Iannis Xanakis: Metastasis
Order to Complexity to Disorder
Kundera on Xenakis. Xenakis severed relations between himself and music. Music as defined by a certain tradition, a heritage. He was not "new" he was "other." Unlike.
Xenakis "does not stand against some earlier phase of music; he turns away from all of European music, from the whole of it's legacy."
In this turn he locates a new origin for sound, not in the notes of man, but in nature. The sound the world makes, alive with rain, with dry heat and machinery.
Xenakis looks to the world of sound, sound with origins not confined to the heart of one man, or his intellect. In this turn he breaks with the authoritative notion that man is the heart of society, a person elevated above other life forms. In this turn from the lie of sentient beings, he takes his place within nature, where man and woman are small parts that do not define the whole.
Bakhtin also takes a turn from the I of writing to the world of speech. In his turn he locates the world of sound within an utterance— man at once a part of the grand dialogue, no more or less than a speaker.
About Xenakis' legacy: "Will he be remembered by music lovers?"
That is a question of music: what harmonies and scales are being agreed up, what instruments played, what opportunities for vocalizations, what beings expressed and realities explored.
They both fondle the dichotomies that have divided Nations, thoughts and music: man/nature; man/woman; oral/written; civilized/savage.
About Xenakis: "What will remain is the act of enormous rejection: for the first time someone has dared to tell European music that it can be abandoned. Forgotten."
So many parts of life are accepted as inevitable, events that cannot be avoided or evaded, certainties. This may be why some twist themselves around the barbed wire of free will and original sin. They are so certain,—as sure to follow as night follows day— of the story of their life, an appropriate score, an authority to empower their position.
Kundera mentions the circumstance of Xenakis' life: being sentenced to death, civil war, disfigurement. In his mind these circumstances "Led Xenakis to side with the objective sound of the world against the sound of a soul's subjectivity."
Many artists and many children of war (especially survivors of wars of extermination) break open in the attempt to understand. Arahon Appelfeld writes, "The numerous books of testimony that were written about the Holocaust are, if you will, a desperate effort to force the Holocaust into a remote recess of madness, to cut it off from life, and in other cases, to envelop it in a kind of mystical aura, intangible, which must be discussed as a kind of experience that cannot be expressed in words, but rather in a prolonged silence." (Beyond Despair)
The first time I heard Xanakis I thought of Beckett. I also think of Broch, beginning The Death of Virgil while interred by the Gestapo, finishing it in poverty and exile. None of these artists accept the inevitable. They have lost the certainty of day following night. And they respond with compositions: Metastasis. Pas Moi. The Death of Virgil.
Showing posts with label Obsolescence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obsolescence. Show all posts
16 August 2012
09 August 2012
Obsolescence
"The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows."
(Kafka, Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope and the True Way, No. 32)
I remember hearing a story about Sitting Bull. A prominent missionary, devoted to conversions, was attempting to frighten him into submitting. He explained the particular nature of heaven and warned—he would be denied entry into paradise should he retain his ways. If he wanted to go to heaven he needed to take the waters, and become born again in Christ. Taking his time to consider the matter, carefully, Sitting Bull asked, "Will you be there?" The missionary replied, "Yes. Of course."
"In that case I prefer not to go."
The impossibility of crows.
"Land acquisition and missionary work always went hand in hand in American history."
(Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins)
We are crows bringing light. Hear us traveling in a community of clouds, a black bevy, a convocation of language. Time means nothing to our customs, they are older than a memory of origins. Here is a box. Let me open it. The answer: food, fun and fornication. There is no greater puzzler than I. The question: what is life?
"Social in impact, most Indian religious experience was individualistic in origin. Visions defined vocations in this world rather than providing information concerning salvation in the other world."
(Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins)
(Kafka, Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope and the True Way, No. 32)
I remember hearing a story about Sitting Bull. A prominent missionary, devoted to conversions, was attempting to frighten him into submitting. He explained the particular nature of heaven and warned—he would be denied entry into paradise should he retain his ways. If he wanted to go to heaven he needed to take the waters, and become born again in Christ. Taking his time to consider the matter, carefully, Sitting Bull asked, "Will you be there?" The missionary replied, "Yes. Of course."
