"Hell is empty, and all the devils are here." Francis Bacon

                     We are all in the dumps

For diamonds are trumps

 

We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, Maurice Sendak

the sadness of the zoo

 quantifying complicity/strongman

 

Part of the great political crisis we face in the world today is a failure to imagine plausible desirable futures. Moshin Hamid

Driven by the terror “of time being split, of the course of the day being suddenly interrupted, of the whole world irretrievably disintegrating,” we seek assurance in an order that can “overwhelm the discontinuous."(Calasso) Our perceptions of time and space are mapped into imaginal geographies determined by fixed boundaries to sustain these hopes.

The public buys into an abstracted and mythic vision of the future (MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN) held in place by a fear of impermanence that is “so tormenting as to make the continuity of time seem an improbable gift, and one that is always about to be taken away." The production of the future is thus relinquished to an omniscient narrator who sees history as a necessary chain of events and so claims to know how the story will end. He recounts a future that has already been determined by past events, one that is thus predictable and “overwhelms the discontinuous.” Charting the territory ahead into a single determined future, he inscribes a path over previous maps reducing all sightlines to a single trajectory.

[...]the illusion is that the strongman will unite the nation.  But an aspiring dictator will always claim that some belong and others don't.  He will define one group after another as the enemy.  This might feel good, so long as you feel that you are on the right side of the line.  But now fear is the essence of life.  The politics of us-and-them, once begun, never ends.  

Most likely you won’t be killed or be required to kill. But amid the dreariness of life under dictatorship is dark responsibility for others’ death [...] the knowledge of having been utterly complicit in the very worst in human cruelty but being without tools for quantifying that complicity. 

The Strongman Fantasy, Timothy Snyder

We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is the longing for an authority figure selling certainty, claiming the fist to be a helping hand. It is a touchingly human impulse, primal and pacifying — children turn to the parent to remove the overwhelm and uncertainty of a world they don’t yet understand and cannot carry. It is also a dangerous impulse, for it pulsates beneath every war and every reign of terror in the history of the world. Marginalia

 

We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind… The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society. Leonard Cohen

• Roberto Calasso, Ardor, Transl. by Richard Dixon, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,2014) 208-9.
  
• Marginalia 
• Cressida Leyshon, “Moshin Hamid On the Migrants in All of Us,” The New Yorker, November 7, 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-week-in-fiction-mohsin- hamid-2016-

 

marking time

 

 

Our freedom is interdependent. Prisons — indefinite detention, parole, concentration camps — exist inasmuch as we allow them to.

There is no doubt that concentration camps are in operation on US soil once again.

"Dehumanization is no excess or exception it is the very premise of the American prison."** 

Trump’s election win sends private prisons stocks soaring as investors anticipate hard crackdown on migration. His pledge to crack down hard on mass migration promises to mean big business for private prisons. Fortune

Jesse Krimes: At the MET

Apokaluptein:16389067 was conceived and executed within federal prison.  The title references the Greek origin of the word apocalypse meaning to ‘uncover, reveal;' an event involving destruction or damage on a catastrophic scale; the numbers reference Krimes' Federal Bureau of Prisons identification number. He smuggled the contraband works through the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the United States Postal Service, piece by piece, over a period of three years, resulting in a forced Exquisite Corpse with himself.  The resulting work is a series of 39 disembodied prison sheets sutured together, making up a collective installation as vast as the history and timeline represented  over his seventy-month absence.Apokaluptein:16389067

Marking Time

**Laura K. Wallace on "The Prison & the American Imagination" 

The Horror, continued. Closed ports: the things they carried

 

 

 

Judith Ortiz Cofer: "The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica"

Presiding over a formica counter,
plastic Mother and Child magnetized
to the top of an ancient register,
the heady mix of smells from the open bins
of dried codfish, the green plantains
hanging in stalks like votive offerings,
she is the Patroness of Exiles,
a woman of no-age who was never pretty,
who spends her days selling canned memories
while listening to the Puerto Ricans complain
that it would be cheaper to fly to San Juan
than to buy a pound of Bustelo coffee here,
and to Cubans perfecting their speech
of a "glorious return" to Havana--where no one
has been allowed to die and nothing to change until then;
to Mexicans who pass through, talking lyrically
of dólares to be made in El Norte--

all wanting the comfort
of spoken Spanish, to gaze upon the family portrait
of her plain wide face, her ample bosom
resting on her plump arms, her look of maternal interest
as they speak to her and each other
of their dreams and their disillusions--
how she smiles understanding,
when they walk down the narrow aisles of her store
reading the labels of packages aloud, as if
they were the names of lost lovers; Suspiros,
Merengues, the stale candy of everyone's childhood.

She spends her days
slicing jamón y queso and wrapping it in wax paper
tied with string: plain ham and cheese
that would cost less at the A&P, but it would not satisfy
the hunger of the fragile old man lost in the folds
of his winter coat, who brings her lists of items
that he reads to her like poetry, or the others,
whose needs she must divine, conjuring up products
from places that now exist only in their hearts--
closed ports she must trade with.

Deportation Nation (audio): The Consequences for You of the Trump-Vance Plan

 image: New York Times

The Voices of Latino Culture: Readings from Spain, Latin America, and the United States, ed. Daniel S. Whitaker (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1996), 265-67.

 

The horror, the horror.

 

 

“In the dark times 

 will there also be singing?  

Yes, there will also be singing. 

 About the dark times.”

Bertolt Brecht

 from instagram

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

 

the whims of one man

 

  Timothy Snyder on dictators and declarations of loyalty:

Strongman rule is a fantasy.  Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be your strongman.  He won't.  In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents.  We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something. But the vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance.  The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing.  We get abused and we get used to it. 

Another pleasant illusion is that the strongman will unite the nation.  But an aspiring dictator will always claim that some belong and others don't.  He will define one group after another as the enemy.  This might feel good, so long as you feel that you are on the right side of the line.  But now fear is the essence of life.  The politics of us-and-them, once begun, never ends. 

We dream that a strongman will let us focus on America.  But dictatorship opens our country to the worst the world has to offer.  An American strongman will measure himself by the wealth and power of other dictators.  He will befriend them and compete with them.  From them he will learn new ways to oppress and to exploit his own people.

At least, the fantasy goes, the strongman will get things done.  But dictatorial power today is not about achieving anything positive.  It is about preventing anyone else from achieving anything.  The strongman is really the weak man: his secret is that he makes everyone else weaker. 

Unaccountable to the law and to voters, the dictator has no reason to consider anything beyond his own personal interests.  In the twenty-first century, those are simple: dying in bed as a billionaire.  To enrich himself and to stay out of prison, the strongman dismantles the justice system and replaces civil servants with loyalists. 

The new bureaucrats will have no sense of accountability.  Basic government functions will break down. Citizens who want access will learn to pay bribes.  Bureaucrats in office thanks to patronage will be corrupt, and citizens will be desperate.  Quickly the corruption becomes normal, even unquestioned. 

As the fantasy of strongman rule fades into everyday dictatorship, people realize that they need things like water or schools or Social Security checks.  Insofar as such goods are available under a dictatorship, they come with a moral as well as a financial price.  When you go to a government office, you will be expected to declare your personal loyalty to the strongman.   

If you have a complaint about these practices, too bad.  Americans are litigious people, and many of us assume that we can go to the police or sue.  But when you vote a strong man in, you vote out the rule of law.  In court, only loyalism and wealth will matter.  Americans who do not fear the police will learn to do so.  Those who wear the uniform must either resign or become the enforcers of the whims of one man.

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.