neotokyo

[neotokyo]

I wish I knew no astronomy when stars appear

— Joseph Brodsky, A Song.

[neotokyo]

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

[neotokyo]

The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible. Its function is nostalgic. It is the final empty claim for the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture. If the image is no longer unique and exclusive, the art object, the thing, must be made mysteriously so.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing.

Though I suppose the act of seeing art—really seeing it—looking at it; into it, is existing within and without a painting. In that moment you don’t think of anything but what’s before you—you have no past or future, and the world falls away into a pure, clear silence, that [whatever the medium or artist; Titian or Testino] may feel like something akin to prayer. I haven’t had the luxury of looking at a painting like that in a long, long time.

[neotokyo]

“For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked. How do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet, at the same time, remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”

— Bell Hooks, All About Love

[neotokyo]

Joan Didion, on self respect

[neotokyo]

Larry Levis, from “New Year’s Eve at the Santa Fe Hotel, San Fresno, California” in The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems

[neotokyo]

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

[neotokyo]

I often lament how pain is tidal—it leads us away from and returns us to our bodies, again and again. It is both the blanket that smothers and the impetus to burrow. This is a difficult way to live. But pain also reminds me that I am a body, that I am in a body. It is a great irony of my life that pain is what prompts me to discover how to feel, with my body, things other than pain... When it's pain we're talking about, I can describe it clearly: its exact location, temperature, movement; its length, depth, width. But defining the shape of anger, for example, or the climate of pleasure, is difficult. I have learned to be afraid of feeling. Connecting emotions to physical sensations—feeling my feelings—is rarely a familiar or safe place for me. But I want it to be.

Jennie DuGuay, numb is a feeling: embodying a body of pain

[neotokyo]

catastrophe is next to godliness by franny choi

[neotokyo]

The chaotic, cacophonous chamber of social media hides the direction of power. Consider the way in which social media backlash offers the illusion of collective power; a celebrity or brand will say something racist or sexist, tweets and Instagram posts will accrue, critiquing their mistake and demanding redress, and the company or celebrity will issue an apology. This process is often swift and exhilarating – it can feel highly compelling, like watching a sport – and gives the sense that powerful figures are accountable to ordinary people. In fact, these processes strengthen our affective ties to celebrities or brands, while also making profit for social media platforms.

Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State

[neotokyo]

Michael Warner, “Tongues Untied: Memoirs of a Pentecostal Boyhood” (2004)

[neotokyo]

It is not a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that the world is always passing and irrecoverable, to be known only in loss. To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain.

Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow.

[neotokyo]

Mahmoud Darwish, Journal of an Ordinary Grief (يـومـيـات الـحـزن الـعـادي), 1973