"In that case I prefer not to go."
The impossibility of crows.
"Land acquisition and missionary work always went hand in hand in American history."
(Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins)
We are crows bringing light. Hear us traveling in a community of clouds, a black bevy, a convocation of language. Time means nothing to our customs, they are older than a memory of origins. Here is a box. Let me open it. The answer: food, fun and fornication. There is no greater puzzler than I. The question: what is life?
"Social in impact, most Indian religious experience was individualistic in origin. Visions defined vocations in this world rather than providing information concerning salvation in the other world."
(Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins)
02 August 2012
Obsolescence
"It is our belief that no writer can improve his work until he discards the dulcet notion that the reader is feeble-minded, for writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar. Ascent is at the heart of the matter. A country whose writers are following a calculating machine downstairs is not ascending—if you will pardon the expression—and a writer who questions the capacity of the person at the other end of the line is not a writer at all, merely a schemer."
(E.B. White, An E.B. White Reader)
I love Henry James. He writes sentence I can get lost in. I like being lost in a work. Really lost, not just so completely immersed that the toast burns. Style is a gift we give each other.
I've developed a punctuation fetish. Largely as a result of having my English corrected.
I spend a lot of time studying the comma. In a punctuation book I love, the writer cautions against using too many commas, as the reader today has a short attention span and will not suffer these long sentences. The author's suggestion is to keep it simple. Vary sentence length, yes, but don't ask too much of the reader.
The authors I like ask a great deal from me. In reading them I attempt to meet those expectation. I am grateful to them for having the faith, not only in their own work, but in me, a dear reader. Books, and stories (when retold every season) allow you grow into them, to look over them, searching for lost moments and striving for more complete understandings.
(E.B. White, An E.B. White Reader)
I love Henry James. He writes sentence I can get lost in. I like being lost in a work. Really lost, not just so completely immersed that the toast burns. Style is a gift we give each other.
I've developed a punctuation fetish. Largely as a result of having my English corrected.
I spend a lot of time studying the comma. In a punctuation book I love, the writer cautions against using too many commas, as the reader today has a short attention span and will not suffer these long sentences. The author's suggestion is to keep it simple. Vary sentence length, yes, but don't ask too much of the reader.
The authors I like ask a great deal from me. In reading them I attempt to meet those expectation. I am grateful to them for having the faith, not only in their own work, but in me, a dear reader. Books, and stories (when retold every season) allow you grow into them, to look over them, searching for lost moments and striving for more complete understandings.
26 July 2012
Obsolescence
"Experience remains the unexplored metaphysical terrain of the 21st Century and it is likely that the best scouts will be Indians—not by virtue of superior 'intellect' as commonly understood, but simply because there remains among many of us a predisposition to live in the world as opposed to living on, above, or in control of the world." (Vine Deloria, Jr. and Daniel R. Wildcat, Power and Place: Indian Education in America)
Silko writes about a time when the land is all that survives. It had happened before. It would happen again. People had an age. They would come to the end of it. Many are preparing for that time now. Many have been preparing for ages.
At the time I was afraid. I still dream about the end of this world. I still cling to this life. Her words haunted me, because I knew their truth, though, at times, I am still a child, afraid of knowing.
I spent each day outside with my Grandfather watching him work the dirt. He taught me to respect the plant people and the insects. They were my friends. I spent hours with them, beneath the sun, talking and listening. They told me things: the insects and my Grandfather.
He had a stove just inside the door and would cook what he grew there, on four burners of his own. My Grandmother's stove, with six burners and a griddle, was upstairs. By the time I arrived he'd lost his upstairs privilege.
When he died his sisters sent for me and taught me the intricacies of water. In the city water was easy to come by. I was a child and didn't think beyond the faucet. They lived with rations and each sister had their way to work within the rules and to work around them. They answered to their plants—the city could try to catch them and figure out how to fine them.
