elizabeth catlett mora

Elizabeth Catlett, 1949, Mariana Yampolsky

*

"I have always wanted my art to service my people -- to reflect us, to relate to us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential. We have to create an art for liberation and for life."

Organizada Negra, 1947, Lithograph

Target, 1970, bronze

Central America Says No, 1986, Linograph

Homage to the Panthers, 1970, Linocut

*

"I arrived in Mexico City one night and the next evening I went to the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP). I got dizzy from the altitude so we all went to a café. I met my future husband that night. There were a lot of us, all artists. Leopoldo Mendez, Pablo Higgins, Francisco 'Pancho' Mora. Pablo said, 'You should teach Pancho English, and he can teach you Spanish.' He never learned English."

"Mexico City was a calm, beautiful place. Not like it is now. It was a sunshiny, green, lovely city, where everything moved slowly. I realized this one day I was standing on a corner talking to a friend and waiting for a bus. When the bus came, I said, 'I've got to go.' But the friend said, 'Don't worry, another bus will come along.'"

Alfabetizando, c. 1950, Lithograph

"I had to meet with five professors. One of them said, 'Why did you apply? You can't get the job. You are a foreigner and a woman.'

A week or so later I was sick in bed. There was a phone call for us at the store next door. Pancho went to get it and then he came upstairs. 'Give me your hand. Now I am shaking the hand of a professor of the National University.'"

*

Elizabeth Catlett at work in her studio, c. 1983

There is a Woman in Every Color

Female Torso, 1988, Black Marble

Singing Their Songs, 1992, Lithograph

"I learned how you use your art for the service of people, struggling people, to whom only realism is meaningful."

I Have Given the World My Songs, 1947, Linocut

Cartas, 1986, Lithograph

(((brooke candy)))

gioconda belli :: la mujer habitada

Felipe wouldn't come today. She felt it in the leaves, in the air. She trusted her intuition, her ability to read what might be in the weight of the atmosphere, the way the flowers moved and the direction of the wind.

Felipe wouldn't come today, and it was better that way, she thought. She was tired.

The stars twinkled in the distance like roguish eyes opening and closing the holes in the universe. "I'm alone," she thought, looking at the immense abyss of darkness. "I'm alone and nobody can tell me for certain if what I am doing is right or wrong." This was the amazing thing about running one's own life, she thought: that chiarascuro substance shifting in time whose individual duration was a chance like everything else.

***

Now she will not leave the earth like flowers that perish without a trace. Omens are hidden in the night, and she moves among them, at last unsheathing her obsidian, her oak. Little remains now of that dormant woman whom the scent of my blossoms wakened from the heavy sleep of indolence. Slowly Lavinia has touched her depths, reaching the place where lie the noble sentiments the gods give to humans before sending them t live on earth and sow corn. My presence has been a knife to carve away indifference. But hidden within her were the sensations which now flourish and that some day will intone chants that will never die.

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY

!LUCE!

Woman never speaks the same way. What she emits is flowing, fluctuating. Blurring. And she is not listened to, unless proper meaning (meaning of the proper) is lost. Whence the resistances to that voice that overflows the "subject." Which the "subject" then congeals, freezes, in its categories until it paralyzes the voice in its flow.

"And there you have it, Gentlemen, that is why your daughters are dumb." Even if they chatter, proliferate phythically in works that only signify their aphasia, or the mimetic underside of your desire. And interpreting them where they exhibit only their muteness means subjecting them to a language that exiles them at an ever increasing distance from what perhaps they would have said to you, were already whispering to you. If only your ears were not so formless, so clogged with meaning(s), that they are closed to what does not in some way echo the already heard.

Outside of this volume already circumscribed by the signification articulated in (the father's) discourse nothing is: awoman. Zone of silence.

*

Re-semblance cannot do without red blood.

Mother-matter-nature must go on forever nourishing speculation.

But this re-source is also rejected as the waste-product of reflection, 

cast outside as what resists it:

as madness.

*

*

What remains, then, would be the pleasure of speaking of love.

A pleasure already, and still, enjoyed by the ancient soul.

A pleasure the science of which psychoanalytic theory would elaborate.

For an over-pleasure?

But of what? Of whom?

And between whom and whom?

