Notes on Pictures, Poetry, a Higher Good Life, and the Eternity of the Instant — Transactions with Magnificence

— One of the poems I marked is a prose poem, Madrigal, and it’s translated by Patty Crane:

“I inherited a dark forest where I seldom walk. But there will come a day when the dead and the living change places. Then the forest will be set into motion. We aren’t without hope. The most difficult crimes remain unsolved despite the efforts of many police. In the same way that somewhere in our lives there’s a great unsolved love. I inherited a dark forest but today I walk in another forest, the light one. Every living thing that sings wriggles sways and crawls! It’s spring and the air is intense. I have a degree from the university of oblivion and I’m as empty-handed as the shirt on the clothesline.”

— Another poem I learn this week that I really like is by Wendell Berry.

Shall we do with out hope? Some days
there will likely be none. But now
to the dry and useless wooden flooring
they arrive once more, the primary
flowers of the 12 months, the meeting
of the devoted, the gorgeous,
wholly given to being.
And on this lengthy season
of machines and mechanical will
there have been small human acts
of compassion, acts of care, work
flowerlike in selfless loveliness.
Leaving hope to the darkish
and to a greater day,
obtain these beauties freely
given, and provides thanks.

— I suppose we’ve been raging towards the machine and all of the machines for a while now. Why wouldn’t we be? But nonetheless, Let’s “work flowerlike in selfless loveliness.”

— I preserve returning to a phrase by the late Lauren Berlant the place they speak concerning the picture of a “better good life.” What would Berlant be making of this time I’ve to marvel. What a loss sure? They discuss “inventing life together.” What is our new strange now, I ponder, studying their work. Where are our optimisms now situated? How to invent life collectively? What is working and find out how to detach from what will not be working. What now we have been doing at breakneck pace ever because the pandemic it appears to me, is adjusting, whereas but within the unknowing. We are in a scenario. Constantly.

— Berlant says, “As we know from situation comedy, a situation is a genre of living that one knows one’s in but that one has to find out about, a circumstance embedded in life but not in one’s control. A situation is a disturbance….It has a punctum, like a photograph; it forces one to take notice, to become interested in potential changes to ordinariness. When a situation unfolds, people try to maintain themselves in it until they figure out how to adjust.” And aint that simply the reality.

— I preserve desirous about varied micro-traumas and our reactions to automations, for one factor. And the phrase traumation feels price exploring to me. Traumautomation? We need to work flowerlike, however we’re given different. How to reconcile these items?

— Back to the Artemis II joy-bringers, tho. Christina Koch mentioned this: “Planet Earth you are a crew.” And I’ve been asking myself why this hits me so properly? Why do I really like the thought of that? The Artemis astronauts are the crew to emulate hey? A guide that meant a ton to me a number of years again and nonetheless does is Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft. In it he asks, “How is being part of a crew different than being part of a “team” within the new mode of workplace work?” I can’t assist questioning how the world can be completely different/higher/ if it have been Microsoft Crews as an alternative of Microsoft Teams. Or how about Microsoft Flowers.

— Crawford says that “in most work that transpires in large organizations, one’s work is meaningless taken by itself. The individual feels that, alone, he is without any affect.” He talks about how on a staff, it “depends on group dynamics, which are inherently unstable…” however “on a crew, skill becomes the basis for a circle of mutual regard…” There is a solidarity in a crew, he says, and a “positive attraction, akin to love.” There is a “regard for human excellence.”

— The world is completely different now however most individuals are simply making an attempt to be their flowerlike human selves.

— How to be alive on this world now when “the surfaces of the world are aesthetically uneven. You come around a bend in the road, and the world suddenly falls open…”(Elaine Scarry). But additionally, 2026, a variety of what we’re seeing is exterior the aesthetic realm. It’s exterior the aesthetic expertise which might solely be a human one.

— I attempt to primarily keep off LinkedIn lately however I used to be drawn in by some posts, as soon as once more about Artemis II and images. This post by Nick Heller is nice although. He says, “Imagine looking at a photo like this…made by humans…taken from a spaceship made by other humans…currently on a trip designed by human engineers and scientists…and then going back to a keyboard to type up another weak post about how amazing your generative AI prompts are at producing images.” And within the feedback Christopher Johnson says, “From a semiotic point of view, part of the beauty of photographs is their indexicality: they are caused by the interaction between camera and subject. As a consequence of that, we can learn things about the world by looking at photographs. We can’t learn anything about the world from a synthetically generated image. This general idea applies in some way to all forms of synthetic content, but is especially relevant to images.”

— Well, now we have all lived a number of flowers, to cite Helene Cixous.

— Let’s finish with one final poem as a result of generally at the least there are yellow flowers that shine. There are many poems to learn, so many left to write down. Some of them simply out of attain. Still, there are stars on the market, glimmers…

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER
translation by Patty Crane

April and Silence

Spring lies forsaken.
The velvet-dark ditch
crawls by my aspect
with out reflections.

The solely factor that shines
are yellow flowers.

I’m cradled in my shadow
like a fiddle
in its black case.

The solely factor I need to say
glimmers out of attain
just like the silver
on the pawnbroker’s.