. As soon as our pro‐lifers figure out they can have a tambourine, it’s over.

 excerpts:*Patricia Lockwood, The Winged Thing - The New Yorker

** Hundreds of copies of the LA-based guerrilla poster artist Robbie Conal’s latest work, “Supreme Injustices,” were pasted up from Venice to Los Feliz.

image here: Robbie Conal

What is freedom?

 

The First Amendment is an important one.

I agree. It says that people are free to assemble, and if their assembly is a threat to powerful people who cause harm, you get to spray them with tear gas and drive your car into them.

We must do everything to protect women.
        Absolutely, and that’s—wait, no. No, we don’t.

What are some synonyms for freedom?
        “Independence,” “autonomy,” and “shut up, stop crying, and do what you are told."                 

 

Image and text from McSweeney's: Freedom 

Cassidy Hutchinson: Superhero