Codi

“Every anthology is about what’s been excluded; these essays try to bring that close as they range from riot to recipe in their common refusal to be collected. In this sheaf, the truth of black cake has always already displaced the lie of the melting pot. In this bouquet, that truth is displaced, too. Such displacement teaches us all we can know about everything, which is that everything ain’t all; that everything’s not the erasure of exclusion but its management; that it’s not things but nothing that goes together, apart, after all. That’s why we have to look through what’s gathered here, which what’s gathered here facilitates. In this anthology, the incompleteness we desire breaks the brokenness we abjure.”
― Kristen Case, 21, 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

“Being-valued, which is to say being-devalued, emerges in the proximity of things. There’s an evil you and I can’t get away from. Sometimes you and I want to call it home, collapsing our presence into an absence of extension, an instant of argon blue, where and when all our things can be accounted for. And insofar as subjects have a place and time they have a price. This is the private imperative of an American rebirth predicated on expropriating birth’s radical impropriety so it can clock how we keep having played that tune tomorrow.”
― Kristen Case, 21, 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

“Sometimes we’re so deep in it we’re outside of it. There, we know two things: how fucked up it is to be in the life and how beautiful it is to live in and with and as what has no value.”
― Kristen Case, 21, 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

“But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experience just becomes a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon. I just didn't want to get all wound up in any systems at all.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren