outside light (Page 27)

outside light

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introduction to a poem

This is an introduction to a poem called ‘All it Takes’ or ‘Clay Birds.’ Although I hesitate to call it a poem. But that’s my problem. Not yours. And I’ll be talking about that in another introduction. I was listening to the editor of The Economist magazine. When

a musical interlude–takes me back to chapter two you know who

sketches of Kawaeranga

don’t trust bird stories they have short lives are pleased to please themselves tell of quick movement quick and alive and don’t trust the pain of trees they bear up the sky look the sky is blue … the big kauri on the ridge supports half the sky calls

the déjà vu of an extensive and multifarious declaration of perplexity, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Shape of the Ruins, the past that is ruined, in its jealousy, by the present’s 2 minutes hate

… the worst vices of our digital societies: intellectual irresponsibility, proud mediocrity, implausible denigration with impunity, but most of all verbal terrorism, the schoolyard bullying the participants got involved in with incomprehensible enthusiasm, the cowardice of all aggressors who used pseudonyms to vilify but would never repeat their insults out loud.

Rodrigo Garcia: Gabo, Mercedes & an image of death as impenetrable, as object of a singular encounter, as departure

each person has their own singular encounter, not just with the deceased but also with the event itself, … death … Nobody can be denied their relationship to it, their membership in that society. And death as something that is, rather than as the lack of something, is sobering to behold. That

completing a short series up to christmas

my mother and my father are far away and huddled together against the weather they look hopefully out to the sea as if one of us is coming to pick them up and the odd thing is that they show no resentment at the lateness in their faces as they

antinomy–or the opposite is true, even the opposite of the opposite, oddly

Narratives of crisis emplot events to create a meaningful sequence. The way they construct this sequence is prior to and entails the choice of explanatory mechanisms and the fingering of guilty parties. To speak about “post-truth,” declining trust in science, and/or the “death of expertise” is to sketch the