Generations of Navajo found happiness and meaning in a world of agriculture, livestock and hand made essentials. Clocks, currency and employment did not dictate their days, nor define their personalities. Land based economies and land based peoples lived and continue to live by the sun and seasons. My grandparents, like many urban Indians, applied their knowledge to their circumstance, using tried and true theories to navigate the very difficult task of raising a family in San Francisco. Tradition helped us retain our shape as humans, as particular humans, informing our daily life, on or off reservation, in or outside of the city.
Today we face the same task our ancestors faced—making choices in a novel world with indigenous knowledge and traditional ethics for guidelines; our goal is to retain our belief in and our ability to be ourselves.
The key to decimating a people for good is to instill hopelessness. Economics, formal education and consumer/media culture emphasize, unequivocally, that living seasonal lives is absurd at best. For generations we have been told that the only way we can survive is to fundamentally change who we are and to completely abandon our knowledge and language.
I learned how to be human in kitchens and cornfields.
I learned our responses in times of crisis, and the practical applications of our philosophy to our contemporary place.
Each of us face an increasingly hostile economic, educational and political terrain, often working long hours and having little time for meaningful relationships.
As a Navajo and a novelist I face the parallel beliefs that my existence, as well as my vocation, is obsolete. The skills, philosophy, oral tradition, and languages, as well as the narrative structure and style of the prose I work within, operate inside a land based oral tradition. This writing is meant to be taken in, contemplated and applied to daily life (activities and decisions). I am consciously offering this content in this form as an alternative to the immediacy and disconnection that characterizes the status quo (on and off line). The Axe is not business as usual. My goal is to create a space and an experience similar to the kitchens and cornfields I grew up in where highly complex historical, scientific, philosophical and spiritual knowledge was presented at a high level so that every member of the family/community could partake in the confidence and joy intrinsic in an indigenous upbringing. These complex stories were told on a seasonal bases and it is often not until your fortieth year of hearing and living that individuals really "begin" to understand. What is elemental is the process.
Silko writes about a time when the land is all that survives. It had happened before. It would happen again. People had an age. They would come to the end of it. Many are preparing for that time now. Many have been preparing for ages.
At the time I was afraid. I still dream about the end of this world. I still cling to this life. Her words haunted me, because I knew their truth, though, at times, I am still a child, afraid of knowing.
I spent each day outside with my Grandfather watching him work the dirt. He taught me to respect the plant people and the insects. They were my friends. I spent hours with them, beneath the sun, talking and listening. They told me things: the insects and my Grandfather.
He had a stove just inside the door and would cook what he grew there, on four burners of his own. My Grandmother's stove, with six burners and a griddle, was upstairs. By the time I arrived he'd lost his upstairs privilege.
When he died his sisters sent for me and taught me the intricacies of water. In the city water was easy to come by. I was a child and didn't think beyond the faucet. They lived with rations and each sister had their way to work within the rules and to work around them. They answered to their plants—the city could try to catch them and figure out how to fine them.
Generations of Navajo found happiness and meaning in a world of agriculture, livestock and hand made essentials. Clocks, currency and employment did not dictate their days, nor define their personalities. Land based economies and land based peoples lived and continue to live by the sun and seasons. My grandparents, like many urban Indians, applied their knowledge to their circumstance, using tried and true theories to navigate the very difficult task of raising a family in San Francisco. Tradition helped us retain our shape as humans, as particular humans, informing our daily life, on or off reservation, in or outside of the city.
Today we face the same task our ancestors faced—making choices in a novel world with indigenous knowledge and traditional ethics for guidelines; our goal is to retain our belief in and our ability to be ourselves.
The key to decimating a people for good is to instill hopelessness. Economics, formal education and consumer/media culture emphasize, unequivocally, that living seasonal lives is absurd at best. For generations we have been told that the only way we can survive is to fundamentally change who we are and to completely abandon our knowledge and language.
I learned how to be human in kitchens and cornfields.
I learned our responses in times of crisis, and the practical applications of our philosophy to our contemporary place.
Each of us face an increasingly hostile economic, educational and political terrain, often working long hours and having little time for meaningful relationships.