*

One way [to "reopen" the figures of philosophical discourse, to make them "render up" and give back what they owe the feminine] is to interrogate the conditions under which systematicity itself is possible: what the coherence of the discursive utterance conceals of the conditions under which it is produced, whatever it may say about these conditions in discourse. For example the "matter" from which the speaking subject draws nourishment in order to produce itself, to reproduce itself; the scenography that makes representation feasible, representation as defined in philosophy, that is, the architectonics of its theatre, its framing in space-time, its geometric organization, its props, its actors, their respective positions, their dialogues, indeed, their tragic relations, without overlooking the mirror, most often hidden, that allows the logos, the subject to reduplicate itself, to reflect itself by itself. All these are interventions on the scene; they ensure its coherence so long as they remain uninterpreted. Thus they have to be reenacted, in each figure of discourse, in order to shake discourse away from its mooring in the value of "presence." For each philosopher, beginning with those whose names define some age in the history of philosophy, we have to point out how the break with material contiguity is made, how the system is put together, how the specular economy works.

land rights & the geography of soul

(((timeliness)))

http://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2013-06-04/googles-eric-schmidt-and-jared-cohen

http://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2012-10-10/cecile-richards-inforums-21st-century-visionary-award

'playing the blues is like being black twice'

once more with feeling:

International Boundaries Are Not Authoritative

Awesome.

"General Map of Railways, Islamic Republic of Iran & Its Transit Corridors"

http://web.archive.org/web/20040113090232/http://www.irirw.com/erailinfo/maps/mainmap.htm

"Fuck everybody. Amen."

::Synecdoche, new york::

searching for sugarman

duras : the lover

He lit a cigarette and gave it to me. And very quietly, close to my lips, he talked to me.

And I talked to him too, very quietly.

Because he doesn't know for himself, I say it for him, in his stead. Because he doesn't know he carries within him a supreme elegance, I say it for him.

*

*

The story of my life doesn't exist. Does not exist. There's never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it's not true, there was no one. The story of one small part of my youth I've already written, more or less -- I mean, enough to give a glimpse of it. Of this part, I mean, the part about the crossing of the river. What I'm doing now is both different and the same. Before, I spoke of clear periods, those on which the light fell. Now I'm talking about the hidden stretches of that same youth, of certain facts, feelings, events that I buried. I started to write in surroundings that drove me to reticence. Writing, for those people, was still something moral. Nowadays if often seems writing is nothing at all. Sometimes I realize that if writing isn't, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it's nothing. That if it's not, each time, all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence, then writing is nothing but advertisement. But usually I have no opinion, I can see that all options are open now, that there seem to be no more barriers, that writing seems at a loss for somewhere to hide, to be written, to be read. That its basic unseemliness is no longer accepted. But at that point I stop thinking about it.

*

*

Both are doomed to discredit because of the kind of body they have, caressed by lovers, kissed by their lips, consigned to the infamy of a pleasure unto death, as they both call it, unto the mysterious death of lovers without love.

*

i love london : i love yosemite : i love life

woolf :: "craftsmanship" :: bbc

I LOVE KALX

los norte americanos:

Kakinomoto no Hitomaro

In the sea of Iwami,
By the cape of Kara,
There amid the stones under sea
Grows the deep-sea miru weed;
There along the rocky strand
Grows the sleek sea tangle.

Like the swaying sea tangle,
Unresisting would she lie beside me --
My wife whom I love with a love
Deep as the miru-growing ocean.
But few are the nights
We two have lain together.

Away I have come, parting from her
Even as the creeping vines do part.
My heart aches within me;
I turn back to gaze --
But because of the yellow leaves
Of Watari Hill,
Flying and fluttering in the air,
I cannot see plainly
My wife waving her sleeve to me.
Now as the moon, sailing through the cloud-rift
Above the mountain of Yakami,
Disappears, leaving me full of regret,
So vanishes my love out of sight;
Now sinks at last the sun,
Coursing down the western sky.

I thought myself a strong man,
But the sleeves of my garment
Are wetted through with tears.


ENVOYS
My black steed
Galloping fast,
Away have I come,
Leaving under distant skies
The dwelling place of my love.

Oh, yellow leaves
Falling on the autumn hill,
Cease a while
To fly and flutter in the air,
That I may see my love's dwelling place!

intimacy:

"Rirette felt a great emptiness in her head, because she was so tired, she looked at the port, all sticky in the glass, like a liquid caramel and a voice in her repeated, "Happiness, happiness," and it was a beautifully grave and tender world."

what is wrong with groovin?

vibrazioni dal canapaio

it's so hard to tell who's going to love you the best.

::: the loss of nostalgia's referent :::

dead men don't smoke marijuana :)

those deep purplyblackblues...

mo' miles, mo' miel

"The point was not to prescribe a new gendered way of life that might then serve as a model for readers of the text.

Rather, the aim of the text was to open up the field of possibility for gender without dictating which kinds of possibilities ought to be realized.

