questions we should be asking

Questions

If there’s one true thing, it’s that

Google will make money off us no matter what.

If we want to know

what percentage of America is white

(as it seems we do)

what percentage of the population is gay

(as it seems we do)

what percentage of the earth is water:

the engine is ready for our desire.

The urgent snow is everywhere

is a line by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and

many have asked, apparently,

where am I right now. Also

when will I die. Do you love me

may be up there, generating

high cost-per-click, but not

as high as how to make pancakes,

what time is it in California.

So many things I wanted to ask you,

now that you’re gone, and your texts

bounce back to me

undeliverable. Praise to

the goddess of the internet search, who returns

with her basket of grain,

67,000 helpful suggestions

to everything we request:

how to solve a Rubik’s Cube,

what to do when you’re bored,

how old is the earth,

how to clear cache,

what animal am I,

why do we dream,

where are you now, come back.

 

Copyright © 2018 by Rachel Richardson

Abetare: Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj (born 1986, Kostërc, former Yugoslavia) has been commissioned to create a site-specific installation for the Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. For the artist's first major project in the United States, Halilaj has transformed The Met Roof with a sprawling sculptural installation.

the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact

 

When [the Dreamers] own vulnerability becomes real – when the police decide to use tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when armed society shoots down children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities – they are shocked in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be. [...]

You have been cast into a race where the wind is always at your face and the hounds at your feet. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.

 

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, 

It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis

 

 

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

 

 

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things

Ozymandias,
Percy Bysshe Shelley

the games of an old man [...] What we need now is this unlikely Challenger pounding on the gates of an amazed Castle.

 

Diffusion of Knowledge John Ashbery collage 1972

New York
Where I am now, which is a logarithm
Of other cities. Our landscape
Is alive with filiations, shuttlings;
Business is carried on by look, gesture,
Hearsay. It is another life to the city,
The backing of the looking glass of the
Unidentified but precisely sketched studio. It wants
To siphon off the life of the studio, deflate
Its mapped space to enactments, island it.
That operation has been temporarily stalled
But something new is on the way, a new preciosity
In the wind. Can you stand it,
Francesco? Are you strong enough for it?
This wind brings what it knows not, is
Self--propelled, blind, has no notion
Of itself. It is inertia that once
Acknowledged saps all activity, secret or public:
Whispers of the word that can't be understood
But can be felt, a chill, a blight
Moving outward along the capes and peninsulas
Of your nervures and so to the archipelagoes
And to the bathed, aired secrecy of the open sea.
This is its negative side. Its positive side is
Making you notice life and the stresses
That only seemed to go away, but now,
As this new mode questions, are seen to be
Hastening out of style. If they are to become classics They must decide which side they are on.
Their reticence has undermined

The urban scenery, made its ambiguities
Look willful and tired, the games of an old man.
What we need now is this unlikely
Challenger pounding on the gates of an amazed
Castle.

 

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror     John Ashbery

  

The Coming Goo

 

 

the coup/plasmic terrorists/what algae can tell us about the limits of human agency

 

The Coming Goo

    Typewriters, Bombs, and Jellyfish. Tom McCarthy 

 “Does this mass have intent?”

“Is it governed by some sort of plan? A systematic, or at least strategic (revolutionary? or reactionary?) progam? . . . Even if it lacks the central nervous system that would enable it to think it had a plan, could one be attributed to it retrospectively, or vicariously, or by default? 

 

 

 

***The Employees, Olga Ravn

"ghosts in the portal, reading forever, tenderly holding down hearts"

 

‘Hito Kage No Ishii’, or 'Human Shadow Etched in Stone'. Photo: Universal History Archive / Getty Images

Does the stone feel sorrow? […]  I can tell by your faces. It's a dangerous thing for an organization not to be sure which of the objects in custody may be considered to be living. It raises questions.* 

“Can ghosts learn new technology?” her sister asked, thinking of what must come next, the endless conveyor of progress to which a whole human history’s worth of spirits must adapt. The two them were silent for a minute, and then images came crowding in: an elevator ghost pressing every button, feeling its stomach drop out through the bottom of the world; a ghost unzipping its message across the long, black telegraph wires; ghosts in the portal, reading forever, tenderly holding down hearts. **

 

*The Employees, Olga Ravn, 34.

**Title and text: No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood, 202

 

spinning alternate futures in their chamber

 

A City Without Guns. Jennifer Nagle Meyers. 2014.

“Guns aren't just history's props and agents: they're history itself, spinning alternate futures in their chamber, hurling the present from their barrel, casting aside the empty shells of the past.”

 Tom McCarthy, Remainder, Vintage Books, 2005.

War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.

Cy Twombly, Shield of Achilles, 1978. Oil on canvas

This is the time of year
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain height,

rising toward a saint
still honored in these parts,
the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts.

Once up against the sky it's hard
to tell them from the stars—
planets, that is—the tinted ones:
Venus going down, or Mars,

or the pale green one.  With a wind,
they flare and falter, wobble and toss;
but if it's still they steer between
the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,

receding, dwindling, solemnly
and steadily forsaking us,
or, in the downdraft from a peak,
suddenly turning dangerous.

Last night another big one fell.
It splattered like an egg of fire
against the cliff behind the house.
The flame ran down.  We saw the pair

of owls who nest there flying up
and up, their whirling black-and-white
stained bright pink underneath, until
they shrieked up out of sight.

The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft!—a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.

 

"The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. [...] Once war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death's face."

"The Iliad, or the Poem of Force," War and the Iliad Simone Weil

*Title: Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy, 261.

"The Armadillo," Elizabeth Bishop

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

 for Peter 10/20/2020:

“The leaves crisping at their edges. Here is a season Hamnet has not known or touched. Here is a world moving on without him.”

