This caused me to have the most unusual, spectacular dreams. They were dreams about dreams. They combined dreams from years ago with newer ones. It had never occurred to me that the mind could call up old dreams, or mash them together if it did, but that’s what happened. “I didn’t know what to do with them,” he recalled, “They weren’t a book or an exhibit, or … but it’s like Lucille Clifton said,
You might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.
Which is to say that
We will die on Earth in a hard dirty dust cloud,
on a day we now remember.
We will die on Earth — and we can’t run —
maybe a Tuesday, like today, towards the close of June.
Tuesday, because today, Tuesday, when I prose
these lines, we have forced our heads upright again
unwillingly and, never like today have we,
with all our road, seen ourselves so alone.
The human race is dead, we beat ourselves,
[and so many other plants and animals,]
without most of us doing anything to deserve it;
we got hit hard with a stick and hard
likewise with a rope; witnesses are
all the days and nights of the week and all our vertebrae,
the loneliness, the dust clouds, the roads …
Which is to say that a vast cloud of Sahara dust is blanketing the Caribbean as it heads to the US with a size and concentration that experts say hasn’t been seen in half a century. So yes, the angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But the dust is blowing in; it has got caught in his wings, the angel can no longer open or close them. The dust irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This pile of debris and this cloud of dust are what we call progress and history. Later in the same text, Thesis XV, Benjamin, goes on to add this bit of poetry, which can be loosely translated as
Who would have believed it!
A million Trumpistas stand
at the foot of every tower,
as though irritated with
time itself, shooting at the dials
in order to stop the day.
Which of course has to be glossed by Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,”, the line “none of them can stop the time.”
Premise 1: By his own admission Trump intentionally limited the number of COVID-19 tests available which resulted in fewer tests.
Premise 2: The fewer the tests the more undetected sick people.
Premise 3: The more undetected sick people, the greater the spread of the disease.
Premise 4: The greater the spread of the disease, the more deaths from it.
Premise 5: Since Trump admitted to being responsible for intentionally limiting the number of tests, he unintentionally admitted to being responsible for the deaths that resulted from his intentionally limiting the number of tests.
Conclusion: Trump is a mass murderer of an unknown number of the citizens of the country of which he is the President. QED.
The only question remaining: is he mentally competent enough for these murders to be considered intentional? K says no way. The work features a facing pair of one-horned bulls, a serpent, and a collection of smaller emblems, inscriptions, and other embellishments that draw from the larger universe of Telas — a world in constant folding and unfolding. On one level the fold is a critique of typical accounts of subjectivity — those that presume a simple interiority and exteriority — for the fold announces that the inside is nothing more than a fold of the outside. Deleuze gives us Foucault’s vivid illustration of this relation — the Renaissance madman, who, in being put to sea in a ship becomes a passenger, or prisoner in the interior of the exterior — the fold of the sea. From March through the end of May, then, a friend of K’s writes, we had a total of 72 cases of COVID in our little tourist town (Gatlinburg / Pigeon Forge, TN, population approximately 4000). Today, just three and a half weeks later, we have 489 confirmed cases. Those are locals only — the waitstaff, line cooks, ticket takers, hotel workers, etc. who keep things running. That number does not include tourists. Those are lumped in a category called “out of state” (currently standing at 604 infected) so we have no way of determining what direction these vectors are headed because they aren’t broken down by where they were visiting from. Almost no one is wearing a mask because “Murrica!” and “But mah freedumb!” and “liberal hoax”. But hey, as long as the $$$$ keep on rolling in, it’s all good, right?
What at once becomes clear is this: rather than positing that “we humans have a poverty problem, or a habitat problem, or an energy problem, or a trade problem, or a population problem, or an atmosphere problem, or a waste problem or a resource problem,” these, on a planetary scale, are understood, together, as “inter- connected problems.” Thus, thinking globally, what “we really have is a poverty-hunger-habitat-energy-trade- population-atmosphere- waste- resource problem,” none of whose separate parts can be solved on their own. They all interact and are interconnected and thus, together, are constitutive of our species’ now seemingly inescapable, hitherto unresolvable “global problematique.” The main problem with respect to solving the cognitive contradiction with which we are now confronted is therefore how we can begin not only to draw attention to but also to mind about those outside our specific and particular referent-we perspectives and worldviews. If, as Nicholas Humphrey suggests, the mind is itself a praxis — a praxis by means of which minds must necessarily be always engaged in minding about what happens, positively or negatively, to a biological species-specific and hybrid (bios / mythoi) genre-specific living entity and overall well-being, the following question arises: How can we be enabled to come to mind about the well-being or ill-being of those inhabiting worlds outside that of our normatively politically quote unquote liberal democratic referent-we of homo-oeconomicus? Keeping in mind, too, that those “outside” the referent-we of homo oeconomicus also indicate that they themselves had only been brought into existence as such “outsiders” over the last five hundred years or so, by Western civilization’s globally and territorially incorporating planetary imperializing world system. How to envision a system, then, that would no longer follow a biocentric naturally selected / dysselected bioevolutionary teleological logic and necessitates accumulation, but rather engenders a worldview and outlook, reconceptualized, in new terms, from the ecumenically human hybrid perspective of our Third Event origin as a species as homo narrans? “The sky is not blue, it will not hold.” Meanwhile, many identical men in black clothes populate a crumbling urban environment where much of the architecture is inside out and upside down, and unidentified yellow blobs clutter the place. Meanwhile, I’m getting away from my plot of rain forest, the 9,000 square feet of no history (except it’s there), a channel of light pushes through the leaves, the ferns, the light in that tunnel soon fades, as rain starts up again, like a water pump that’s lost function in its air bladder, wheezing and coughing when the toilet’s flushed. I grew up in one chaos and find myself in another. However, one has to begin somewhere, so I propose that we begin with the concept represented by the letter A (which varies according to the interest of the group being addressed). I caution them that since they know that A will appear different after learning B, they have to approach A with the willingness to not assume that any element of is complete in isolation from the rest of the shall we say alphabet. One has also to be willing to let go of what one knows about any aspect of the alphabet at any moment in order to understand it, and the shall we say meta-alphabet, more fully, and one has to be willing to let go of what one knows about any aspect of that so-called meta-alphabet at any moment in order to understand it, and the what we are so deep in the hole now we have to call the meta-meta-alphabet, more fully, and one has to be willing to let go of what one knows about any aspect of the meta-meta-alphabet at any moment in order to understand it, and the (why not?) meta-meta-meta-alphabet, more fully, and of course we aren’t really talking about alphabets, we are talking about … what are we talking about, anyway? Oh, yeah, spirit guides. I’ve grown to rely on these nonphysical guides in every area of my life. There have been countless moments in my life when I’ve witnessed the intervention of my guides. These beings come in many forms and they have different purposes, but their common goal is to help guide us back into alignment with the love that moves the sun and the other stars, goo goo Barabajagal, love is hot, truth is molten, which for some reason I always heard as small time. But we’ve been over all that already. What I mean to say is we all have our own spirit guides. We have guides that are ancestors and deceased family members. Some spirit guides may have names. In some cases, you may have a group of guides that all have the same name. These 10 simple, beautiful steps will help you cultivate a connection to your spirit guides and deepen your relationship to them day by day. If this all sounds a little trippy to you, let me reassure you: your guides are loving and wise. Once you begin inviting in your spirit guides, there are different ways you might experience their presence. You can experience a spirit guide as an inner knowing. You may feel or sense your guide’s presence, or “hear” a voice within, like a strong intuition or realization. Some people audibly hear (or see) their guides. Sparks of light are another indicator of a spirit guide’s presence. Sometimes when I know my guides are with me, I see little sparks of light. Also, when books fall off the shelf, your spirit guides are the ones who are kicking them off for you! I can’t tell you how many people have written to me or spoken to me at an event and said they discovered my book because it literally fell off the shelf in front of them. You can experience this kind of guidance, too! It is available. For only $25.99! As John Cage put it, I compose music, but mostly I’m a mushroom identifier. I don’t know if you’ll agree that that’s where we are — at the “entrance into eternity,” but we are somewhere, aren’t we? And in extremis seems apt. Yes, I did heed your suggestion to look to the other meaning of in extremis; indeed, I had already done so when you suggested it and came up with three different examples: “one or two would talk to the press in extremis,” meaning a difficult situation; another: “cannibalism is rare, but in extremis, it is something to which the human species will resort”; and a third: “they suddenly find themselves in extremis twenty miles out to sea — in an extremely difficult situation,” (“not waving but drowning”) …
Xenophanes said that the dogs would claim
that the gods were dogs
if dogs could form propositions
and if any of these propositions
were about gods.
Betsy Ross said: the candle’s genius is the flame. The flame’s food is the candle. But what is the flame’s genius? Betsy Ross said: Just as the left hand is not the double of the right hand, so, too, my shadow is not the double of me. Just as the left hand is not the negation of the right hand, so, too, my shadow is not the negation of me. One hand longs for the other. Do I long for my shadow?
I know the tape is running. I know the camera’s on.
No, the sentence before that one, what did I say?
