possible worlds

It is difficult to imagine something more pharisaic than this demiurge, 
who contemplates all uncreated possible worlds to take delight in his single choice.  
For to do so, he must close his ears to the incessant lamentation that, throughout the infinite chambers of this Baroque inferno of potentiality, arises from everything that could have been but was not, 
from everything that could have been otherwise but had to be sacrificed for the present world to be as it is.

---

Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities, Collected Essays in Philosophy,  “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” trans. and ed. Daniel Heller-Roasen,  (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 266.

the clank of the old historical machinery

"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

full immersion in the chaos of life

I am waiting for my case to come up   

and I am waiting

for a rebirth of wonder

Happy 100th Birthday

 Lawrence Ferlinghetti
image: Louise Richardson
In waiting, mixed media

a time of encounters

Thousands and thousands of doubles of yourself follow the thousands of of paths that you didn’t take at various crossroads in your life, because you thought there was but a single one.
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Sleep of Memory, Patrick Modiano

Frank Samsa collage

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We have a heart for you to forget.

for Mia, February 7, 2019

    The mind makes its daily pilgrimage

    Through riff-raff moments. Then,
    Back into the caprice case to dream
    In a circle, a pony goes round.
    The circle's association: There's a center
    To almost everything but never
    Any certainty. Nothing is
    More malleable than a moment. We were
    Only yesterday breathing in a sea.
    Some summer sun
    Asked us over and over we went. The sand was hot.
    We were only yesterday tender hearted
    Waiting. To be something.
    A spring. And then someone says, Sit down,
    We have a heart for you to forget. A mind to suffer
    With. So, experience. So, the circus tent.

from: February Elegy, Mary Jo Bang
image:Leonhard Kätzel, Journal of Nobody

just like that

“What if we accept these points of light, their translucence, their brightness; what if we let ourselves enjoy this, stop fearing it, get used to it; what if we come to believe in it, to expect it, to be impressed upon by it; what if we take hope and forgo our ancient heritage and instead, and infused, begin to entrain with it, with ourselves then to radiate it; what if we do that, get educated up to that, and then, just like that, the light goes off or is snatched away?” 

Slate: Anna Burns, Milkman  
image: here