Category: Personal/Political

From Pohanginapete, a mediation on what it means to be an artist in a time of slow-motion apocalypse:

The comment reminded me of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous remark, “The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks.”

I thought about the justification for comments like these, and my own pessimism about where we’re headed; our apparent failure to convert concern into action. Should we abandon esoteric research; should I stop photographing rocks?

It’s a hard one. It’s tempting to think we “should” act responsibly, but how happy would we be if we insisted on acting responsibly? Sure, some of us would — and do — feel satisfied and happy knowing (or thinking) we’re doing the right thing, but what about the rest of us who, if we sacrificed ourselves for the greater good, would spend our lives feeling thwarted by our sense of duty — in effect, resenting the conscience that denied us the right to pursue what we most wanted? Enough, I guess, to make the world a less happy place than it would otherwise have been.
— The end of the world as we know it

(Please leave any comments you might have over there, not here.)

Some recent quotes which have nothing whatsoever to do with politics

Experiments in Dr. Hanlon’s lab have shown that they are color blind. They see a world without color, but their skin changes rapidly to any hue in the rainbow. How is that possible?
Revealed: Secrets of the Camouflage Masters

Sometimes they play the same songs in the same order. Sometimes the same songs in a different order. Sometimes different songs completely. The venue changes and thus the stage configuration, sound, the lighting are new each time.
Hydragenic

They can’t escape, these protagonists,
caught between ruby and green,
the dark blue light, all within
the black bars of lead.
Patteran Pages

Foxes begin now to be very rank, & to smell so high that as one rides along of a morning it is easy to distinguish where they have been the night before.
The Natural History of Selborne

They assault him with paws and tongues, licking him as though his face was made of sugar, clearly impressed to find him at their level.
Now’s the time

The poem has nothing
to say right now. The poem
wishes it were somewhere
else–
chatoyance

I keep my kids’ baby teeth in my change purse.
The Rain in My Purse

A ceremony is symbolic; it celebrates something that has happened. (Birthdays happen, with or without a ceremony.) A ritual is theurgic; it creates a new truth.
Velveteen Rabbi

Frost and sun transmute to sequinned lace of fine-spun silver the slug trails thrown over the log pile.
fluffspangle

Zoom lens: eyes, then feet float up towards the tree-tops. Cool, dreamy clarity of Winter shapes.
tasting rhubarb

We saw what we believe to be Pelagic Cormorant pairs nesting on these sheer cliffs. An interesting sight, their chosen ledge so narrow that the birds stand with their necks kinked and their beaks pointing upward. They too are waiting for storms to pass, for eggs to hatch, holding an idea about the future for which there are no words.
Dharma Bums

I’ve always liked to think of clouds as aquatic environments suspended in the sky. Yet despite their comfortable white fluffy look, they’re not hospitable places.
The Wild Side

When I’m somewhere else, I experience not just the absence of home, but an absence shaped like home.
Creature of the Shade

seen so many times,
she is north.
florescence

She says Not again.
She says I am not
strong, don’t you dare tell me

how strong I am.
Up!

After a time of tiny wandering, I begin to grow sad and lonely. Where will I sleep? What can I eat? Exploring a maze of shapes and patterns, amongst mythical animals, seems suddenly not enough. Or perhaps too much.
Smoke and Ash

a pigeon pecks at a pile of puke
a small stone

Sometimes I just want to tell the world to “Shut up.” Noise of the radio, noise of tires on the wet asphalt, the distant whine of all the unhappy people.
The Middlewesterner

If we wait long enough, your plot of snowdrops may meet my patch of lily-of-the-valley, and then our flowers will be neighbors too and we’ll not have to steal glances from one another’s garden any longer.
Somewhere in NJ