Excerpt from the Introduction " The Dialectics of Seeing" Susan Buck Morrs

In the south of Italy, on the hollow and crumbling shell of the precapitalist order, modern social relations have been shakily, unevenly erected. Avoiding theoretical generalization, Benjamin presents this truth in the visual gesture of an anecdote:

In a bustling piazza a fat lady drops her fan. She looks about helplessly, too unshapely to pick it up herself. A cavalier appears and is prepared to perform this service for fifty lire. They negotiate and the lady receives herfan for ten.6

"Naples" speaks of the routinization of swindle and the professionalization of begging, expressions of the specifically capitalist form of Naples' underdevelopment, where "poverty and misery appear as contagious as they are pictured to be to children."7 Ben-jamin and Lacis record the disorganization of the working class:"With the pawn shop and lotto, the state holds this proletariat in a vice: what it advances to them in one hand it takes back again with the other."8 For this class, self-consciousness is less political than theatrical:

Even the most wretched person is sovereign in the double consciousness ofplaying a part in every corruption, every never-to-return image of Neapolitan street life, enjoying the leisure of their poverty, and following the grand panorama.9 Traditional life goes on, except now, as a tourist show, everything is done for money. Tours and replicas of the ruins of Pompeii are for salelO; natives perform the legendary eating of macaroni with their hands for tourists for a price. I I Artists create their work in pastels on the street on which a few coins are tossed before feet erase it.12 Cows are kept in five-story tenements. 13 Political events are turned into festivals.14 One sees neither an ancient society nor a modern one, but an improvisatory culture released, and even nourished, by the city's rapid decay.

The essay "Naples" by Walter Benjamin appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1926. 

Travailleurs de la Mer, Victor Hugo

Daydream, which is to thought as the nebula is to the star, borders on sleep, and is concerned with it as its frontier. An atmosphere inhabited by living transparencies: there’s a beginning of the unknown. But beyond it the Possible opens out, immense. Other beings, other facts, are there. No supernaturalism, only the occult continuation of infinite nature … Sleep is in contact with the Possible, which we also call the improbable. The world of the night is a world. Night, as night, is a universe … The dark things of the unknown world become neighbors of man, whether by true communication or by a visionary enlargement of the distances of the abyss … and the sleeper, not quite seeing, not quite unconscious, glimpses the strange animalities, weird vegetations, terrible or radiant pallors, ghosts, masks, figures, hydras, confusions, moonless moonlights, obscure unmakings of miracle, growths and vanishings within a murky depth, shapes floating in shadow, the whole mystery which we call Dreaming, and which is nothing other than the approach of an invisible reality. The dream is the aquarium of Night.

 

(from the preface of Chapter 7, The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin)

Bluets, Maggie Nelson

 169. Despite his falling away from film, Kelley remains charmed by Joseph Cornell’s 1936 film Rose Hobart, a collage of found footage of a jungle b-movie called East of Borneo. Using scissors and tape, Cornell cut East of Borneo down from 77 minutes to 191/2, focusing fairly exclusively on shots of Rose Hobart, the movie’s spunky female lead. Cornell’s instructions for the film state that it should be screened with a soundtrack of Latin dance music, and that it should be projected through a deep blue filter, so as to bathe Rose in the color he so loved.

172. To stumble upon discarded canisters of a bad Hollywood movie, to cut the reels up in an effort to isolate the thing you love to gaze upon most, to project the resulting patchwork through the lens of your favorite color, alongside a bustling “tropical” soundtrack: this seems to me, right now, the perfect film.

187. Is it a related form of aggrandizement, to inflate a heartbreak into a sort of allegory? Losing what one loves is simpler, more common, than that. More precise. One could leave it, too, as it is. —Yet how can I explain, that every time I put a pin in the balloon of it, the balloon seems to swell back up as soon as I turn away from it? 

188. How often I’ve imagined the bubble of body and breath you and I made, even though by now I can hardly remember what you look like, I can hardly see your face. 

189. How often, in my private mind, have I choreographed ribbons of black and red in water, two serious ropes of heart and mind. The ink and the blood in the turquoise water: these are the colors inside the fucking. 

190. What’s past is past. One could leave it as it is, too.

(tiny selection)

From - The Envelope Poems , Emily Dickinson

 

On June Blossoming in June by Karen An-hwei Lee

This summer, we drank cardamom iced tea sweetened with agave—

savoring an idea of sweetness lingering, not as if we actually ate honey

from the lovely overflow of  liquid summer heat and soft beeswax

tongued with a wedge of spanakopita and a platter of shaved lamb

            strewn on pita bread with yogurt cucumber dip—

glistening slices of salmon topped by edamame, wakame seaweed,

crushed macadamia nuts mingled with black sesame on beds of rice,

and steaming cups of chai with black tea and milk, loose-leaf sencha,

and chunks of sea bass with a tossed mesclun of tender greens

                                      garnished by crisp curls of chicharrónes

and chopped beet salad with tart beets—the mellow gold ones

soaked in wine vinegar, dressed with tendrils of microgreens—

corollas of night-blooming honeysuckle and star jasmine flaming

with small cups of  heady fumes wafting on trellises across the lot

                        with a walk-in hair salon and laundromat—

then avocados with eggs-over-easy in hollandaise sauce over muffins

alongside triangles of toast dipped in yolks beaten with cinnamon,

            and flavorful black coffee with a drop of fresh cream,

quiche with crimini mushrooms, feta, swiss cheese, not leeks or truffles,

shot through with julienned sundried tomatoes the color of stop signs,

and mocha spiced with chili, black pepper, chocolate, cardamom again

by a plate of smoked salmon and capers, ricotta, buttery arugula,

and baby spinach drizzled with olive oil on thin sourdough toast

                        in glowing strokes of  late June light

fringed by the noise of peninsula traffic on the harbor

            laced by grease and silt from the machinery of  life—

the sea isn’t far away though only gulls could spy it from here—

so why don’t we walk all the way to the inlet of the marina, a landing

where children play in the fading light blanched on grassy edges

                        as if already a memory of summer within summer—

and you say, with the air of a prophet who ate locusts and honey,

join me in the place where lives are bound together

by a cord of three strands.

We Real Cool , Gwendolyn Brooks, 1960

THE POOL PLAYERS. 

                   SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

From an introduction by Marguerite Yourcenar to The Writing of Stones, Roger Caillois

....In short, there had taken place in that great intellect the equivalent of the Copernican revolution: man was no longer the center of the universe, except in the sense that the center is everywhere; man, like all the rest, was a cog in the whole system of turning wheels. Quite early on, having entered "the forbidden laboratories," Caillois applied himself to the study of the diagonals which link the species, of the recurrent phenomena that act, so to speak, as a matrix of forms. His work on the octopus and the praying mantis showed him the relation between a creature belonging to the lowest reaches of the animal abyss and the fantasies and desires inhabiting the deeps of humanity. In Meduse et Cie (Medusa and Company) he meditated on the insect imagination with its extravagant and terrifying transformations, its masks for display or for battle, its nuptial ornaments or instruments of hypnotism, not all of them utilitarian but seemingly corresponding to an almost conscious need for change and elaboration. 

One of the working hypotheses of modern science - that nature always acts with the greatest possible economy of means and toward the most practical of ends - finally came to appear unacceptable to Caillois. "Nature is not a miser." He had become more aware of it as a mine of prodigality, a feast of superfluity; of the element of fantasy, the aesthetic factor whether unconscious or otherwise which is inherent in every scrap of matter and of which man's own aesthetic may be no more than one of many manifestations, and one often distorted by our exaggerated awareness of it ....

Educated, Tara Westover

 On our first evening in Rome, we climbed one of the seven hills and looked out over the metropolis. Byzantine domes hovered over the city like rising balloons. It was nearly dusk; the streets were bathed in amber. It wasn't the colour of a modern city, of steel, glass and concrete. It was the colour of sunset. 

For two days we explored Rome, a city that is both a living organism and a fossil. Bleached structures from antiquity lay like dried bones, embedded in pulsating cables and thrumming traffic, the arteries of modern life. We visited the Pantheon, the Roman Forum, the Sistine Chapel. My instinct was to worship, to venerate. That is how I felt toward the whole city: that it should be behind glass, adored from a distance, never touched, never altered. My companions moved through the city differently, aware of its significance but not subdued by it. They were not hushed by the Trevi Fountain; they were not silenced by the Colosseum. 