One might wonder what use 'opening up possibilities' finally is, but no one who has understood what it is to live in the social world as what is 'impossible,' illegible, unrealizable, unreal, and illegitimate is likely to pose that question." -jb

PARIS IS BURNING!

judy.

"But perhaps there is now another difficulty after a generation of feminist writing which tried, with varying degrees of success, to bring the feminine body into writing, to write the feminine proximately or directly, sometimes without even the hint of a preposition or marker of linguistic distance between the writing and the written. It may be only a question of learning how to read those troubled translations, but some of us nevertheless found ourselves returning to pillage the Logos for its useful remains."

- Bodies that Matter, ix

the lady herself::

::yeshe tsogyal

kar wai wong

serafini

 oh, yes.

.obama.

"I want to take a look one more time.

I'm not going to see this again."

[NB: first, play bottom video; after twenty (20) seconds, begin top video]

miles

::fanon::

"Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent.

Of those who heat the iron in order to shape it at once. I should prefer to warm man's body and leave him. We might reach this result: mankind retaining this fire through self-combustion.

Mankind set free of the trampoline that is the resistance of others, and digging into its own flesh to find a meaning."

-Black Skin, White Masks // page 9

::deixis::

ORLANDO. // V.WOOLF

Hail ! natural desire ! Hail ! happiness ! divine happiness ! and pleasure of all sorts, flowers and wine, though one fades and the other intoxicates; and half-crown tickets out of London on Sundays, and singing in a dark chapel hymns about death, and anything, anything that interrupts and confounds the tapping of typewriters and the filing of letters and forging of links and chains, binding the Empire together. Hail even the crude, red bows on shop girls' lips (as if Cupid, very clumsily, dipped his thumb in red ink and scrawled a token in passing). Hail, happiness ! kingfisher flashing from bank to bank, and all fulfilment of natural desire, whether it is what the male novelist says it is; or prayer; or denial; hail ! in whatever form it comes, and may there be more forms, and stranger. For dark flows the stream--would it were true, as the rhyme hints "like a dream"--but duller and worser than that is our usual lot; without dreams, but alive, smug, fluent, habitual, under trees whose shade of an olive green drowns the blue of the wing of the vanishing bird when he darts of a sudden from bank to bank.

Hail, happiness, then, and after happiness, hail not those dreams which bloat the sharp image as spotted mirrors do the face in a country-inn parlor; dreams which splinter the whole and tear us asunder and would us and split us apart in the night when we would sleep; but sleep, sleep, so deep that all shapes are ground to dust of infinite softness, water of dimness inscrutable, and there, folded, shrouded, like a mummy, like a moth, prone let us lie on the sand at the bottom of sleep.

But wait ! but wait ! we are not going, this time, visiting the blind land. Blue, like a match struck right in the ball of the innermost eye, he flys, burns, bursts the seal of sleep; the kingfisher; so that now floods back refluent like a tide, the red, thick stream of life again; bubbling, dripping; and we rise, and our eyes (for how handy a rhyme is to pass us safe over the awkward transition from death to life) fall on--(here the barrel-organ stops playing abruptly).

"It's a very fine boy, M'Lady," said Mrs. Banting, the midwife. In other words Orlando was safely delivered of a son on Thursday, March the 20th, at three o'clock in the morning

*

From Sir Thomas Browne

"I that have examined the parts of man, and know upon what tender filaments that Fabrick hangs, doe wonder that we are not alwayes so; and considering the thousand dores that lead to death doe thanke my God that we can die but once."

the body in four parts.

excerpted from Janet Kauffman's the body in four parts.

It is the dream of the body -- to know a place bodily and to say so. To take words into and out of itself. To have words assume bodily shape, salamander or milk, it doesn't matter. To inhabit a shore, a fabulous body of water, debris, insects drilled in the sand.

Where in the world can the body say, I am in my element?

The body strips to its flesh, and flame, and dives. When air gives out, and blues and greens simplify into dark, lips open the way lips open for kisses.

But the body, more fully desirous, recalcitrant in the extreme, says, even there, No, this is not the world I dreamed of. This is not the world.

alphabets

AMHARIC.

ARABIC.

TIBETAN.

SANSKRIT.

der Körper

BORGES.

FORJADURA
by Jorge Luis Borges

Como un ciego de manos precursoras
que apartan muros y vislumbran cielos,
lento de azoramiento voy palpando
por las noches hendidas
los versos venideros.
He de quemar la sombra abominable
en su límpida hoguera:
púrpura de palabras
sobre la espalda flagelada del tiempo.
He de encerrar el llanto de las tardes
en el duro diamante del poema.
Nada importa que el alma
ande sola y desnuda como el viento
si el universo de un glorioso beso
aún abarca mi vida
y en lo callado se embravece un grito.
Para ir sembrando versos
la noche es una tierra labrantía.

*

FORGING
English translation by S.R. Girma

As one who is blind with heralding hands
that draw apart walls and catch glimpses of skies,
slowly with trepidation I feel forward,
into the cleaved nights,
the forthcoming verses.
I must burn the loathsome obscurity
at its transparent stake:
cardinal by words
flagellated against the back by time.
I must enclose the wails of the evenings
in the firm diamond of the poem.
It matters not that the spirit
walks alone and naked like the wind
if the universe with a blessed kiss
still takes my life in its arms
and in the quiet a howl is enraged.
To sow verses
the night is a fertile land.

the lickerish quartet.

Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind.

-Goethe

we gotta find this party...

...iman sagt.....

MAX RICHTER.

aznavour.

Le travail ne me fait pas peur, je suis un peu décorateur un peu styliste Mais mon vrai métier c'est la nuit que je l'exerce en travesti, je suis artiste.

m.c. escher

puddle woodcut, 1952

relativity lithograph, 1953

hand with reflecting sphere or self-portrait in spherical mirror lithograph, 1935

street in scanno, abruzzi lithograph, 1930

image & archetype.

why are you wearing that stupid man-suit?

oh, wow.

writing about the deforestation of Thailand...

this bitter earth, well, what fruit it bears.

short.

!!!wobniarelbuodoublerainbow!!!

rainbow love, world

bardo.

my friend is dear.

malkovichmalkovichmalkovich(DEUTSCHE)

.shantel.

slightly furthur...

there is change,

so let's kiss and say, rather, "see ya soon."

i have a friend named ben

he once shared this video with me.

atlas: when the world feels heavy on yr shoulders

it is

a bursting

feeling like

you can

know no

more.

common & mary j.

it is just thus, just Suchness...

an excerpt from "The Goddess" chapter of The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti, translated by Robert Thurman:

Thereuopn, Manjusri, the crown prince, addressed the Licchavi Vimalakirti: "Good sir, how should a bodhisattva regard all living beings?"




Vimalakirti replied, "Manjusri, a bodhisattva should regard all living beings as a wise man regards the reflection of the moon in water or as magicians regard men created by magic. He should regard them as being like a face in a mirror; like the water of a mirage; like the sound of an echo; like a mass of clouds in the sky; like the previous moment of a ball of foam; like the appearance and disappearance of a bubble of water; like the core of a plantain tree; like a flash of lightning; like the fifth great element; like the seventh sense-medium; like the appearance of matter in an immaterial realm; like a sprout from a rotten seed; like a tortoise-hair coat; like the fun of games for one who wishes to die; like the egoistic views of a stream-winner; like a third rebirth of a once-returner; like the descent of a nonreturner into a womb; like the existence of desire, hatred, and folly in a saint; like the thoughts of avarice, immorality, wickedness, and hostility in a bodhisattva who has attained tolerance; like the instincts of passions in a Tathagata; like the perception of color in one blind from birth; like the inhalation and exhalation of an ascetic absorbed in the meditation of cessation; like the track of a bird in the sky; like the erection of a eunuch; like the pregnancy of a barren woman; like the unproduced passions of an emanated incarnation of the Tathagata; like dream-visions seen after waking; like the passions of one who is free of conceptualizations; like fire burning without fuel; like the reincarnation of one who has attained ultimate liberation."

rithma - i wish i could be beautiful

...and here is an appropriate stanza:

((and i have known the eyes already, known them all --
the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase))


-from eliot's "the love song of j. alfred prufrock"

!rad!

artwork by kirsten mccrea

jean-michel basquiat

taped "shut"

related to the previous situationist image, an image from the fantastic korean film "spring, summer, fall, winter, & spring": he is taped "shut" as he lights the canoe on which he is sitting on fire:

::the situationists::

"a youth disturbed too often by the future"

'neath the bodhi tree

for daniel:

D'où Venons Nous ~ Que Sommes Nous ~ Où Allons Nous // Gauguin

punk is dead ! crass

ash wednesday - t.s. eliot

I

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is
nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

..SIVA DARSAN..

the waking - t. roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

anniversary - gabriela mistral

And we go on and on,
Neither sleeping nor awake,
Towards the meeting, unaware
That we are already there.
That the silence is perfect,
And that the flesh is gone.
The call still is not heard
Nor does the Caller reveal his face.
…..
But perhaps this might be
Oh, my love, the gift
Of the eternal Face without gestures
And of the kingdom without form!

i like my body - e.e. cummings

bodiesbodiesbodies

Carmelo Bene - L'Amore Di Dio

the queen of soul.

NINA.