AUGUST 2024

any conversation surrounding money and art gets either very dull or very contentious quick, but without delving too deeply into some self-contradictory and tangled thoughts here, I’ll just say that I’ve always been in gregory orr’s camp: “How lucky we are / That you can’t sell / A poem, that it has / No value. Might / As well / Give it away.” after reading this piece in film comment about cinema (the making of) and piracy that tracks an idealistic artistry that is at once insistent on future-building and stoically cognisant of capitalism’s gears and demands, I think that the foundation of artistic production (no matter the form) resists commercialisation and monetary value by definition, because such labels and designations can only be assigned after the making, and for the makers that process never stops. . . what one can buy or assign value to is only one manifestation of something uncontainable. . . an idea and a drive. . . a thought and its incarnations that are as various as moments. . . “When productions end and crews return home, directors and producers remain on half-finished bridges. Neither have called ‘Cut!’ The cameras, their internal panopticons, still roll. They remain vigilant and attentive, keeping love alive by the seams.”

and I really love this series that it’s from—”print out”—which features writings from independent film publications around the world. print is so alive and in the throes of constant invention. people keep putting words down on paper because they know that we create meaning through its tangibility.

The way time is soaked by wagons, tunes, autobiographies, beaches, puddings, margins, and rules
Into separate minutes
Which present them in turn in separate appearances
As entertainments, perhaps
As a means of filling time
With prisons

noor naga’s if an egyptian cannot speak english might be one of the most incisive novels I’ve read as of late in regards to the contemporary expat experience, most pivotally regarding the ways in which ethics are not, in fact, universal, and are married distinctly to culture and various arenas in space. despite any reluctance on my part to see nationhood as a fragile concept of geopolitics, any discussion of borders must also consider our evaluation of morality and even standard practices of “kindness” when crossing over into another container. . . communication is temperamental, vacillating, and constantly being intercepted by an immensity of contradictory belongings. . .

and———”Everything is like something else. / I should’ve waited before I learned this.” (ashbery)

the work of photographer cho gi-seok in capturing the transcendence of adolescent outburst, the supple interplay between organicism and artifice, and the sculptural baroque of classic dichotomies.

dance as a vision of gas and liquid existing together, testing one another, of teaching the air about fluidity. . .

Later, there were so many protagonists
one got quite lost, as in a forest of dopplegängers.
Many things were going on. And the moon, poised
on the ridge like an enormous, smooth grapefruit, understood
the importance of each and wasn’t going
to make one’s task any easier, though we loved her.

and then there is the thought of those imprisoned and their reality, which must always be brought to the foreground for those who are freed—not simply for the persistence of liberation efforts but for the most profound understandings of what it means to be alive. kaleem hawa’s essay in paraptraxis is vital reading, just as is nasser abu srour’s the tale of a wall. and all of this too makes me think of a book that changed so many things for me, mei zhi’s F. . .

Later we joked,
now we know what we will be doing when the world burns.
We will be shutting the windows and catching up on email
finally.

susan sontag’s “trip to hanoi” is such a feat of trans-cultural thinking that seems so beyond the orientalism of her time, from admitting the failures in her romanticism, her schematic of the western world as supposedly more complex without undermining the complexity of what she perceives as simple, the acknowledgement of her intellectual limitations, the threading of experience back to her learnings regardless, the accuracy by which she diagnoses her superiority complex, but how she doesn’t let that supercede her willingness to speak, to praise without establishing constraints, to criticise without exercising judgment, to be so emboldened in the need to understand—but not to take possession of the other but to more firmly grasp oneself. . . to make use of unknowing as a radical political tool. . .

after wanting to rewatch certain parts of radu jude’s bad luck banging and loony porn after it had been taken off of mubi, I looked for it online and could only find it on a porn site—a remarkable irony (or an action so sincere that it feels ironic?) that is so enjoyable I wonder if jude hadn’t put it up there himself.

the poem at the end of valentina maurel’s I have electric dreams is so apt. so perfectly coalesces the emotional wires running currents through all the images and the conversations. displaces the temporal reality of the cinema to make it seem real in the way that something is real not when it is seen, but when it is understood:

Tengo sueños eléctricos
en los que mi padre cuando no puede arreglar algo
lo revienta al piso
se enoja, me grita, me insulta
nos queremos a gritos, a veces a golpes
así somos
una horda de animales salvajes
soñando con ser humanos
hace falta a veces varios días para entender que
la rabia que nos atraviesa no nos pertenece

I have electric dreams 
where my dad, when he can’t fix something
smashes it on the ground
he gets angry, shouts, calls names
we scream our love for each other, sometimes with blows
that’s what we are
a pack of wild animals with dreams of humanity
sometimes one needs several lives to comprehend this
the rage that runs through us doesn’t belong to us

also, parallels between I have electric dreams and aftersun are inevitable (father-daughter, violence [physical in the former, psychic in the latter], budding sexuality, etc.), but maurel’s is the superior film; it handles its silences and unsayables with so much more finesse and momentum.

my favourite bouguereau paintings, in ascending order: dante et virgile (1850); la nymphee (1878); marchande de grenades (1875); la crépuscule (1882); and les oréades (1902).

