A blog of fragments.
DISPATCH 3
Note: All empires will fall.
I am asking myself: What kind of writing life cannot muster a word in response to genocide? Among so many other things, I think about the character of silence. I walk slowly in cold air.
Good poems make themselves vulnerable to interpretation. Yet a craft that matters understands when exactitude, wrought from ambiguity, is demanded. Too often I hear people speak about living with contradiction in a way that crosses back into uncontradicted complicity. A material critique reduced to a simple observation of discursivity. I think of the demands of witness.
In what ways can we refine the production of an aesthetic form without merely serving as decorators of empire? How can such an airless question be pressurized to gain its proper shape? And yet, the invulnerable redoubt of idle writers: craft freed of life itself, autonomous elaboration agnostic to trees and dangling limbs.
Often, I turn to the speculative to parse my questions. But I am not invested in an aesthetic and ethical project of an exclusively distant futurity; I think the conditions for imagining otherwise are improvised within the very inhibiting conditions that reify what is happening as what only ought to ever possibly happen. To put it in other words: scenes of negation are still sites of living encounter. To write this as an addendum to Foucault indebted to Lauren Berlant: epistemic shifts proceed unevenly and even unrecognizably within the shifting infrastructures of life. But let me say this plainly: there is a world and a life where such urgent questions must be (re)formulated and answered—and it is this one. Why have some of us not done so? Why can I not find the words?
One side of the path drops several stories. I hug the opposite side, hand grazing stone, yet I still feel the sensation of falling.