10 enero 2013

Walking Out

Walking down this

steep trail, I drone to myself:

Kent, I need to rest.

Juan, necesito descansar.

Twenty times, one

hundred, breath harsh

against my ears. My trekking

poles swing too far, not far

enough. I stumble

over tumbled rocks

square-cornered boulders

slick & tilted slabs.

A man-made trail

maintained by falling water.

My foot bones ache.

from Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Tr. Brian Massumi (1987):

This body is stolen first from the girl: Stop behaving like that, you’re not a little girl anymore, you’re not a tomboy, etc. The girl’s becoming is stolen first, in order to impose a history, or prehistory, upon her. . . . The girl is certainly not defined by virginity; she is defined by a relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness

US in 2012: warmest year on record: NOAA

from Peter Gizzi's Some Values of Landscape and Weather (2003):

Beginning with a Phrase from Simone Weil

There is no better time than the present when we have lost everything. It doesn’t mean rain falling

at a certain declension, at a variable speed is without purpose or design.

The present everything is lost in time, according to laws of physics things shift

when we lose sight of a present,

when there is no more everything. No more presence in everything loved.

In the expanding model things slowly drift and everything better than the present is lost in no time.

A day mulches according to gravity

and the sow bug marches. Gone, the hinge cracks, the gate swings a breeze,

breeze contingent upon a grace opening to air,

velocity tied to winging clay. Every anything in its peculiar station.

The sun brightens as it bleaches, fades the spectral value in everything seen. And chaos is no better model

when we come adrift.

When we have lost a presence when there is no more everything. No more presence in everything loved,

losing anything to the present. I heard a fly buzz. I heard revealed nature,

cars in the street and the garbage, footprints of a world, every fly a perpetual window,

unalloyed life, gling, pinnacles of tar.

There is no better everything than loss when we have time. No lack in the present better than everything.

In this expanding model rain falls

according to laws of physics, things drift. And everything better than the present is gone

in no time. A certain declension, a variable speed.

Is there no better presence than loss?

A grace opening to air.

No better time than the present.

Simone Weil [pronounced Vay] [pic by Yann (Wikipedia)]

from Simone Weil's essay "Social Harmony" in Gravity and Grace (1952):

Whence will renewal come to us — to us who have defiled and emptied the whole earthly globe? . . .

As it cannot be expected that a man without grace should be just, there must be a society organized in such a way that injustices punish each other through a perpetual oscillation. . . .

A well ordered society would be one where the State had only a negative action, comparable to that of a rudder: a light pressure at the right moment to counteract the first suggestion of any loss of equilibrium. . . .

The great mistake of the Marxists and of the whole of the nineteenth century was to think that by walking straight on one mounted upwards into the air. . . .

After the collapse of our civilization there must be one of two things: either the whole of it will perish like the ancient civilizations, or it will adapt itself to a decentralized world.

It rests with us, not to break up the centralization (for it automatically goes on increasing like a snowball until the catastrophe comes), but to prepare for the future. . . .

You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.

more Deleuze & Guattari:

A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc. — and an abstract machine that sweeps them along? We have been criticized for overquoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work. Kleist and a mad war machine, Kafka and a most extraordinary bureaucratic machine . . . (What if one became animal or plant through literature, which certainly does not mean literarily? Is it not first through the voice that one becomes animal?) Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. . . . Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.