Sunday, April 16, 2023

some kind of reading diary (16 April 2023)



One can arrive in this part of the city either by air, the terracing offering a series of landing strips; by car, at ground level; or lastly by underground train — according to the distances to be covered. Crossed in all directions by freeways, the ground level is devoid of buildings, with the exception of various pylons which support the construction, and a round building of six storeys, which supports the overhanging terrace. These supports, around which one has foreseen areas for the parking of the means of transport, contain the lifts which go up to the upper levels of the city or to the basement floors

An inner horizon, extending vertically as it was, in the self-dark, an external one of great breadth, in the world-light; and the regions behind both horizons are filled with the same utopia, are consequently identical in the Ultimum 

In satellite estates, villages, small towns and inner-cities, the most common response is one of empathy, and recognition that other segments of the population are struggling to keep themselves and their loved ones alive. Day in day out all I really see is them endlessly grinding to collectively survive, and I wonder if there's any way that capital "a" activists and capital "o" organisers can ever work in genuine solidarity with them, or whether it will always be a relationship of contempt, pity and extraction 

We watched this from our hiding places, wordlessly we were there like in a bad dream of a bad book. We hasn't been given any sense of subtlety, we were rough-hewn in terms of intelligence. We understood little and our fear didn't diminish. On the contrary it never seemed to cease to grow, and it spread within us nauseatingly, scraping and mistreating our secret ducts and oneiric glands 

She knew that one had to survive many desolations and injuries — one would be both bloodied and bowed; but one had to keep writing anyway — through it, despite it, because of it, around it, in it, under it goddam

Human actions and appetites can be considered just as if it were a question of lines, surfaces and bodies

... and new neighborhoods of such a city could be constructed increasingly toward the west, while to the same extent the east would be abandoned to the overgrowth of topical vegetation, thereby creating, on its own, zones of gradual transition between the modern city and wild nature. This city pursued by the forest would offer unsurpassable zones of drift that would take shape behind it; it would also be a marriage with nature more audacious than anything attempted by our modern architects 

"We forget that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold, not the nightingale, nor the swallow, nor the hoopoe, though they do say these birds sing when in pain"

... for although it is true that "these times are certainly not the heroic age", still the ethical task of encouraging others to want to live is entrusted to the intellect and the imagination, to philosophy and poetry. But who can show that this illusion is less real than reality? Ultimately, we humans will discover ourselves to be quite another thing from what we have been, or what we have imagined ourselves to be

and to have missed as we have missed is no small thing. In islands cleansed by fast and straight winds, and in the unsurpassable zones that take shape behind them; between four seas, and on either side of the same space of gradual transition. To have moved between the words of our language like guerrillas in some strange undeclared war, and across ice, and across snow, and across the elevated Fronts of an occurring world, in hope and doubt. With desires to die that seem out of control. And sometimes serenely, while at other times chaos is obligated to devour us. (This is how we have missed one another.)  

"A march, rhythmic and full of an infectious and ideologically irreproachable euphoria" 

(en route from D. Hunter, Plato, Antoine Volodine, Andrea Dworkin, the Situationists, Giacomo Leopardi, Ernst Bloch, Alejandra Pizarnik, and SB [as always])

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