ways of seeing

John Berger - ways of seeing 

a Form of Refusal

“…even in his catatonic or anorexic state, Bartleby is not the patient, but the doctor of a sick America.”

—Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, the Formula”

Proposing Painting as a Form of Refusal

Night gathers, and now my watch begins

"Night gathers, and now my watch begins. […] I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Night's Watch, for this night and all the nights to come." Game of Thrones

MORE: Resistance 

Kara Walker reimagines

"Not wanting to listen to the news on inauguration day, artist Kara Walker painted. The result is a Trumpian take on Emanuel Leutze’s famous work “Washington Crossing the Delaware”, a copy of which is on display at the Met Museum." here 

STAY MAD

"I believe it is never too soon to issue a warning about the dangers ahead."*

STAY MAD.

STAY MOBILIZED.

GET ORGANIZED

MORE: Do one. Do them all. But do something.

"99 Ways to Fight Trump"

How We Can Fight Trump | The Nation

Nine Ways to Oppose Donald Trump - The New Yorker

* here

just saying...

A few months ago I thought the slaughter of the Civil War, and the agitation of the violent Abolitionists who helped bring it on, were evil. But possibly they had to be violent, because easy-going citizens like me couldn’t be stirred up otherwise. If our grandfathers had the alertness and courage to see the evils of slavery and a government conducted by gentlemen for gentlemen only, there wouldn’t have been any need of agitation and war and blood.

It becomes clear that the installation of a fascist government will not be a revolution or coup d'état; rather, the groundwork for fascism has already been constructed in the ideological worldviews of the majority of Americans.  The riposte to the claim that “It Can’t Happen Here” is “It already has.”

It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis 

After all, Germany was a state where the law rested on a firm foundation, where a majority in parliament was opposed to Hitler, and where every citizen believed that “his liberty and equal rights were secured by the solemnly affirmed constitution.”

link: WHEN IT’S TOO LATE TO STOP FASCISM, ACCORDING TO STEFAN ZWEIG

We are Making a New World,

Catastrophes: missed opportunities [to change the present]. 

 Arcades Project, [N10,l]  Walter Benjamin 

“This is the fourth great crisis in American history,” Bannon told an audience at the Liberty Restoration Foundation, a conservative nonprofit, in 2011. “We had the Revolution. We had the Civil War. We had the Great Depression and World War II. This is the great Fourth Turning in American history, and we’re going to be one thing on the other side.”

“It’s just a conceit. It’s a fiction, it’s all made up,” Wilentz said about cyclical historical models. “There’s nothing to them. They’re just inventions.”


from: Steve Bannon Believes The Apocalypse Is Coming And War Is Inevitable

image: Paul Nash: We are Making a New World, 1918

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“holes of oblivion"

What he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such. 

link - from: The Banality of Evil articles, Hannah Arendt 
image

Resistance: show

For Beckett, the integral being is not the acrobat but the clown. The acrobat acts as a specialist, using only a limited segment of his faculties. 

The clown is the integral man who mimes the acrobat in an elaborate drama of incompetence. 

Beckett sees the bicycle as the sign and symbol of specialist futility in the present electric age, when we must all interact and react, using all our facilities at once.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, (Corte Madera, CA: Ginko Press, 2003) 251.

image: The New Yorker

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it really didn’t matter.

Dr. Seuss, ... and the wolf chewed up the children and spit out their bones... 

but those were foreign children and it really didn’t matter."

 October 1, 1941, Dr. Seuss Political Cartoons. Special Collection & Archives, UC San Diego Library

How could anyone sleep?

‘There Was a Great Want of Civility’ 

All night in the trees,

the whispering,

a great disorder, not the way

leaves talk among themselves

during the day, not the rustle

of squirrels and birds among them,

but a tossing, shiftless shadow

weight of darkness,

leaf to leaf.

I dared not close my eyes

for fear it would have

its way with me.

How

could anyone sleep?

By JULIE SUAREZ

from the New York Times Magazine, Feb.3,2017:
This poem is from “The Traveler’s Vade Mecum,” a new anthology of poetry. The anthology takes its title from a 19th-century compendium of 8,466 numbered sentences designed to help travelers compose shorter telegrams; to use this system, the sender and the receiver of the telegram would each have a copy of the book and would communicate such useful messages as “I am onboard a steamer ship bound for Paris” by writing “45-Paris,” or ominous ones like “A sad accident has happened” merely with “461.” The anthology’s editor, the poet and novelist Helen Klein Ross, chose some of these sentences and assigned them to poets to use as titles. The result is a wide-ranging, pleasurable overview of many different approaches in American poetry today. Selected by Matthew Zapruder