This is not what I think
I’ve thought about inventing a long, hollow, clear plastic dress connected to a vacuum, and I would go around the city sucking up garbage, which would slowly fill my dress. And a sign mounted on my wig would read: EVERYTHING FROM EXPLODING STARS! Or maybe: PLEASE LITTER SO I CAN BE PRETTY! Or maybe: WALTZ ME WITH LOVE’S RECYCLING IN YOUR EYES! Or maybe:
All of us
stumble around on the streets
squint at the sun
and say:
the earth is round.
All of us
stumble around on the streets
squint at the sun
and say:
there is at least one site offering COVID-19 betting on the final digit in the number of new daily cases announced in Southeast Asian nations like Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. Bettors could also put money down on whether or not the number of reported cases would be higher or lower than the previous day, or if the next reported number would be odd or even,
Poku poku poku poku poku
Poku poku poku poku poku
Poku poku poku poku poku
Poku poku poku poku poku
which, according to Norman Waddell’s note, is to say that, since larger-sized wooden fish make a deep resonant sound — “wump, wump” — when struck, “poku” suggests Hakuin was beating a smaller variety, or perhaps what I’m hearing are
doors slamming in the hall
a humming refrigerator
the arms of the mini art
installation moving on the
mantle: gold painted
prosperity kittens
their arms constantly waving
neighbors zooming a Klan rally
remember when all the city
morgues were backed up
with zip-locked stroke mags
sorry if that sounds disrespectful
it’s not FACE NOT
RECOGNIZED, TRY AGAIN
So yes, the disappearance of the fireflies — when the blinding glare of searchlights crushes their relatively weak glimmer — is an excellent allegory on which to build something. So we cannot be surprised that artists and thinkers have elevated this allegory in the field of aesthetics, and that it may lend itself as the title of an art exhibit. And yet its sole purpose is to ask, stubbornly, over and over again, a question in the field of politics, a certain struggle of light against light. What lies between disappearances and survivals? Acts of resistance. Perhaps an everyday struggle to counter injustice, if not a struggle that justice may be served. These lines are from Pasolini’s “Resistance and its Light”:
We escaped with our household goods in a cart
from Casarsa, to a village lost
among canals and vineyards,
and it was a pure light.
My brother left on a still March morning
in a clandestine train,
his pistol in a book, and it was pure light.
To repeat, how can you not love a paragraph that includes both a sentence that begins “If a troll army or some software were to hologram a product” and another that concludes with someone (it doesn’t matter who here) “sailing off into the ecocidal horizons of climate chaos, where the materiality of inscriptions collude with mass extinction events, where the bio-material and the trace interbraid, and opens the question of how to re-read the entire archive and canonical legacy from this new disappearing point, this ‘matter’ that is neither Marxian nor Aristotelian, nor subject to any narrative beyond cosmic rebalancing against the bizarre set of scars and irreversible accumulated wreckage the brief ‘Anthropocene’ epoch has accomplished”? The Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, the Cairngorms, what are these compared with the mountains of Holland, right? The pyramids of Gaza, a forensic analyst once told me, occur as a result of an encounter between two elements common in the area: an armored Caterpillar D9 bulldozer and a three-story building, typical of refugee homes in Gaza. The bulldozer's short blade can topple only the peripheral columns. The internal columns are left intact, forming the peak of the pyramid. The floor slabs break at their approximate center, then fold down and outward to form the faces of the structure. The geometry of the pyramids of Gaza is not as ideal as that of the pyramids of Giza. Their irregularities register differences in the process of construction-the uneven spread of concrete, for example-or in the process of destruction, whether a firefight or a tank shell struck the building. The pyramid is but one of several typologies of destruction that can be told apart. The ruins that result from engineers placing explosives next to all major columns might end up looking like a series of floors “pancaked” over each other. Large airdropped bombs with delay fuses break through all the floors of a building and blow up under its foundations. The remnant is a large conic crater into which the building has disappeared. Sustained artillery fire turns buildings into piles of rubble. Poke-holes around windows designate a firefight. A tank shell fired into a building opens large round holes in the façade. I mention this because on July 1st Israel plans to “apply sovereignty” eye eee annex eye eee commit an crime against humanity to about 30% of the West Bank, covering many of the always-already illegal Israeli settlements and the rich agricultural lands of the Jordan Valley, which ought to result in a lot more pyramidical and other shall we say built and biologically interesting shapes. That’s me trying to keep from screaming, by the way. So I turn to Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, who writes that, “More than a decade ago, when I started the research for this book, I could not anticipate that the nothingness that I know about the Algerian origin of my father would one day have a proper name. Some years ago, I came to know this proper name — Aïsha — and adopted it, making it mine. This was the