as-if-falling

[as-if-falling]

We all need primers and guidebooks on how to live in (spite of) America, a living that - if it’s going to be honest - has to begin if it’s going to begin with heartbreak. Any other beginning is a romance. Monica Huerta, Magical Habits (2021, 57)

[as-if-falling]

Final Privacy Song

...

He said I know

these immortality pills

are killing me

but I take them anyway,

there's no time

left to learn the sword,

can you hear

the truant wind

so green

say the door

to the great rebellion

is almost here

so let's drink our despair

until that final

morning of sick rain

before the civil war.

From Final Privacy Song by Matthew Zapruder (2023)

[as-if-falling]

Your dress waving in the wind. This is the only flag I love.

Garous Abdolmalekian, from “Pattern,” Lean Against This Late Hour, Trans. Idra Novey and Ahmad Nadalizadeh (Random House, 2020)

[as-if-falling]

[as-if-falling]

Who am I? A tremor of nothingness, living in a permanent earthquake. Yet for a moment of profound happiness, the spasmodic Earth comes to unite herself with my shaky body. Who am I, now, for several seconds? Earth herself.

Michel Serres, The Natural Contract (via bergmans-ghost)

[as-if-falling]

Alas, how is ’t with you, That you do bend your eye on vacancy And with th’ incorporal air do hold discourse?

Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 3 Scene 4, ll 130-132, Gertrude

[as-if-falling]

Cai Guo-qiang, “Study for Cosmos: Dandelion no. 3″

[as-if-falling]

[as-if-falling]

She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse. For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

Toni Morrison, Nobel Speech, 1993

[as-if-falling]

[as-if-falling]

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The problem with tense is that neither past nor present will really do—the latter suggesting timeless issues, frozen in the ethnographic record, the former that they belong to a vanished and no longer relevant era. Neither, of course, conveys the truth since ideas are not so mobile nor so immobile as any such attempt to locate them suggests. It is a pity that one is tied to the grammatical choice. And it is a pity that English does not have a dual, for then one could also use 'we' in the sense of 'we two', an inclusion that would not obliterate separateness. Indeed, the work can be read both as an apology and an apologia for a language and a culture that does not make that particular possibility of central concern to the way it imagines itself.

Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift (1988), xv

[as-if-falling]

[as-if-falling]

For there are two kinds of flux. On the one hand, there is flux in straight lines, or lines that form circles that close back in on themselves; on the other, there is turbulent flux, spirals that never meet back up, dis-archic tops. Our world tends to produce flux at a constant speed, like a treadmill, where one advances without taking a step. The treadmill versus the top. Becoming without ever undergoing the test of loss, loving without venturing outside oneself: This is what is proposed as a “way of life”

Frederic Neyrat, Atopias, p. 3-4

[as-if-falling]

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

Tacitus, Agricola, chapter 30.

[as-if-falling]

[as-if-falling]

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe; it gives life back to those who no longer exist.

Guy de Maupassant, “Suicides.”