Scaffolding

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.

by Seamus Heaney
from Open Ground Selected Poems 1966-1996
.

Adolph Reed, Jr. at nonsite:

Many pundits and scholars have remarked on how the 2016 election reflected the significance of race in American politics. One strain of commentary to that effect contends that Trump’s election revealed a deep commitment to racism among white voters, especially working-class white voters, who are fundamentally alienated from a Democratic liberalism identified with nonwhites, feminists, LGBTQ people, and liberal technocratic elites.

From that perspective, the strategic moral of the Trump victory is that, as MSNBC Clintonoid Joy-Ann Reid put it in an August 29, 2017 Daily Show interview, the Democrats must recognize that they are the party of “black and brown people, of gay people, of marginalized people” and should stop longing “to be the party of the sort of Pabst Blue Ribbon voter, the kind of Coors Lite drinking voter…the sort of Archie Bunker voters” because the latter are committed Republicans. Reid imagines that, even though most Americans’ incomes have remained flat or declined and their lives have become more precarious over the period, the Democrats have been trying to appeal to those voters’ economic interests for forty years only to be rebuffed consistently because the latter care more about their “values” than their economic interests, and “the Republican party represents their values.”

more here.

Colm Tóibín at the NYRB:

Joseph Conrad’s heroes were often alone, and close to hostility and danger. Sometimes, when Conrad’s imagination was at its most fertile and his command of English at its most precise, the danger came darkly from within the self. At other times, however, it came from what could not be named. Conrad sought then to evoke rather than delineate, using something close to the language of prayer. While his imagination was content at times with the tiny, vivid, perfectly observed detail, it was also nourished by the need to suggest and symbolize. Like a poet, he often left the space in between strangely, alluringly vacant.

His own vague terms—words like “ineffable,” “infinite,” “mysterious,” “unknowable”—were as close as he could come to a sense of our fate in the world or the essence of the universe, a sense that reached beyond the time he described and beyond his characters’ circumstances. This idea of “beyond” satisfied something in his imagination. He worked as though between the intricate systems of a ship and the vague horizon of a vast sea.

more here.

Christian Wiman at The American Scholar:

The definition of  joy in the passages by Wordsworth and MacCaig, though both are tethered tightly to the natural world, remains pretty abstract. Even “Small Moth,” clear as it is on the elements of one woman’s happiness, is elusive about that moment of joy. This may be inevitable, though maybe all poems of joy—maybe all poems, period—are aimed against whatever glitch in us or whim of God has made our most transcendent moments resistant to description. (A “revenge of a mortal hand,” is how the Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska defines the joy of writing.) The great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai once wondered why it is that we have such various and discriminating language for our pains but become such hapless generalizers for our joys. “I want to describe,” his poem “The Precision of Pain” concludes, “with a sharp pain’s precision, happiness / and blurry joy. I learned to speak among the pains.”

“Among the pains” is where we all learned to speak. The instant the link between word and world appears, so does the rift between them. (I met a Czech scholar once, a man of immense learning and multiple languages, who told me that he didn’t speak a word until he was five years old. “Everything was okay until then,” he said with a shrug.) This link/loss aspect of speech seems true no matter one’s metaphysical dispensations.

more here.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month)

William Archila in AGNI:

I was ten and my father was gone, already living here in the States, when my mother woke me up in the middle of the night to listen to a strange voice coming out of the transistor radio. It was Pablo Neruda reciting his love poems while violins and guitars played in the background. For two years I fell asleep to the voice of Neruda rising and falling like waves in the distance, like seagulls swooping down, my head filling with poetry.

The broadcast was interrupted in November, 1980, when I fled El Salvador and the war that was tearing my country apart. I was twelve years old. I arrived in Los Angeles, California, with many questions unanswered, conversations unfinished and years of my young life unfulfilled. I gave up much of my national culture and Spanish language to learn a new culture and language. My English was full of street vernacular and strong raw accents—my words squashed, shredded, forced to dance a Shakespearian rag. I became part of the growing immigrant community, speaking ghetto Spanish. “Go back to your country” echoed throughout these years. Ahead a long road stretched into darkness.