As a Navajo and a novelist I face the parallel beliefs that my existence, as well as my vocation, is obsolete. The skills, philosophy, oral tradition, and languages, as well as the narrative structure and style of the prose I work within, operate inside a land based oral tradition. This writing is meant to be taken in, contemplated and applied to daily life (activities and decisions). I am consciously offering this content in this form as an alternative to the immediacy and disconnection that characterizes the status quo (on and off line). The Axe is not business as usual. My goal is to create a space and an experience similar to the kitchens and cornfields I grew up in where highly complex historical, scientific, philosophical and spiritual knowledge was presented at a high level so that every member of the family/community could partake in the confidence and joy intrinsic in an indigenous upbringing. These complex stories were told on a seasonal bases and it is often not until your fortieth year of hearing and living that individuals really "begin" to understand. What is elemental is the process.
19 July 2012
Obsolescence
In Beyond the Writer's Workshop: New Ways to Write Creative Nonfiction Carol Bly presents a challenging project: 100 stories.
She suggests we ask children to endeavor to learn, verbatim, 100 stories by the age of 18. She does not, as emphatically or clearly, state that this attempt, this devotion, requires they have access to 100 stories, and a person to listen to their recitations. I ask that you keep this in mind as you read along and determine how this project can work for you (regardless of your age).
Bly argues for the merits of this project, offering the following observations:
1. Storytellers use Language.
2. If children are asked to memorize great stories—they will use classic language.
3. They will hear themselves speaking great words.
4. They will hear themselves narrating the lives of creatures very unlike themselves.
5. They will directly experience something other.
This lays the groundwork for many things.
I ask you to add to the notion of classic languages, the project of learning and using ancestral languages (often considered endangered, impracticable, extinct, or obsolete) for your own 100 Stories project.
Bly further argues that memorizing and telling 100 stories (to listeners) lays the foundation for empathy. Children will fill their mind with classical feelings and humor. She also writes, for the purpose of this project, "do not translate the language of each story into something familiar, current or provincial." She says you will lose the wonder and the tone—I agree and add you will lose much more.
Bly writes: "Children love strangeness if they're not afraid of it, and they are not afraid of it when they get to say the strange words in their own voice. When they tell stories of unlike creatures and unlike places they free-heartedly exercise curiosity about otherness—about things that will never be like what they know."
Further details about the project, as defined by Bly are on pages 163-170.
Some insights I had while reading Bly's project and her understanding of story. Her 100 stories project provides a concrete way (for people who do know how) to relate to the unknown, without killing it. She asks the young storyteller, and the related listener, to allow the mystery of the unknown and to memorize its language. She asks them (us) to relate to others without changing them, or reducing them to the known, the understandable or the same. She asks the young storyteller not to kill others, but to take the details of them into our mind and memorize them. Perhaps so we can recognize them when we encounter them? Perhaps to know they exist, even if we never have the honor of meeting them.
Many might ask who does this?
I do.
We do.
The Urban Nizhóní do.
Many ask who has the time to do this? (Meaning memorizing stories is impossible, or not worthwhile.)
I've heard and been persecuted by the notion that the oral tradition is always one generation from extinction. Stories need someone to tell them. They need someone to listen to them. Given the state of books and libraries I have an easier time now when I make my argument that books and archives are equally vulnerable to loss (by decidedly different means and methods). They need someone to care for them and read them too.
Devoting our lives to the stories that walk among us is more then a contemporary possibility, or a creative nonfiction workshop idea, it is an essential part of the project of life.
This project has merit, especially when you make a devotion to the stories themselves and the ethics of storytelling. Please remember, this project is not founded on theft. Do not go stealing stories. Make an honest and true devotion to story and start there. Start with your own stories, respect them. If you do not have access to them, start asking around, start reading.
She suggests we ask children to endeavor to learn, verbatim, 100 stories by the age of 18. She does not, as emphatically or clearly, state that this attempt, this devotion, requires they have access to 100 stories, and a person to listen to their recitations. I ask that you keep this in mind as you read along and determine how this project can work for you (regardless of your age).
