Ekstasis

From "A History of Origami" by Bob Hicok

nightmarebrunette:

i cried
by thinking of all the people
who’ve never broken a shop window, not the baker’s
window, the bead-seller’s,
who sells beads for purposes
i find hard to list: necklaces,
the hanging of strings of beads
in doorways, the owning of beads
just in case.

breaking a shop window with a piece of shale
the size of my heart, a piece of shale
on which i’ve drawn my heart, not my actual heart
but my feelings of my heart,
since i’ve never seen my heart,
would set something free.

i don’t know what that something is
but it would be free. […]

it would be free and look like a bird, an actual bird
or a dollar folded into a bird, a dollar bird
in a dollar boat.

which is to say
i believe origami arrives
when we need it most.

i can’t prove this but i can’t prove
you’re a good person though i suspect
you’re a good person.

Apropos of Nothing

mills:

Sometimes when I review what I’ve written here, I am greatly relieved to remember that it will all be lost. It is a common enough trope that we fear death not solely because of oblivion but also because of erasure, not solely for the cessation of consciousness but also because everything we made, said, and did will disappear from the Earth someday. One reads that many “want to leave something behind,” don’t want their lives to dissolve into the froth and scum of generations, cannot bear that their entire worlds will become historical trivia and eventually will be forgotten.

But I am pleased that whatever the advance of the ubiquitous archival process the Internet represents, however sophisticated the indexing or permanent the storage, someday there will be none of this nonsense left, none of these noxious little emissions nor anything of the best ones, none of the preening and straining and posing or the fortunate moments of slight quality; and even were it to remain somehow, no one will care to read it: there will be too much else to sort through. The mathematics of populations ensures that all the photos, all the glib assertions about subjects I barely understand, all that I have made and indeed all that I am will be gone.

This noise! One can see, after years of being shamed by the voracious appetite of one’s self for attention and approval, its contemptible posturing and pageantry, how nice it will be to have no self, to be no self, and to have nothing of the self remain.

Won’t it be nice when this all disappears?

…Except it’s not nonsense, at least as far as WE are not nonsense. You’re right that our “emissions” are unlikely to have any real staying power on their own, but two things should be considered:

(1. Those bits of ourselves we choose to share, choose to have archived, don’t exist in a vacuum, nor do those of all the others who have made the same choice. Any one may be meaningless, but the larger that data set grows, the more information can be extracted from it, as a whole. You say, of our various and sundry pieces of information, that, “…even were it to remain somehow, no one will care to read it: there will be too much else to sort through.” Thats’s just it, though…everything we write here, everything we experience, is an integral part of that “too much else.” We’re adding to that bulk, right alongside the information you more highly value and with larger and larger data sets comes the possibility for more and more meta-data, more culling of our pictures and our words and thus more layers of information (context) being added on to them. Context brings me to me second point…

(2. Actually, it’s Lyn Hejinian’s point (and a bit of Arendt, too) from her essay “Reason”:

Along comes something — launched in context.

It is almost automatic to us to assume that this something (on the one hand) and we (on the other) exist independently — that something was independently elsewhere (out of sight and mind) prior to coming into the zone in which we perceive it and which we, at the moment of this perceptual encounter, designate as context. Furthermore, it is at the moment that we perceive this something that we ourselves come into that context — into our coinciding (by chance?) with something. The context, in other words, is the medium of our encounter, the ground of our becoming (i.e., happening to be) present at the same place at the same time. By this reasoning, one would also have to say that context too is launched — or at least that it comes into existence qua context when something is launched in such a way as to become perceptible to us and thereby to involve us — whomever we are — strangers (even if, perhaps, only momentarily strangers) to each other previously and now inseparable components of the experience…

…But the phrase or sentence with which I’ve become obsessed, “Along comes something — launched in context,” announces a moment of incipience; one could even say that it is itself, as a phrase or utterance, a moment of incipience — an appearing, a being born — coming into what Hannah Arendt calls “the condition of natality,” the condition we all have in common.

Something which wasn’t here before is here now; it appears and it appeared to us, and it is acknowledge by the sensation this is happening. And as such, as a moment of incipience or point of natality, it constitutes, in a very particular and crucial sense, an action — since (to continue Hannah Arendt’s argument) it is “engaged in founding and preserving” something, which “creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history” and it thereby undertakes “the task to provide and preserve the world for, to foresee and reckon with, the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers.” This “new beginning … can make itself felt in the world … because [it] possesses the capacity of [itself] beginning something anew.”

…Our context is important, whether any one of the individual bits which comprise it is or is not.

Ana Marie Cox's Twitter FAQ

rkb:

Just watched her on Rachel Maddow and wound my way to this:

Okay that’s two whole answers that seem, like, earnest and stuff. Are you okay? Running a fever? Or, more seriously, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH ANA? Ha ha. While, yes, you may have noticed a certain lack of reverence for Washington, its traditions, its residents, and its society, that doesn’t mean I have contempt for it, or them. Washington is the sausage factory that produces democracy and while it can get ugly inside the end-product is both tasty and relatively good for you. I’ve never really understood why journalists get jaded about politics. Cynical, sure, but if you’re jaded about covering THE FUCKING PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES who, you know, HAPPENS TO BE BLACK THIS TIME, then go home. I’m excited to be here, and thank you, readers, for helping to make that possible.

…I’ve had a crush on AMC since I was in highschool, when I only knew her as Wonkette. I’m probably one of only about 500 people who has a hardcover copy of her book (which is a great read, for the record) Dog Days.