In high school I began writing long before I read any poetry that excited me. My writings were fragments—verses and scribbles not meant to be taken seriously or shared. I pursued this calling in secret, writing only for myself. In college I tried to read the masters of the English language: Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Dickinson, Whitman, but none of them spoke to me—or maybe I wasn’t ready to listen. It wasn’t until I read Ginsberg’s “Howl” that I was amazed to discover I was not the only young man who saw the best minds of his generation destroyed.

More here.

Jaspreet Gill in Quillette:

Disagreement has made disagreeable individuals of us all. News channels are littered with platitudes masquerading as thoughtful discussions. Individuals, convinced that the volume of their speech corresponds to the correctness of their arguments, contribute to the cacophony of tirades. The print media publish headlines assassinating opponents’ characters rather than their ideas. Swipes and scrolls lead us to trivial online quarrels which bleed into our personal conversations. Research from the Pew Research Centre suggests that 91 percent of Republicans and 86 percent of Democrats hold unfavourable views of the other. It would be unfair but tempting to lay the blame at the feet of politicians, public intellectuals, and journalists. But we, the people, are also complicit in this potentially slippery slope.

Gathering by the campfire in our ideological tribes, we bask in the warm glow of unchallenged beliefs. We caricature arguments that do not fit neatly into our canonical jigsaw. Foregoing uncomfortable rumination in favour of rhetoric, we have helped to create and perpetuate a climate in which dissent is tolerated only for as long as it is a heresy we find palatable. And because the sacred cow revered by one tribe could be butchered by another, both worship and slaughter are seen as barbaric. Our immune system, fearful the body may contract moral anaemia by merely engaging with opposing viewpoints, triggers a defensive response that renders us allergic (and deaf) to opinions outside our personalised Overton windows. The ultra-networked age leaves us distant and disconnected and facilitates the rapid transmission of viral partisanship.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

In our everyday lives, it makes sense to ask “why” this or that event occurs, but such questions have answers only because they are embedded in a larger explanatory context. In particular, because the world of our everyday experience is an emergent approximation with an extremely strong arrow of time, such that we can safely associate “causes” with subsequent “effects.” The universe, considered as all of reality (i.e. let’s include the multiverse, if any), isn’t like that. The right question to ask isn’t “Why did this happen?”, but “Could this have happened in accordance with the laws of physics?” As far as the universe and our current knowledge of the laws of physics is concerned, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” The demand for something more — a reason why the universe exists at all — is a relic piece of metaphysical baggage we would be better off to discard.

This perspective gets pushback from two different sides.

More here.

Tina Rosenberg in the New York Times:

Gene Sharp died last week. What Sun Tzu and Clausewitz were to war, Sharp, who was 90, was to nonviolent struggle — strategist, philosopher, guru. An American academic who worked from his modest Boston home, Sharp studied and cataloged examples of nonviolent resistance, looking at why they succeeded or failed.

His most influential work was “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a pamphlet written for Burma’s opposition in 1993. It has been translated into dozens of languages — often clandestinely — and became a handbook for civic resistance movements around the world. (Much of Sharp’s writing is available free on the website of his organization, the Albert Einstein Institute.)

Sharp is best known as a strategist for movements in the most dire circumstances — those trying to create political change when there is no institutional path. But his ideas have shaped civic protest movements in the United States and other democracies, and they contain some surprising advice for the resistance to President Trump.

First, here’s a brief summary of what Sharp taught the world…

More here.

If You Go and Look at a Hen For an Hour or Two, You’ll Find in the End
That the Mystery Has Not Diminished but Rather Increased

Its feet yellow and strong.

Its walking rhythm with that kind of ludicrous efficiency,
halting from time to scrabble in the dirt.

Its compact structure in bright feathers, black,
nearly blue when the sun strikes.

Crowned in red, with its beak
exactly the same yellow as its feet,
eyes quick.

As it moves forward on the ground, it scrapes and pecks,
it lifts its head every so often, moving it a bit:
an inexorable atavism
for spotting potential predators.

And now it stretches, flapping vigorously in place.

To perk up, maybe,
to get its circulation going, or something of the sort.
.

by Alejandro Crotto
from Asymptote Journal
Oct. 2017
translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers
.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month)

More here. (Note: For the bravest woman I knew and was proud to call a friend. نَّا لِلّهِ وَإِنَّـا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعونَ‎i. Heartbroken)