The Waves, Virginia Woolf

 'Life is pleasant. Life is good. The mere process of life is satisfactory. Take the ordinary man in good health. He likes eating and sleeping. He likes the snuff of fresh air and walking at a brisk pace down the Strand. Or in the country there’s a cock crowing on a gate; there’s a foal galloping round a field. Something always has to be done next. Tuesday follows Monday; Wednesday Tuesday. Each spreads the same ripple of well-being, repeats the same curve of rhythm; covers fresh sand with a chill or ebbs a little slackly without. So the being grows rings; identity becomes robust. What was fiery and furtive like a fling of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild gusts of life from every quarter is now methodical and orderly and flung with a purpose – so it seems.’

An encounter with the sea (Ocean Sea, Alessandro Barrico)

 "we could think of a woman—of a woman—respected, loved, mother, woman. For whatever reason—illness—brought to a sea that she would otherwise never have seen and that is now the wavering needle of her cure, an immeasurable index, in truth, which she contemplates but does not understand. Her hair hangs loose and she is barefoot, and this is not a mere detail, it is absurd, along with that little white tunic and the trousers that leave her ankles exposed, you could imagine her slim hips, it is absurd, only her boudoir has seen her like this, and yet, like that, there she is on an enormous beach, where there is none of the viscous, stagnant air of the bridal bed, but the gusty sea breeze bearing the edict of a wild freedom removed, forgotten, oppressed, debased for a whole lifetime as mother, wife, beloved woman. And it is clear: she cannot not feel it. That emptiness all around, with no walls or closed doors, and in front of her, alone, a boundless exciting mirror of water, that alone would already have been a feast for the senses, an orgy of the nerves, and everything is yet to happen, the bite of the gelid water, the fear, the liquid embrace of the sea, the shock on the skin, the heart in the mouth . . ."

From "Aniara", Harry Martinson (science fiction and poetry)

We're slowly coming to suspect that the space

we're traveling in is of a different sort

from what we thought whenever that word "space"

was decked out by our fantasies on Earth.

We're coming to suspect now that our drift

is even deeper then we first believed,

that knowledge is a blue naiveté

which with a measured quantity of insight

imagined that the Mystery has structure.

We now suspect that what we claim is space

and glassy clarity around Aniara’s hull

is spirit, everlasting and impalpable,

that we have strayed in spiritual seas.

The Dirt World (Paradises Lost, Ursula Le Guin)

To learn who we are, look not at history but at the arts, the record of our best, our genius. The elderly, sorrowful, Dutch faces gaze out of the darkness of a lost century. The mother’s beautiful grave head is bowed above the dead son who lies across her lap. The old mad king cries over his murdered daughter, “Never, never, never, never, never!” With infinite gentleness the Compassionate One murmurs, “It does not last, it cannot satisfy, it has no being.” “Sleep, sleep,” say the cradle songs, and “Set me free” cry the yearning slave-songs. The symphonies rise, a glory out of darkness. And the poets, the crazy poets cry out, “A terrible beauty is born.” But they’re all crazy. They’re all old and mad. All their beauty is terrible. Don’t read the poets. They don’t last, they can’t satisfy, they have no being. They wrote about another world, the dirt world.

Music and Mythology ( The Raw and the Cooked -Claude Levi Strauss)

 The true answer is to be found, I think, in the characteristic that myth and music share of both being languages which, in their different ways, transcend articulate expression, while at the same time—like articulate speech, but unlike painting—requiring a temporal dimension in which to unfold. But this relation to time is of a rather special nature: it is as if music and mythology needed time only in order to deny it. Both, indeed, are instruments for the obliteration of time. Below the level of sounds and rhythms, music acts upon a primitive terrain, which is the physiological time of the listener; this time is irreversible and therefore irredeemably diachronic, yet music transmutes the segment devoted to listening to it into a synchronic totality, enclosed within itself. Because of the internal organization of the musical work, the act of listening to it immobilizes passing time; it catches and enfolds it as one catches and enfolds a cloth flapping in the wind. It follows that by listening to music, and while we are listening to it, we enter into a kind of immortality.