 

         Cy Twombly, Quattro Stagioni: Autunno 1993–5

 

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand, and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop, very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say, it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only all the time.

Part of Eve's Discussion

Marie Howe

 Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel.

image: The Tate, Cy Twombly, Quattro Stagioni: Autunno 1993–5

― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet, 9-10.

 

temporary little men

 

Politics! The trouble was that they had a dictator now, which, according to some people (white), they had never had before, and according to other people (everyone else), they had only ever been having, constantly, since the beginning of the world. Her stupidity panicked her, as well as the way her voice now sounded when she talked to people who hadn't stopped being stupid yet.

The problem was that the dictator was very funny, which had maybe always been true of all dictators. Absurdism, she thought. Suddenly all those Russian novels where a man turns into a teaspoonful of blackberry jam at a country house began to make sense.

[...]

Patricia Lockwood, No One Is talking About This, p.4

Lines Which Do Not Exist

 

 

“To rule forever," continues the Chinaman, later, "it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call...Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,-- to create thus a Distinction betwixt 'em,-- 'tis the first stroke.-- All else will follow as if predestin'd, unto War and Devastation.”  

 

 

Thomas Pynchon, Mason Dixon, 615.

Gerhard Richter, Lines Which Do Not Exist

 

Horror has a face and a name.

 

 

Horror has a face and a name... you must make a friend of horror.” To cast out the horror that has a name and a face you must give it another name and another face.*

And the naming of the intolerable is itself a kind of hope.

When something is termed intolerable, actions must follow. These actions are subject to the vicissitudes of life. But the pure hope resides first and foremost in the capacity to name the intolerable as such: and this capacity comes from afar - from the past and from the future. This is why politics and courage are inseparable. The time of the torturers is agonizingly but exclusively present.*

image: Die Orden der Nacht, 1996, Anselm Kiefer (German, born 1945), acrylic, emulsion, and shellac on canvas, 140 x 182 1/4 in. Seattle Art Museum.

*Sans Soleil, Chris Marker.

*John Berger, And Our Faces, My heart, Brief as Photos, Vintage International 1984, 18.

The Eye like a Strange Balloon Mounts toward Infinity

 

 “As the ordeal went on, it became clear to certain of these balloonists, observing from above ... how much the modern State depended for its survival on maintaining a condition of permanent siege--through the systematic encirclement of populations, the starvation of bodies and spirits, the relentless degradation of civility until citizen was turned against citizen, even to the point of committing atrocities ... When the Sieges ended, those balloonists chose to fly on, free now of the political delusions that reigned more than ever on the ground” 

 

image:Odilon Redon. The Eye like a Strange Balloon Mounts toward Infinity (L'Œil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l'infini). 1882

 

Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, Penguin Publishing Group, 2007, 19.

to resist is not simply an act of refusal

 

[...] to resist is not simply an act of refusal, of holding back against a drowning tide; it is to act totally with love in a world of sinister complicity.

 

Frank O’Hara was right and in “times of crisis we must all decide again and again whom to love.”

What do we call the horror that stretches across our present age like a canopy, a kind of shadow violence, the sort we are all guilty of: violence of the ignored, utterly avoidable variety. The casual violence of cruelty. The violence of poverty, denial, lack of care, of turning our attention away from slow burning fires that we ought to be duty bound to watch and hold in our eyes. We are not innocents here, but shadow men, looking the other way while havoc is wrought in our silence.

Fatima Bhutto, A World on Fire
 

image: Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Visual Poems by David Joez Villaverde 

note: all material for the text in image is sourced from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

repost from 10/08/2020

It happened, but not to you.

 

 

 

It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Nearer. Farther off.
It happened, but not to you.

You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. The left.
Because it was raining. Because of the shade.
Because the day was sunny.

You were in luck -- there was a forest.
You were in luck -- there were no trees.
You were in luck -- a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake,
A jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant . . .

So you're here? Still dizzy from
another dodge, close shave, reprieve?
One hole in the net and you slipped through?
I couldn't be more shocked or
speechless.
Listen,
how your heart pounds inside me.

 

 

"Could Have," Wisława Szymborska

 

Just as your face has been replaced by a question mark

 

 

How Do We Write Now?

The alternate title of this, of course, is how the fuck do we write now.

Just as the customary greeting of hello has been replaced with what the fuck is going on, and you grab your friend’s arm almost against your will and shake her a little bit and say no seriously, what the fuck is happening.

Just as your face has been replaced by a question mark immediately followed by an exclamation mark immediately followed by another question mark.

Just as your heart has been replaced by what happens to a bunch of seagulls when a dog comes running down the beach.

Just as your blood now carries in its current the Jaws theme.

 

Patricia Lockwood Tin House

image: Damon Winter/The New York Times

For Zelensky and Ukraine:a fight for the future

 

 

 

Gratification to the survivors of daily damnations

Thanks to the clouds on fire, the burning sunset,
and every diminishing as beautiful as time.
Thanks to the moments that are not yours,
the soft part of the world you are in
when you tiptoe to your mother’s room,
the unending seconds until you hear her snore
because the lost lyrics of the living
will always escape through the mouth.
Thanks to the quietness she drew from the well of nights
and bottled for you by dawn—for the lilacs,
the roses, and the thorns blooming in your mouth.
We pocket the heart until we know what to do with it.
Nature introduces spring to us like visitors.
Living and leaving, we multitask at our best.
When you get home, stare around like it’s another man’s.
Like this can be here, like that can be beautiful.
Cigar this life and light it with the sun.
Breathe this poem in. Own a spot on a cliff or an edge
or somewhere that can carry a stamp of your body.
Become. Open a book and see this trapped time
I left for you to live all over 

BY
Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi