E > Recent Status Updates

“Halperin suggests that ‘To practice a stylistics of the self ultimately means to cultivate that part of oneself that leads beyond oneself, that transcends oneself: it is to elaborate the strategic possibilities of what is the most impersonal dimension of personal life — namely, the capacity to ´realize oneself´ by becoming other than what one is.’”

(in reference to Foucault) “we must ‘work at becoming homosexual and not be obstinate in recognizing that we are.’ Homosexuality is desirable because a homosexual way of life allows us to reimagine sociality. The homosexual needs to ‘invent from A to Z a relationship that is formless’ and eventually to arrive at a ‘multiplicity of relations.’”

“They resort to drag, song, mime, dance, etc. … in order to trouble them, to stir up uncertain desire-zones that they always more or less refuse to explore. The question is no longer to know whether one will play feminine against masculine or the reverse, but to make bodies, all bodies, break away from the representations and restraints on the ‘social body.’” (Guattari)

“The queer trend that I am identifying is in many ways an effort to reclaim the past and put it in direct relationship with the present. Autoethnography is not interested in searching for some lost and essential experience, because it understands the relationship that subjects have with their own pasts as complicated yet necessary fictions.”

“No-one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, dear to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate... [there are] the ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don’t look, don’t smell, don’t dream.”

“People of color, queers of color, white queers, and other minorities occasionally and understandably long for separatist enclaves outside of the dominant culture. Such enclaves, however, are often politically disadvantageous when one stops to consider the ways in which the social script depends on minority factionalism and isolationism to maintain the status of the dominant order.”

Passing the Unworked Field
Queen Anne’s lace
is hardly
prized but
all the same it isn’t
idle look
how it
stands straight on its
this stems how it
scrubs its white faces
with the
rags of the sun how it
makes all the
loveliness
it can.

“It was said that people mattered, which they did, and we lost their shine.
It was also said that god is light, so that nobody and nothing could see him. But some did. Therefore he is not light.
He resides in night. There’s an affinity between the functions of our brain and those of god. He is memory, and the brain is an agent borrowing that memory, and its functions in total darkness. Like everything divine.”

“In its will to protect the living from the maddening effect of a constant present, nature created memory. An escape. A rest.”

“Standing trees sleep in this forest that created the night when the moon was looking elsewhere.”

Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When the mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say.

The Butterfly

those things
which you so laughingly call
hands are in fact two
brown butterflies fluttering
across the pleasure
they give
my body

"Riots remind us that the basic unit of politics is not representation, as our bourgeois rulers have insisted, but regicide - as they themselves learned from historical experience! And though riots are far from being the ideal form for effective form for sovereign contestation (and though they tend to announce their doom from the outset), they remain felicitous in the short term on account of their availability."

To the Waters of the Chia-Ling - Yuan Chen
Long ago you were perhaps
a river flowing down a mountain!
Since then you've been flowing,
deepening your bed;
If I could make a river current
understand human feeling,
Then you might know my mind
on coming from so far.

"Poetry is the essence of ideas before they are distilled into thought...
Poetry is the anarchy of the sense making sense."

"If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit."

"Hence the existentialist ambitions of poetry, the conviction that it alone catches the thing in itself, inasmuch, precisely, as it wants to be an anti-language. All told, all of those who use speech, poets are the least formalist, for they are the only ones who believe that the meaning of the words is only a form, which they, being realists, cannot be content."

"We have learned what we can, but remain mindful that our knowledge not close the circle, closing out the void, so that we forget that what we do not know remains boundless, without limit or bottom, and that what we know may have to share the quality of being known with what denies it. What is seen with one eye has no depth."