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[loneberry]

The time has come to become ungovernable my friends

[loneberry]

Really fucking sad. No words.

[loneberry]

Cowards! They’re afraid of the students!!

[loneberry]

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A post shared by Palestine Solidarity Committee (@harvxrdpsc)

Campus uprisings have erupted all over the world in solidarity with Gaza. Young people are fucking fed up with the political class and their sneering condescension as they abet a genocide. The students are being smeared relentlessly by the ghoulish media, which is more concerned with decorum than the actual genocide that is unfolding in Gaza. Meanwhile, in Gaza, “Three separate mass graves containing 392 bodies show signs of executions and people being buried alive”. Field assassinations of doctors. Children. Murdered. Their hands zipped-tied behind their backs. What does the political class say? “We’ll look into that.” They’re always “looking into it” while 2000 pound bunker buster bombs are being dropped on Palestinian civilians.

Marching with the Harvard students yesterday, I was so proud of how flawlessly they pulled off erecting the camp in Harvard Yard—using subterfuge, organizing on Signal, smuggling tents into the yard in the middle of the night. When they rolled out the tents, it brought tears to my eyes. I am so proud of these kids...still fighting even though the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee was just banned. We made a circle around the students setting up the tents and linked arms, but the cops did not come to make arrests.

Things unfolded quite differently at my home institution back in Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, where administration recently canceled the valedictorian speech of Asna Tabassum because she is Muslim. The perfidious president brought hundreds of LAPD cops to campus to make mass arrests, even violently assaulting a student organizer.

55+ students and 3 faculty members were arrested (update: 93 people arrested), including my dear friend and colleague, who is worried about losing her job. This was a real mask off moment. I’m so fucking disappointed with my university. I was hired as a professor of “critical carceral studies” because the George Floyd protests had put policing on the agenda. It’s all ultimately just PR, a total sham. University administrators and the cops are bedfellows—the police will always be called in to repress political dissent and use brute force to bring students back into line. The students are completely right to be enraged by the hypocrisy of the “grown-ups.” Civility is really just complicity with genocide.

In this moment, it is the students who are teaching us. They are waking us up. I believe it is our duty to show up for them.

[loneberry]

This was a really special night at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, reading with the lyrical virtuoso Tongo Eisen-Martin (introduced by Keith Jones). Leading up to the photo I said, omg, I am so short! Tongo joked he could bend down for the photo. Even with him leaning forward the gap is still hilariously large.

Lil person, big voice. Shoutout to shortie poets everywhere

[loneberry]

notes on the singing world

This morning I sat outside on my back porch, drinking my coffee at 7:30am, soaking up the early sun. There was peace in my heart, a peace I wish I could give to everyone in the world. We still don’t know the source of it. I listened to a live recording of the Brazilian singer Gal Costa singing “Baby”—“Você precisa saber da piscina, Da margarina, da Carolina, da gasolina...” The crowd roars with those opening lyrics. You can hear the whole audience singing along, “Baby, baby, I love you...” I wept some tears of joy and wrote in my notebook, “You know, when I die, I will be sad to leave the world behind. I loved this broken world, I loved it truly.” 

Then I read a journal entry from a week ago:

April 13

Today the sky went from sunny to gray sunny to gray. Stepped out of my house, into the blustery air—two pigeons were perched above the commuter rail, their iridescent throats catching the spring sun. Turning down Oxford Street, Kimya Dawson came on over my headphones. I haven’t thought of Kimya Dawson in nearly 20 years, I thought, and was flooded with memories of high school, teenage emotion, so embarrassingly earnest. Once I left a comment on Kimya’s livejournal: “I couldn’t get a ticket to your show...” She put me on the guest list, how sweet of her. “And the road’s still long but you come along...” 

I felt calm. Thought: so this is the calm that follows a long cry. The whole world and its kaleidoscopic array of details were singing to me: the white petals of the star magnolia aloft on the wind, a stranger’s purple sari blowing in the breeze as she crosses the street, the tuxedo cat sitting in the periwinkles, pink saucer magnolia blooms above some blue graffiti, observed through a chain link fence.

