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[nickreads]

The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say, “There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.” Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.

Susan Sontag | On Photography

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Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

[…]

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.

Susan Sontag | On Photography

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A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance. The lover's photograph hidden in a married woman's wallet, the poster photograph of a rock star tacked up over an adolescent's bed, the campaign-button image of a politician's face pinned on a voter's coat, the snapshots of a cabdriver's children clipped to the visor—all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.

Susan Sontag | On Photography

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A photograph of 1900 that was affecting then because of its subject would, today, be more likely to move us because it is a photograph taken in 1900. The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. Aesthetic distance seems built into the very experience of looking at photographs, if not right away, then certainly with the passage of time. Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

Susan Sontag | On Photography

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[Photography] started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have the right to observe.

Susan Sontag | On Photography

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By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night. May god bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

James Agee | A Death in the Family

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"Carceral feminism," which is a term that has begun to circulate recently—carceral feminisms, that is to say, feminisms that call for the criminalization and incarceration of those who engage in gender violence—do the work of the state. Carceral feminisms do the work of the state as surely as they focus on state violence and repression as the solution to heteropatriarchy and as the solution, more specifically, to sexual assault. But it does not work for those who are directly involved in the repressive work of the state either. As influenced as many police officers may be by the racism that criminalizes communities of color and this influence is not limited to white police officers; Black police officers and police officers of color are subject to the same way in which racism structurally defines police work—but even as they may be influenced by this racism, it was not their individual idea to do this. So simply by focusing on the individual as if the individual were an aberration, we inadvertently engage in the process of reproducing the very violence that we assume we are contesting.

[Emphasis added, my own]

Angela Y. Davis | Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

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That's the reduction of mythology to theology. Mythology is very fluid. Most of the myths are self-contradictory (…) Mythology is poetry, and the poetic language is very flexible.

Religion turns poetry into prose. God is literally up there, and this is literally what he thinks, and this is the way you've got to behave to get into proper relationship with that god up there.

Joseph Campbell | The Power of Myth

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Any critical engagement with racism requires us to understand the tyranny of the universal.

Angela Y. Davis | Freedom is a Constant Struggle

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I am

hung by a nail

the sun melts my heart

I am

cousin to the snake

and am afraid of waterfalls

I am

afraid of women and green walls

Charles Bukowski | “straight on through”

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even if I were a comfortable, domesticated

sophisticate I could never drink the

blood of the masses and

call it wine.

Charles Bukowski | “voices”

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maybe it was God. do you think He's there?

yes, He's a hook from the ceiling.

I thought so.

I'm growing tomatoes in my basement, she says.

that's sensible.

I want to move. where shall I move?

north is obvious. west is the ocean. the east is the past. south is the only way.

Charles Bukowski | “charisma”

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Who interprets the divinity inherent in nature for us today? Who are our shamans? Who interprets unseen things for us?

CAMPBELL: It is the function of the artist to do this. The artist is the one who communicates myth for today. But he has to be an artist who understands mythology and humanity and isn't simply a sociologist with a program for you.

Joseph Campbell | The Power of Myth

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The spirit is really the bouquet of life. It is not something breathed into life, it comes out of life. This is one of the glorious things about the mother-goddess religions, where the world is the body of the Goddess, divine in itself, and divinity isn't something ruling over and above a fallen nature.

Joseph Campbell | The Power of Myth

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we can't cry, and it helps to laugh —

it's like letting out

dreams, ideals,

poisons

Charles Bukowski | “the way”

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Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world.

Joseph Campbell | The Power of Myth

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Yes, that is what I'm saying. Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't even a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off.

Joseph Campbell | The Power of Myth