Bly argues for the merits of this project, offering the following observations:
1. Storytellers use Language.
2. If children are asked to memorize great stories—they will use classic language.
3. They will hear themselves speaking great words.
4. They will hear themselves narrating the lives of creatures very unlike themselves.
5. They will directly experience something other.
This lays the groundwork for many things.
I ask you to add to the notion of classic languages, the project of learning and using ancestral languages (often considered endangered, impracticable, extinct, or obsolete) for your own 100 Stories project.
Bly further argues that memorizing and telling 100 stories (to listeners) lays the foundation for empathy. Children will fill their mind with classical feelings and humor. She also writes, for the purpose of this project, "do not translate the language of each story into something familiar, current or provincial." She says you will lose the wonder and the tone—I agree and add you will lose much more.
Bly writes: "Children love strangeness if they're not afraid of it, and they are not afraid of it when they get to say the strange words in their own voice. When they tell stories of unlike creatures and unlike places they free-heartedly exercise curiosity about otherness—about things that will never be like what they know."
Further details about the project, as defined by Bly are on pages 163-170.
Some insights I had while reading Bly's project and her understanding of story. Her 100 stories project provides a concrete way (for people who do know how) to relate to the unknown, without killing it. She asks the young storyteller, and the related listener, to allow the mystery of the unknown and to memorize its language. She asks them (us) to relate to others without changing them, or reducing them to the known, the understandable or the same. She asks the young storyteller not to kill others, but to take the details of them into our mind and memorize them. Perhaps so we can recognize them when we encounter them? Perhaps to know they exist, even if we never have the honor of meeting them.
Many might ask who does this?
I do.
We do.
The Urban Nizhóní do.
Many ask who has the time to do this? (Meaning memorizing stories is impossible, or not worthwhile.)
I've heard and been persecuted by the notion that the oral tradition is always one generation from extinction. Stories need someone to tell them. They need someone to listen to them. Given the state of books and libraries I have an easier time now when I make my argument that books and archives are equally vulnerable to loss (by decidedly different means and methods). They need someone to care for them and read them too.
Devoting our lives to the stories that walk among us is more then a contemporary possibility, or a creative nonfiction workshop idea, it is an essential part of the project of life.
This project has merit, especially when you make a devotion to the stories themselves and the ethics of storytelling. Please remember, this project is not founded on theft. Do not go stealing stories. Make an honest and true devotion to story and start there. Start with your own stories, respect them. If you do not have access to them, start asking around, start reading.
12 July 2012
Obsolescence
"Here we see that what is terrifying and inconceivable is not the infinite void, but existence." (Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium)
It's difficult to avoid the dead in Prague.
Every place remembers: Slaves were sold at the Týn Courtyard.
There are people who cannot recall their origins.
The Nazis closed the Prague Jewish Museum (established in 1906 to preserve holy objects from Synagogues demolished during Josefov' slum clearances of the turn of the century) on March 15, 1939. Their plan: Create a Central Jewish Museum for the documentation of an extinct race. Their method: Collect objects from Jewish communities from Bohemia and Moravia, catalogue and store them. Exterminate the people. What they accomplished: The world's largest collection of sacred Jewish objects, simultaneously serving as a memorial to seven centuries of oppression.
Every place remembers: Yad Vashem is a memorial for the anti-Jewish Holocaust in Jerusalem.
There are people who cannot recognize their relations.
Yad Vashem memorial has a library (with an online searchable database) that catalogues the names of the more than six million victims from the Shoah period. The library keeps the names of these people, and information about where they lived, where they were born, anything that could be known or remembered about them. The point is to state definitively that they existed, they had lives and they mattered. Those who died were not without names or bodies. They were not a mass to be buried; they were human beings.
Every place remembers: Hwééldih: (Bosque Redondo Reservation) Place created at Fort Sumner, New Mexico to incarcerate the Navajo and Mescalero Apache from 1864-1868.
They say those bought and sold on the Long Walk to Hwééldih leave no trace. Their survival transformed them into shapes left outside of documents and collections. When baptized they were truly born again, outside k'éí. They ceased to be relevant as they lost their name, their origin, and their means of locating themselves among their relations. They exist only in the space between enslavement and extermination, a vestigial organ, a biological degenerate, something or someone that once was but has disappeared, passed away, without a mark or sign. A creature that functioned, once, at an earlier stage in the development of this, our species.