I walk to the Charles River and sit on a bench watching the daffodils lining the bank of the river dance in the wind while the sparkling light on the surface of the water twinkles in the background. Once Bhanu Kapil and I sat by this river admiring the daffodils. At sunset we sat with our eyes closed, doing a sun meditation before we walked over to the Houghton Library for her reading with Fred Moten. We wandered around the Harvard campus and she posted a photo of me on her blog doing a peace sign in the Harvard Math Department. On the counter next to the Keurig coffee maker, Ed made an intricate mandala out of sugar packets and wood coffee stirrers. She made a joke about Indians and Russians both loving chess and mathematics. 

Drifting in and out of memories. I observe an old man in a beret taking photos with his vintage medium format camera of the daffodils and the river. He says Hello. I smile and say Hello. A woman is on a blanket in the grass, photographing her dog rolling around on its back. 

I wander around Harvard Square. Through the window of Tasty Burger I see a young black woman and white man (probably undergrads) acting playfully as they eat. She sticks her tongue out. He taps it with his finger. They do this over and over. I go into Harvard Book Store, leaf through some books, and buy a copy of Amelia Rosselli’s Sleep. So many words. I wonder about the books I will write, the people who are on the other end of that strange relationship, the relationship between writer and reader. 

I used to have a dragnet mind, used to walk around in a state of pure awe, my window of perception so wide—it was the world, simple, resplendent, endlessly offering itself to me. I humbly accepted it, that gift of quotidian grace. Ordinary things glowed with a freshness that brought tears to my eyes. It’s rarer now, but still, I cherish the days when I can feel the world singing to me. 

The world. Tell them—tell them, she loved it truly. 

[loneberry]

St. John of the Cross on the recklessness of love

But when once the flame has enkindled the soul, it is wont to conceive, together with the estimation that it already has for God, such power and energy, and such yearning for Him, when He communicates to it the heat of love, that, with great boldness, it disregards every-thing and ceases to pay respect to anything, such are the power and the inebriation of love and desire. It regards not what it does, for it would do strange and unusual things in whatever way and manner may present themselves, if thereby its soul might find Him Whom it loves.

6. It was for this reason that Mary Magdalene, though as greatly concerned for her own appearance as she was aforetime, took no heed of the multitude of men who were at the feast, whether they were of little or of great importance; neither did she consider that it was not seemly, and that it looked ill, to go and weep and shed tears among the guests, provided that, without delaying an hour or waiting for another time and season, she could reach Him for love of Whom her soul was already wounded and enkindled. And such is the inebriating power and the boldness of love, that, though she knew her Beloved to be enclosed in the sepulchre by the great sealed stone, and surrounded by soldiers who were guarding Him lest His disciples should steal Him away, she allowed none of these things to impede her, but went before daybreak with the ointments to anoint Him.

7. And finally, this inebriating power and yearning of love caused her to ask one whom she believed to be a gardener and to have stolen Him away from the sepulchre, to tell her, if he had taken Him, where he had laid Him, that she might take Him away; considering not that such a question, according to independent judgment and reason, was foolish; for it was evident that, if the other had stolen Him, he would not say so, still less would he allow Him to be taken away. It is a characteristic of the power and vehemence of love that all things seem possible to it, and it believes all men to be of the same mind as itself. For it thinks that there is naught wherein one may be employed, or which one may seek, save that which it seeks itself and that which it loves; and it believes that there is naught else to be desired, and naught wherein it may be employed, save that one thing, which is pursued by all. For this reason, when the Bride went out to seek her Beloved, through streets and squares, thinking that all others were doing the same, she begged them that, if they found Him, they would speak to Him and say that she was pining for love of Him. Such was the power of the love of this Mary that she thought that, if the gardener would tell her where he had hidden Him, she would go and take Him away, however difficult it might be made for her.

8. Of this manner, then, are the yearnings of love whereof this soul becomes conscious when it has made some progress in this spiritual purgation. For it rises up by night (that is, in this purgative darkness) according to the affections of the will. And with the yearnings and vehemence of the lioness or the she-bear going to seek her cubs when they have been taken away from her and she finds them not, does this wounded soul go forth to seek its God. For, being in darkness, it feels itself to be without Him and to be dying of love for Him. And this is that impatient love wherein the soul cannot long subsist without gaining its desire or dying.

