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the flight of birds across your body
Because we live we are granted names, streams, shocks of heat, murmuring summers. All the days you have ever breathed are swallows shooting between trees. When the wind pushes branches in and out of shade it is an opening, as every small gesture toward another person is incomprehensibly alive. Will you be part of the stoneless passage? When life starts to take things away will you grow very still beneath the larch or feel the slow flight of birds across your body. The bright key of morning. The bay fanned with foam.
source: The Infinities by Joanna Klink
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what is left?
For whom does the bell toll? For whom do I don this clown’s garb and dance in the town square? I am grateful to have found friends, but I feel increasingly drawn away—not by some misbegotten notion that there’s too much negativity, or by the dubious claim that the internet is no longer fun. No. The darkness is within me. All these worries, the pull toward spaghettification in how I interact with others. What I hope to achieve, what drives me toward a kind of broken mirror of expectation upon which I’ve been cutting myself since I very first felt shame. The call is coming from inside the house.
There is no if. There is only this: a dance to be forgotten, a lifetime of wanting to be seen, felt, and missed. For absence to sear. And yet I know that if I give in to these tantrums, to tear it all down, what would even be accomplished? Who would notice? Who would care?
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the exploitative power of language knowledge
In Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, as examined by Annabelle Pelster in an essay for Girls on Tops’ Read Me magazine, subtitles were used sparingly and translated minimally to intentionally exclude both the characters in the room and those of us in the audience who do not understand the Osage language, thus driving home the exploitative power of William Hale’s language knowledge.
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comfort is violence
The desire for comfort for those who Capitalism has pushed to its margins automatically creates discomfort for those that profit from it; it's an act of violence, even when it’s performed in a non-violent manner.
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taste vs ability
Many people think taste is all about choosing what is good. That is part of it. The other part is suffering what is bad in your own work until you can make it good. If your taste is ahead of your ability, you will spend months producing work that looks wrong to you. The only way through that valley is to keep going long enough to close the gap.
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neuroplasticity isn't a metaphor
Math is the most accurate language we have for describing the world, but sometimes we don’t need accuracy, we need relation and approximation. That’s poetry. Poetry is a mutation of the language that allows for evolution. We can expand a body of knowledge with logic. We can expand a body of knowledge with experimentation. We can expand a body of knowledge with lateral thinking and comparison.
People have limited attention, limited bandwidth, so you have to cut every dead word and every false gesture. It has to be relentless and inevitable.
Picking a fight for the sake of fighting doesn’t do anything interesting. Disagreeing with a premise or an approach is incredibly generative.
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Consumption can only turn back on itself
Characters can become the meat chewed up to keep the system running—as in the case of the burnt machinist or the dead teenage girl—or they can become, themselves, producers of even more death, embarking on psychotic road-trip killing sprees or vigilante missions to rid the streets of human filth. Cosseted by imperial wealth, they have no connection to the real labour embodied in their surroundings, and no economic need to engage in or even understand such labour themselves. Consumption can only turn back on itself: hollowed-out like Amy’s stomach, or else apathetically comfortable like the disaffected wealthy loners vulnerable to the recruitment tactics of the new-agers.