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Agnès Varda

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D. A. Powell

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James Baldwin, from “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation”

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all this to say it can really be answered (rhetorically) by a ridiculously, almost stupidly, simple question…. Are you doing something out or fear? Or love? & in this light it just astonishes / saddens me how many decisions on a daily basis (governmental, societal, personal) are made from that place of primal fear. this year and every year i am trying hard to be brave … trying to make decisions from a place of compassion and kindness, not scarcity or fear.

“means to an end” / “ends justify the means” doesn’t apply when you don’t believe that the end is more important than the means. been thinking about the western obsession w teleology & how the worship of a great ‘ending’ can, at its most innocent be merely something like the predilection towards & desire for things like the Disney Happy Ending but what this leads to (i fear) is a rather perverse cultural & psychological belief that tacitly allows genocide, capitalism, exploitation, etc. (think pragmatism, liberalism, current u.s. policy philosophies, etc.) — if ‘the end’ or ‘ends’ are all that matter — fundamentally we are devaluing life. we matter because we end but the point is to dwell in the means as faithfully as possible, whatever that means / looks like to each of us. but as we all know — to release the hold on the end is to release power and control; it’s leaving yourself (or whatever entity, political or otherwise) to the whims of life, and life is fundamentally random and capricious. so even this I think is rooted in a primal fear of the unknown & man’s desire for certainty. but that will always evade us. and the desire for more of it leads to moral dissolution, which we see so much today…

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“means to an end” / “ends justify the means” doesn’t apply when you don’t believe that the end is more important than the means. been thinking about the western obsession w teleology & how the worship of a great ‘ending’ can, at its most innocent be merely something like the predilection towards & desire for things like the Disney Happy Ending but what this leads to (i fear) is a rather perverse cultural & psychological belief that tacitly allows genocide, capitalism, exploitation, etc. (think pragmatism, liberalism, current u.s. policy philosophies, etc.) — if ‘the end’ or ‘ends’ are all that matter — fundamentally we are devaluing life. we matter because we end but the point is to dwell in the means as faithfully as possible, whatever that means / looks like to each of us. but as we all know — to release the hold on the end is to release power and control; it’s leaving yourself (or whatever entity, political or otherwise) to the whims of life, and life is fundamentally random and capricious. so even this I think is rooted in a primal fear of the unknown & man’s desire for certainty. but that will always evade us. and the desire for more of it leads to moral dissolution, which we see so much today…

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reading middlemarch for the first time rn and oh my god it is so. good? like unbelievably so. my god it’s actually astonishing me

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Ed Ruscha

N NO, 1993

acrylic and oil on raw linen, 20 x 24 inches

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Mule deer resting beneath the Grizzly Giant Sequioa in Yosemite National Park, CA

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we are witnessing massacre. total spiritual and moral death. complete complete dehumanization and distraction. and we are all complicit and we are all victims of this abasement

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han kang, winner of the nobel prize for literature, refused to celebrate because of the wars: 'With the war intensifying and people being carried out dead every day, how can we have a celebration or a press conference?'

toshiyuki mimaki, co-chair of Hidankyo, the A-bomb survivors’ group that won nobel peace prize, said: 'Gaza right now is like Japan 80 years ago' and had thought the prize would go to those working hard in Gaza, not to Hidankyo.

arundhati roy, winning the PEN pinter prize, in her speech at the british library: "Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine."

alaa abdel fattah, who was named PEN Writer of Courage by Roy, is in egyptian prison. but in 2021 his mother brought his letters from prison on gaza: Free Jerusalem; tranquil Alexandria, Bride of the Sea; Beirut, the Sheltering Tent — the symbols seem more real than the cities. But Gaza and Cairo are both cities that resist romanticization and so elude song. No one sings to Cairo, but it is the capital of the Arabs. No one sings to Gaza either, but it remains the indisputable capital of Palestine. Both are always present in a crisis. [...]

Do I have the right to dream of escaping to Gaza? Do I have the right to dream of a road to Cairo that passes through Gaza? Does a captive have the right to ask for help from the besieged? I know that these questions show how ancient I am, but I’m an Arab and Palestine’s always on my mind. And, in my defense, I’ll say that I refused to be humiliated in my country, and I never lowered my banners, and it should count that I stood in the face of my oppressors: an orphan, naked and barefoot, and my solace is that the tragedy I’m living is but my share of yours. I call out to you: you are always on my mind."

these are the things the brave and intellectual people of our time are saying. it is possible to be principled. it is always possible to be principled. it is also possible to be less than that—look around and you'll see it in all the writers and artists of our time who are abdicating their roles within humanity. we're living in a time of perfect clarity.

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