“essentially, what she told me was: ‘bertrand, if your life is filled with the music of chopin, the novels of balzach, the poems of musset, then you’ll never be alone.”

cavafy in august. thinking about “ionic”, and also about this miraculous little poem “far off”, which has also translated as “long ago”. in the thickets of lost memories only that word blue can call up the colour blue, and not simply that but a sapphire blue. . .

I should like to relate this memory. . .
but it is so faded now . . . scarcely anything is left—
because it lies far off, in the years of my early manhood.

A skin as if made of jasmine . . .
that night in August—was it August?—that night . . .
I can just barely remember the eyes, they were, I think, blue . . .
Ah yes, blue; a sapphire blue.

finding out that the word in arabic for poetic rhythm is the same word for the sea from darwish, which seems like a perfect something that I should’ve already known but didn’t, just like when I foun out that the word stanza is the italian word for room. . .

the moment in jane b. par agnès v. when philippe léotard (credited as painter/murderer) says: “there’s something about trunks. in lots of old portraits, in the background, there’s a trunk and a woman rummaging through it." and much later, jane says “it’s hard to pinpoint the moment you slip from the foreground to the background.” so where is the real story? in the woman lying bare and supine before us, or in the many hidden and unhidden acts of labour, of searching, or unarticulated and unpictured questions that are left unfinished in one portrait to go drifting off into another, and on and on throughout time. . .

I read john berger’s and our faces, my heart, brief as photos a long time ago, and have somehow managed to forget this incredible passage in it:

poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. all stories are able battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.

poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. they bring a kind of peace. not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been.

it’s so irritating to forget beautiful, important things.

feeling grateful for william stafford when he described the motions of writing as a “succession of emergencies in which my feeling are ambivalent”, that even when translating the hottest and the coldest emotions into poetry one must be have a bit of that ambivalence, for language itself has no emotion but that which is natural to its flow, and the master of the poem is not its writer but the language of its writing.

this scene from hamaguchi’s drive my car, towards of a film that is full of regrets about what has not been said (within a script how does a regret figure), is so powerfully cathartic. . . how she choreographs him into the monologue, how she not only paints the vision of redemption to come, but writes it upon his body. . .

the opening vignette of g. cabrera infante’s view of dawn in the tropics (trans. suzanne jill levine): “The island came out of the sea like a Venus land: out of the foam constantly beautiful.” in this incredibly moving, surreal collection the writer is coming to terms with the frailties, absurdities, and the self-indulgent soul of violence, but purposely keeping out the names and the factual details (perhaps out of some resistance of martyrdom?). here infante is stoic, even ironic, even humorous when relating some of the most tragic and outrageous incidents of this island marked end to end with the wounds of conquering and resistance, and one is reminded that a joke is a kind of strange collaboration between fates and attentions, in which individuals are made into characters, their lives and choices collated into one streamlined course towards an inevitable conclusion. jokes must take place in a world we recognise but there must be something unrecognisable there. they must be told about people we know but only from afar. there is a sense that we find something funny when we want to reject its reality—as if humour lightens, in a way, the tendency of the world’s senselessness to devolve so often into horrors. so someone gets a posthumous promotion. a man committing suicide wraps his gun in a towel so as to not wake their wife. eight students are killed for a mark on a gravestone. as if humankind is itself playing out the joke of the world, so we might as well pretend like we’re in on it.

darwish, remembering ritsos:

And I said: “I learned a lot from you. I learned
how to train myself to love
life and how to row in the white
Mediterranean looking for the way and for home or
for the duality of way and home /
He didn’t care for the compliment. He offered me coffee.
Then said: Your Odysseus will come back safe,
he’ll come back . . . /

and ritsos:

Then, exhausted, he leans on the sofa and shuts his eyes.
’I have a bird in my head,” he says, ‘I can’t get it out.’
The shadows of two huge wings fill the room.

and darwish:

Our coffee cups. And birds. And the green trees
with blue shadows. And the sun leaping from
one wall to another like a gazelle. . .
and the water in clouds with endless shapes
in what is left to us of sky,
and other things of postponed memory
indicate this morning is strong and beautiful,
and that we are eternity’s guests.

and ritsos:

She opened the shutters. She hung the sheets over the sill. She saw the day.
A bird looked at her straight in the eyes. ‘I am alone,’ she whispered.
’I am alive.’ She entered the room. The mirror too is a window.
If I jump into it I will fall into my arms.

and darwish:

And if
there must be a moon let it be high . . . high
and made in Baghdad, not Arabic or Persian
and not claimed by any of the gods around us. And let it be empty
of memories and of ancient kings’ wine,
for us to complete this holy procession, together, you daughter
of the eternal moon, in this place that your hands brought down
to the edge of the earth from the balcony of the fading paradise! . . .

and ritsos:

We lay down. We covered ourselves. We loved one another
around that untouched plate that no longer steamed.
Around midnight the black cat came in through the window
and ate some of Panousis’s food.
Then the moon came in
and hung motionless over the plate.
Panousis’s arm on the blanket
was a severed plane tree.
Well then—must we really be so sad
in order to love one another?