—St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul

[loneberry]

Digging into the English-language poems of Amelia Rosselli. It’s dark and disturbed like her Italian-language poems, but in a totally defamiliarized and often archaic English.

“the terrible transport of love / (a hidden fibre of / hate)”

[loneberry]

Images Festival

Tomorrow, at 12pm in Toronto, after a screening of Mohammad Malas's film The Dream, I will be in conversation with Palestinian curator and writer Nasrin Himada.

Buy tickets for the screening here.

The Dream, a film by Mohammad Malas, is filmed in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, shortly before the massacre of 1982. Malas’s documentary focuses on dreams and dreaming by documenting Palestinians recounting their dreams. In this way, the film plays on a double register, whereby Palestinians recall the reality of their everyday lives transposed into their dreams, nightmares, and premonitions. Ultimately, these dreams tell the story of longing for our land: the dreams make the light. Malas is a prolific filmmaker, working in art, fiction, and documentary. After teaching philosophy at Damascus University in the 1960s, he turned to film and has since produced numerous award-winning works, notably a series of powerful documentaries on political prisoners in the Arab world. He has also published novels and writes frequently on Arab cinema.

[loneberry]

dispatch from the void

Above: A voice memo on M's death anniversary, in which I describe my encounter with a stranger on the French King Bridge. Stranger, I will never forget you. There really are angels out there in the world.

[loneberry]

"The Disinherited" by Gérard de Nerval

I am the dark one,—the widower,—the unconsoled, The prince of Aquitaine at his stricken tower: My sole star is dead,—and my constellated lute Bears the black sun of the Melencolia.

In the night of the tomb, you who consoled me, Give me back Mount Posilipo and the Italian sea, The flower which pleased so my desolate heart, And the trellis where the grape vine unites with the rose.

Am I Amor or Phoebus?…Lusignan or Biron? My forehead is still red from the kiss of the queen; I have dreamed in the grotto where the mermaid swims…

And two times victorious I have crossed the Acheron: Modulating turn by turn on the lyre of Orpheus The sighs of the saint and the cries of the fay.

Translated by Robert Duncan

--Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia

[loneberry]

--Darian Leader, The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia, and Depression

Remember: it is ambivalence--not fierce attachment--that complicates and protracts the process of mourning, leaving the bereaved in limbo, forever tethered to a lost object by an unassimilable hatred and its attendant guilt.

[loneberry]

Here’s a podcast I recorded recently with Andrew Felsher from 128 Lit: https://www.128lit.org/a-cosmic-talk

You can also listen to it on Spotify here:

Or watch it on YouTube here:

[loneberry]

W.G. Sebald on the solar eclipse of 1502

(The Isenheim Altarpiece by Nikolaus of Haguenau and Matthias Grünewald, 1512–1516)

on the first of October the moon’s shadow

slid over Eastern Europe from Mecklenburg

over Bohemia and the Lausitz to southern Poland,

and Grünewald, who repeatedly was in touch

with the Aschaffenburg Court Astrologer Johann

Indagine,

will have travelled to see this event of the century,

awaited with great terror, the eclipse of the sun,

so will have become a witness to

the secret sickening away of the world,

in which a phantasmal encroachment of dusk

in the midst of daytime like a fainting fit

poured through the vault of the sky,

while over the banks of mist and the cold

heavy blues of the clouds

a fiery red arose, and colors

such as his eyes had not known

radiantly wandered about, never again to be

driven out of the painter’s memory.

These colors unfold as the reverse of

the spectrum in a different consistency

of the air, whose deoxygenated void

in the gasping breath of the figures

on the central Isenheim panel is enough

to portend our death by asphyxiation; after which

comes the mountain landscape of weeping

in which Grünewald with a pathetic gaze

into the future has prefigured

a planet utterly strange, chalk-colored

behind the blackish-blue river.

[loneberry]

FIRST TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE

Images from my first total solar eclipse, depicting the outer corona, inner corona, prominent prominences, diamond ring, and the partial phase. Photos taken by Dan.

A black sun. Never had I seen a black sun, that insignia of melancholia that will forever remind me of Kristeva, which will forever remind me of M’s suicide—it was one of the few books M had with her at the very end, the book that her mother believed was the key to why she did it.

