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People are evidently inclined to grant legitimacy to anything that is or seems inevitable no matter how painful it may be. Otherwise the pain might be intolerable. The conquest of this sense of inevitability is essential to the development of politically effective moral outrage. For this to happen, people must perceive and define their situation as the consequence of human injustice: a situation they need not, cannot, and ought not endure.

Barrington Moore Jr., Injustice, in The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.

Philip Levine, “What Work Is”

The point of ‘doing nothing’ is to clean up our inner lives. There is so much that happens to us every day, so many excitements, regrets, suggestions and emotions that we should, if we are living consciously, spend at least an hour a day processing. Most of us manage a few minutes at best and thereby let the marrow of life escape us. We do so not because are forgetful or bad, but because our societies protect us from our responsibilities to ourselves through their cult of activity. We are granted every excuse not to undertake the truly difficult labour of leading more conscious, more searching and more intensely felt lives.

The School of Life, A More Exciting Life

More than enough
is what I keep
getting (and why
and why me?
that snowy line
of thought persists)

by late morning
the already-risen moon
brimming
with its quiet light,

then an entire day
(the urge
to list the happenings,
for whom?)

and then the velvet
star-stamped
darkness falling,
saturating
all the things
that are and aren’t

(and which of those
I happen to be
I also get to ask).

Lia Purpura, “Brink’’

Why […] this perpetual demand that performing arts critics make definitive proclamations about works they barely know? If the performance being reviewed is a program of Beethoven symphonies that the writer has heard a hundred times, that’s one thing, but a brand-new orchestral piece, opera, or play rarely reveals its secrets on the first night. I’ve spent countless hours listening to music, and never once have I encountered a worthwhile new piece that I felt capable of assessing after a single hearing. If a musical work is powerful, or mysterious, or beautiful in some new way, then the listener’s initial experience of it is precisely an experience of incomprehension. It’s only with time, reflection, and repeated listenings that any critic can hope to gain entry to a piece of music, to get inside it and understand its inner workings, in such a way that they’re ready to speak about it to others.

Matthew Aucoin, “Inside the Music”

There is still a photograph of lovers I would like to forget.
After all, the unsentimental oak trees & billboards flash past
On the freeway as I drive home. The photograph
Is by Brassaï & probably it depicts a prostitute & her pimp
On the Boulevard des Invalides in 1934. What her employment was
No longer matters to me or to anyone else, but what troubles me
Is an expression of enormous tenderness & care which covers
Her face as she looks through him. He is handsome, but he is also
In my opinion—nothing, & a star—a blank gust of wind from
Normandy—with his manner as studied & tough as
Belmondo’s was in the first Breathless. The shadows of colonnades
And the shadows over the Seine go past him; he never sees them. And
This punk in the Brassaï print photograph cares more about his coat &
The angle of his cigarette than he does for human life. You
Can see that from the quickest & most indifferent glance.
Probably, it isn’t much of a photograph, but the two of them are
Saying goodbye to each other & neither of them knows it yet. So why
Do I worry about them both? Perhaps I love them; I don’t know.
I am ashamed to admit this, but no woman ever looked at me
The way she is looking at him. Perhaps no man
Could stand it for long if she did. Behind them, it is over &
The street is dark. But still her expression will not change.
It is odd, now, & I envy her, not him. And I know he’s gone
By now, shot down by the police in an alley where the bricks suddenly
Seemed, to his eye, pockmarked by the splashes of cement, full
Of detail & a significance he never had time to figure out.
Both he and his assassin would tell you that the whole thing was a terrible
Mistake, an avenue turning into the indignity of blood
Smeared on brick in curves, arabesques & a spattered constellation of blood—
While the indifferent pigeons strutted about them along the ledges
Of the buildings, & then it was, after all, dawn & they were
Gray in the gray light. Which is what allows him to stroll a while now,
Through the penny arcades of heaven & those little shooting galleries
With the fake ducks, & always a beer on the counter with no one
There to drink it—a beer which no one is given the time
To finish—because, after all, this is heaven & what you see last
You see forever: even if that is only 3 stick figures of blood on brick. And he is
Wind by comparison. That woman still lives here, on this street,
The soft lamplight falling over her face—whose expression,
I suddenly understand, only became serious twenty seconds before
The shutter fell, & enclosed her forever, leaving the rest of us out—
Anyway, it is too cold to leave in the photograph, it is winter,
And, unless you are that woman or I am that man who already owns the pallor
Of the dead, the street is empty for blocks & I couldn’t possibly
Know a thing about either of them. All of which I call my ignorance,
And an obscure, troubled, unphotographable life. I mean, a poetry.

Larry Levis, “À Bout de Souffle’’

On January 3rd, the American military extracted the murderous dictator Nicolás Maduro from Caracas. On January 7th, ICE killed a mother in her car in Minnesota. These are two glimpses of a larger story about death and lies.

The abduction of Maduro was not about naming his crimes, but about ignoring them. The worst thing that Maduro did is just what Trump is beginning to do: killing civilians and blaming them for their own deaths. After Minneapolis, Maduro’s lies are being repeated: in American English, by American authorities.

Timothy Snyder, “Maduro in Minneapolis”

Everyone on the scene [of Renee Nicole Good’s death] had witnessed the crossing of a crucial line in Donald Trump’s mass-deportation project: ICE had just killed an American citizen on American soil.

The administration has since declared that the agent “is protected by absolute immunity,” whatever that means, a signal of unconditional support for an agency bloated with thousands of new, heavily armed, and minimally trained recruits, deployed around the country to help achieve Trump’s goal of deporting 1 million immigrants a year. Events such as Good’s death set the stage for yet more lethal confrontations, which the administration can be trusted to defend with the same specious pretext. What is now overt, in a way that it hadn’t been Wednesday morning, is that these agents are at war with the public, and have been for some time.

Elizabeth Bruenig, “This Will Happen Again”

día 22

como cuando corrés en un sueño
no podés acercarte al hombre que se escapa
y que no puede alejarse de
 
 
 
 
                                            vos

day 22

like when you run in a dream
and can’t catch the man escaping
who can’t escape from
 
 
 
 
                                            you

Daniel Lipara, The Middle of the Noise: Exercises in Grief, translated by Robin Myers

Gearbeitet aber ohne Erfolg. Ich sehe noch immer nicht klar und habe keinen Überblick. Ich sehe Einzelheiten ohne zu wissen wie sie sich in das Ganze einfügen werden. Darum auch fühle ich jedes neue Problem als eine Bürde. Während ein klarer Uberblick zeigen müßte daß jedes Problem das Hauptproblem ist und der Anblick der Hauptfragen ermattet nicht sondern er stärkt!

Worked but without success. I still don’t see clearly and have no overview. I see details without knowing what role they will play in the whole. For this reason, I also perceive every new problem as a burden. Whereas a clear overview would have to show that each problem is the problem and that a consideration of the main questions doesn’t exhaust the case but rather strengthens it!

Ludwig Wittgenstein, 29 August 1914, in Private Notebooks: 1914–1916, edited and translated by Marjorie Perloff