I can't sleep…
Think of the many times you’ve been a refuge: welcoming each stray street cat and abandoned potted plant and dear friend saved from heartache. This body has been warm. It’s given past what hands can give. This body has played lighthouse and homemaker and firefighter. You, a healing breeze; your body, the sky that moves it. A place of rest, a song sent by spring, a flickering light, a wish the world made.
— Schuyler Peck, “You Look Like Hell” (Game Over Books, June 6, 2023) (via Wait-What?)
No matter the circumstance, human suffering matters. Our attending to it matters. Acts of tenderness are not morally trivial. […]
For as Naomi Klein has reminded us, our demise isn’t all or nothing, at least not for the next few centuries. “There are degrees to how bad this thing can get,” Klein says. “Literally, there are degrees.” As we struggle to figure out how to notch back the degrees, so as to mitigate the suffering that a warming planet is going to bring, we also need to figure out forms of relationality—both to ourselves and to each other—that won’t make things worse.
By the time I finished 10:04, I felt like I understood some options: not being ashamed of the desire to make a living doing what we love, while also daring to imagine “art before or after capital”; paying as intense attention to our collectivity as to our individuality; demanding a politics based on more than reproductive futurism, without belittling the daily miracle of conception, nor the labor and mysterious promise of childbearing and -rearing; attempting to listen seriously to others, especially those who differ profoundly from ourselves, no matter how precontaminated the attempts; spending time reading and writing poetry; and more. Far from despair, I felt flooded with the sense that everything mattered, from meticulous descriptions of individual works of art to kissing the forehead of a passed-out intern to analyzing our political language to documenting the sensual details of our daily lives to bagging dried mangoes to the creation of the book I was holding in my hand to my deciding to spend time writing a review of it. “The earth is beautiful beyond all change,” Lerner repeats in 10:04, quoting the poet William Bronk. The inspired and inspiring accomplishment of his novel makes me want to say that sometimes, art is too. And maybe—if incredibly—so might we be, ourselves.
— Maggie Nelson, from “Beyond All Change. On Ben Lerner’s 10:04” in “Like Love: Essays and Conversations..” (Graywolf Press, April 2, 2024)
Notes:
This quote is from a sermon that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, on August 11, 1957. The sermon was titled “Conquering Self-Centeredness” and it explored the theme of altruism versus selfishness. King urged his listeners to dedicate their lives to serving others and to follow the example of Jesus Christ12. He said:
In a sense every day is judgment day, and we, through our deeds and words, our silence and speech, are constantly writing in the Book of Life. Light has come into the world, and every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, “What are you doing for others?”
Quote Source link here.
Canada Geese are said to mate for life. Of course, I didn’t know this but I googled it 2 years ago when I tripped into a need to know. Sawsan, of course, would have known this, and all things about why the earth turns this way and that, and would have told me so, as the knower of all things that I, DK, don’t know. Irritating? Mildly. But like that growth on the instep of your foot — think “One of these things is not like the others, one of these things doesn’t belong here” (Sesame Street) — its become part of you, and you get used to it in time by walking on it.
So here we are, on my 1,195th consecutive (almost) daybreak walk at Cove Island Park — like in a row . Minutes after my weather app said the rain would stop, it stopped. “Precipitation will end at 5:04 a.m.” And damn if it didn’t end at 5:04 a.m. I’m clearly not paying enough for this app, for the 1 in 10x it gets it right.
The heavy rains overnight have made the track muddy, and i’m stepping around the puddles I can see, and splashing through those that I don’t, some ankle deep, with the excess being sopped up by my socks.