05 July 2012
Obsolescence
from Curzio Malaparte's The History of a Manuscript (Kaputt, 1944)
"Let us hope that the new era will really be anew and that writers will enjoy liberty and respect, I say 'let us hope' not because I lack faith in liberty and its benefits—I belong to that group of people who have suffered imprisonment and deportation to the Island of Lipari for their freedom of spirit and their contribution to the cause of liberty—but because we all know how difficult it is in Italy and throughout large sections of Europe to be a human being, and how dangerous it is to be a writer."
These words were written about a time not unlike these, our own. I write with the same hopes and the same sentiment, always attentive to the difficulties of being human and the dangers of being a writer.
I constantly justify my work—novels, Navajo language, traditional arts and culture. Language itself seems to have become obsolete. Hand prepared meals and non gmo food elitist. Home a class struggle by a small percentage of people that refuse to even consider the ethics of occupying an occupied territory.
Even other artists ask me what I get out of writing—what's in it for me. Where is my fun? And why don't I make the change to something shorter and more interactive, something more likely to interface with the contemporary world, not this world I seem to believe in, this world of my grandparents.
They raised me. Their world is not a memory, but a reality I still build, around myself, every morning with herbs ground in my great grandmother's molcajete. We live in the same world, they have gone on, while I remain. This is the world they lived in: facing urbanization, baptism, English only and relocation/deportation. They planted food. They told stories. They embroidered cloth and fabricated garments from the remnants of the food we had eaten—its containers made of cotton, not hide. They clothed us in their knowledge of what it meant to be alive. Life required vision: to be human. This is the kind of human we are: cook, farmer and embroiderer.
They remind me to remember who I am and who I am related to: Navajo, Pueblo, Congolese. Writers make connections according to a grammar they find within their soul. Together, being human and making connections, I am vulnerable to severe fiscal and social punishment. It has always been this way, for a long time, in large sections of Europe and in these United States of America.
My grandparents fought. They fought each other most of all. But their overwhelming disagreement was how to achieve victory, not the absolute need to defeat the lies they found themselves under the weight of. This is their world. We live inside it too.
"Let us hope that the new era will really be anew and that writers will enjoy liberty and respect, I say 'let us hope' not because I lack faith in liberty and its benefits—I belong to that group of people who have suffered imprisonment and deportation to the Island of Lipari for their freedom of spirit and their contribution to the cause of liberty—but because we all know how difficult it is in Italy and throughout large sections of Europe to be a human being, and how dangerous it is to be a writer."
These words were written about a time not unlike these, our own. I write with the same hopes and the same sentiment, always attentive to the difficulties of being human and the dangers of being a writer.
I constantly justify my work—novels, Navajo language, traditional arts and culture. Language itself seems to have become obsolete. Hand prepared meals and non gmo food elitist. Home a class struggle by a small percentage of people that refuse to even consider the ethics of occupying an occupied territory.
Even other artists ask me what I get out of writing—what's in it for me. Where is my fun? And why don't I make the change to something shorter and more interactive, something more likely to interface with the contemporary world, not this world I seem to believe in, this world of my grandparents.
They raised me. Their world is not a memory, but a reality I still build, around myself, every morning with herbs ground in my great grandmother's molcajete. We live in the same world, they have gone on, while I remain. This is the world they lived in: facing urbanization, baptism, English only and relocation/deportation. They planted food. They told stories. They embroidered cloth and fabricated garments from the remnants of the food we had eaten—its containers made of cotton, not hide. They clothed us in their knowledge of what it meant to be alive. Life required vision: to be human. This is the kind of human we are: cook, farmer and embroiderer.
They remind me to remember who I am and who I am related to: Navajo, Pueblo, Congolese. Writers make connections according to a grammar they find within their soul. Together, being human and making connections, I am vulnerable to severe fiscal and social punishment. It has always been this way, for a long time, in large sections of Europe and in these United States of America.
