A blog of fragments.
DISPATCH 8
Imperial peace is the true death of Relation. -Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation
In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin observes: “[W]e begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled” (13). Monuments—as testaments of past labors to present observers that also augur specific kinds of futurities—are always already ruined, such as they are violently carved from materials, imaginaries, politics, and histories. I turn to the temporality of Benjamin’s dialectical image, in which the historical object of interpretation is actualized in the present, as a reprieve from the static archives, linear histories, and vacuous presents that dominate many of our lives and literatures and acquiescences today.
But one can only bear to read about Paris for so long. As much as my critical frameworks are indebted to French and German thinkers, I am bored of the Parisian flaneurs and Derridean bricoleurs. Instead: the goodness of pie and coffee, a Lynchian quotidian appreciation of tiny joys that reveal the immensity of what ought to be. In this way I have also staggered away from Thomas Hardy’s orthodoxy of unhappiness, in which joy is but a momentary episode in our general melodrama of pain. To reckon with joy as a radical force of transformation is something that I will be learning for the rest of my life, I think.
Still—the pain. I am hoping that 2025 will be a year of surgery and recovery for me, so I can finally proceed with my life. In the meanwhile, I will read my little books, write my little poems, stay with the troubles. In our American meanwhile, I think we should insist on disavowing the desire for imperial peace: for the “restoration” of America and/or democracy (what does that even mean?), the “return” of “sanity” and “dignity,” and all the other linguistic and conceptual monuments that cast deep shadows across bodies and memories and graves.
Following Glissant, I try to move from periphery to periphery, instead of tracing a trajectory to and from the (imperial) core. I have learned so much from witnessing people cultivate movements between Korea, Palestine, Okinawa, Sudan…such motion is our present precursor to future action, a fundamental, resilient orientation for the better. I think of Emerson’s horizon: “The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.”
Some fragments from our ruins:
- Anarchism or Socialism (A Nonsensical Question): A short, informative zine. Come for the rainbow discourse vomit collage, stay for the primer on the history of anarchism and socialism.
- “‘Virginia seemed like always night.’ David Lynch” by Han VanderHart: A lovely poem and accompanying essay by a poet I very much admire. Huge thanks to them for sending it my way.