Black sun. On the day of—or day after—M’s death anniversary. I had been weeping for days when I found myself beneath that darkening sky.

*

What’s the difference between a partial and a total eclipse? I vaguely remember going onto the playground with some glasses as a child, but I don’t remember what I saw in the sky. What’s the big deal? The sky goes dark for a few minutes. It can’t be much different from the onset of night.

Wrong.

The rhapsodic scientists I listened to on various podcasts convinced me that there is really no comparison between a partial and total eclipse. I tried to hatch a last-minute plan to get myself in the path of totality. In the days leading up to the eclipse, I would be at the French King Bridge for M’s death anniversary. The only person I knew in Western MA, besides M’s mother, was my poet friend Ethan. So I asked him if he had a plan to see the eclipse.

I did not know, when I texted him out of the blue, that his parents lived in the path of totality in northern Vermont, that his father Dan was an astronomer (communist astronomer!) and eclipse chaser (this was his 14th eclipse), that Dan had even organized the local viewing event and wrote a book on the history of astronomy. At Ethan’s parents’ house there were literally photographs of eclipses mixed in with the family photos (see below). His father had even built a little observatory on his land. I had, in the most haphazard fashion, found the perfect guide to my first total solar eclipse.

Dan brought his equipment to the eclipse viewing: cameras, filters, binoculars, and a $4000 hydrogen alpha telescope that we used before the eclipse to look at the sun’s prominences and a sunspot on the surface. He enthusiastically answered all my questions. How had the Babylonians worked it out so long ago? Why does the wind pick up when the eclipse begins? Why is the sun’s corona so much hotter than the sun’s surface? (It’s still a mystery to the scientists…) Why why why. (People often tell me that I always ask a lot of questions—almost like an eternally curious child.)

The eclipse. It is not like the dimming of sunset, with its orange hues and plunge into the horizon, the low angle. It is a light unlike any light I have seen before, a strange dream-like atmosphere, a gray yet shimmering unreality, the air suddenly cold, the birds in a confused tumult. The uneven temperature of the atmosphere makes the wind pick up as the moon slowly covers the sun. Though the light was not the gold of sunset, you could see a band of orange on every horizon like a 360 degree sunset, an eerie gloaming that electrifies your skin.

A silence descended on the field as the moment of totality approached. Then, audible gasps—we couldn’t believe what we were seeing. I think the first thing I said was, “Holy. Shit.” Nothing prepared me for the numinous beauty of the sun’s corona, those elegant wisps of bright white light haloing the black sun. I think it’s probably the closest one can come to seeing God while alive on this earth. I cried during totality while observing the patterns in the corona through binoculars. A beautiful pink arch of plasma (a prominence) was visible toward the bottom of the sun. Dan pointed out Venus in the sky.

In the center of that black hole there is an abyssal silence

I don’t know how to describe it. Celestial indifference to human endeavor, human emotion. A kind of coldness in that heat, the heat of the corona, beyond even the fires of Hell. Then I can hear the angelic squall of the corona ringing over the landscape. It is a sound full of grace even as it cannot be called happy.

I can see why the ancients might interpret an eclipse as an augur of something deeply ominous, perhaps apocalyptic. The experience is, at once, sublime, ecstatic, and deeply unnerving—all your perceptual faculties are telling you that something is wrong. The ongoingness of the world and its rules cannot be taken for granted, for the sun went black, not in my dream, but in the afternoon sky.

And just as soon as it began, it was over. We had almost 3 and half minutes of totality. I was surprised by how quickly the sky brightened, how much light we get when the sun is almost completely covered.

One day the moon will float away. There won’t be any more total solar eclipses. Be grateful you were alive during this slice of cosmic time.

This is my favorite scene in all of cinema, from Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies. Watch drunkards reenact an eclipse in a drab Hungarian bar...

Ethan and communist astronomer dad!

I even got eclipse-branded maple syrup (peak Vermont)

[loneberry]

[loneberry]

These students have been through absolute hell. And yet they are not cowed, even after the wrath of the global elite/Zionist bully machine has come down on them with full force for trying to stop a genocide. I’m so moved by that steadfastness.