My grandparents fought. They fought each other most of all. But their overwhelming disagreement was how to achieve victory, not the absolute need to defeat the lies they found themselves under the weight of. This is their world. We live inside it too.
29 June 2012
Obsolescence
"Those Spaniards believed in a mongrel whiteness. But they overestimated their semen and that was their mistake. You just can't rape that many people. It's mathematically impossible. It's too hard on the body. You get tired. . .the semen of those Spaniards, who thought they were titans, just got lost in the amorphous mass of thousands of Indians."
Roberto Bolaño, 2666
My life is characterized by violence: physical and ideological. Violence is my heritage.
Heritage: a) something handed down from one's ancestors or the past, a culture, a tradition, etc., b) the rights, burdens, or status resulting from being born in a certain time or place; birthright.
"The poisonous world flows into my mouth like water into that of a drowning man."
Franz Kafka, Diaries
I'm often asked: are you still here? In waiting rooms, in conversations, in response to my steadfast refusal to accept the number I've been assigned. I'm a believer. I believe. What I write (my content) and how I write (my form) reflects my refusal to fade away, my refusal to accept the terms of the day (English and exploitation—of women, earth and children). As a thinker I'm not in favor. I understand that. I'm stubborn, not daft. I ask a great deal from the world. My grandparents asked a great deal from me. We have high expectation. They provoke anger. Often that anger is directed at me. I face it. It hurts. It empties my soul and my bank account. I am free to change. I know that. I am free to turn my back on everything I know. I am free to forget myself and my relations. Always at home I knew the truth: there was no freedom without responsibility. Even during our most violent moments we grappled with ways to be more beautiful than broken.
"It wasn't enough to claim our lands, we had to claim our ways of thinking, acting and living."
William L. Hensley, Fifty Miles from Tomorrow
Everything I do has its origin in the power I was given at four, five and six years of age. Faith. Audacity. Anger. Resilience. We lived a very inspired life in San Francisco violating every code (health, penal, cultural) in the county. I was not a witness to their artistry I was a pivotal participant. Lying to animal control. Helping with the piece work. There was work to spare, so I took my place in the project of asserting our right to exist—then, there, on our own terms, in the face of urban poverty and cruelty. I have no home to go home to. But I have this heritage. I use it to speak to our legacy of slavery, alcoholism and colonization.
Roberto Bolaño, 2666
My life is characterized by violence: physical and ideological. Violence is my heritage.
Heritage: a) something handed down from one's ancestors or the past, a culture, a tradition, etc., b) the rights, burdens, or status resulting from being born in a certain time or place; birthright.
"The poisonous world flows into my mouth like water into that of a drowning man."
Franz Kafka, Diaries
I'm often asked: are you still here? In waiting rooms, in conversations, in response to my steadfast refusal to accept the number I've been assigned. I'm a believer. I believe. What I write (my content) and how I write (my form) reflects my refusal to fade away, my refusal to accept the terms of the day (English and exploitation—of women, earth and children). As a thinker I'm not in favor. I understand that. I'm stubborn, not daft. I ask a great deal from the world. My grandparents asked a great deal from me. We have high expectation. They provoke anger. Often that anger is directed at me. I face it. It hurts. It empties my soul and my bank account. I am free to change. I know that. I am free to turn my back on everything I know. I am free to forget myself and my relations. Always at home I knew the truth: there was no freedom without responsibility. Even during our most violent moments we grappled with ways to be more beautiful than broken.
"It wasn't enough to claim our lands, we had to claim our ways of thinking, acting and living."
William L. Hensley, Fifty Miles from Tomorrow
Everything I do has its origin in the power I was given at four, five and six years of age. Faith. Audacity. Anger. Resilience. We lived a very inspired life in San Francisco violating every code (health, penal, cultural) in the county. I was not a witness to their artistry I was a pivotal participant. Lying to animal control. Helping with the piece work. There was work to spare, so I took my place in the project of asserting our right to exist—then, there, on our own terms, in the face of urban poverty and cruelty. I have no home to go home to. But I have this heritage. I use it to speak to our legacy of slavery, alcoholism and colonization.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)