name of my father’s mother, which he never passed down to us, his daughters and grandchildren. His mother’s name at home was always “grandma,” which as a child seemed to me a proper name. I discovered Aïsha as my grandmother’s name only after my father’s death, when I looked at his birth certificate. I was all too familiar with my father’s overt and covert practices of passing for French. When I first interpreted his action in relation to us, his children and grandchildren, I ignored the meaning of his action in relation to his ancestors. It took me some time before I could recognize that it was more than just a name, that my grandmother insisted and my father gave up on adherence to a name that the whole family was encouraged not to carry when they had been invited to become French citizens, in other words, to give away part of their Arabness. By concealing this name from us, my father betrayed his ancestors, turning his back to the family and siding with the patriotic colonizers who were busy destroying the family’s precolonial world, a world that my grandmother’s name still evokes. By not letting the name go — by rejecting my father’s legacy for the sake of renewing the precolonial legacy of the family — I am standing with my ancestors and not against them, trying to reverse my father’s readiness, once and again, to replace the wound of the colonized by converting into a “colonial monger” who turns against himself, his family, and his world. Even though his citizenship was revoked in 1941 and he was incarcerated in one of Vichy’s concentration camps, he still desired to be ‘one of them.’ I wished he had revolted against the breach in his existence forced by the colonizers that impaired his capacity to cherish and care for the world into which he was born, making him incapable of saying aloud his mother’s name and sharing it with his children. But I knew he could not do that. This would have required accepting his existence as an Algerian, the kind of man the colonizers despised, and an Arab Jew, the kind of existence and historical experience that the Zionists in his new ‘homeland’ consistently denied. I do regret that I never had a name for his particular French accent and could never ask him about its origin. For, obviously, what I now recognize as a North African accent could not have been acquired without speaking — at least as a child and with his mother — Arabic.” Shit is still fucked up and shit, to possibly to misremember an old sign from Occupy. Meanwhile, Trump retweets some old guy in a golf cart from some human-created purpose-built geezer hell in Florida named The Villages yelling WHITE POWER WHITE POWER the day after signing an order protecting Confederate monuments, and meanwhile his zombie poodle Mike Pence says we’re doing great against the virus, even though 30,000 people died in the last 30 days, because … fuck all if I know why. Shit is still fucked up and shit, to possibly to misremember an old sign from Occupy. Does repeating that make it a refrain?
Ay me, I’ve lost my way
climbing this sad mountain,
Ay me, I’ve lost my way.
Let me pass the night
in your hut, I say,
I have lost my way.
And there shines the moon,
rising up above a clear
deathly silence.
None of which will stop the millions and millions of cicadas who are emerging across Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina after hibernating underground for 17 years. Nor will it stop the fungus called Massospora cicadina from invading a bunch of them and causing their abdomens to slide off. At that point the cicadas get frenzied, and mate and mate and mate. But their efforts are fruitless, because their sex organs are gone. This has been going on for generations, but only last year did researchers discover the chemicals driving all this: cathinone, the amphetamine aka bath salts, and psilocybin. If we were cicadas we’d be pretty damn buzzed. Speaking of which, when I tell the guy behind me at the Farmer’s Market that I’m sorry to keep him waiting, he says, “No such thing as time, it’s all a construct.” Did you know there was a Dōgen biopic? It puts the slow in slow cinema; we watch him sit, and then he sits again. Which is to say that all imaged thoughts are surreal, like a train running out of a boy’s forehead, or a giant girl watching her small self from the back. Or a tampon in a Frappucino — a tampon which doesn’t even resemble a tampon — placed there by a cop so he could complain that the barista was mean to him. Oh, that cop! He reminds me of young Mervyn, who is as handsome as the retractability of the claws of birds of prey; or again, as the uncertainty of the muscular movements of wounds in the soft parts of the posterior cervical region; or rather as the perpetual rat-trap, re-set each time by the trapped animal, that can catch rodents indefinitely and works even when hidden beneath straw; and especially and of course as the fortuitous encounter upon a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella! At which point Trump follows up his white power retweet with another, this time of a white couple in St Louis standing in front of their more or less plantation-style house pointing an assault-style rifle and a pistol at some peaceful protestors. Which is why it feels like time to listen to Keiji Haino’s So, Black Is Myself (aka ‘Wisdom That Will Bless I, Who Live in the Spiral Joy Born at the Utter End of a Black Prayer’), the principal sound of which is a drone made from several tone oscillators generating layered sine waveforms that seem to move in and out of sync with each other. The imbricated frequencies from the oscillators combine to generate a loud, quasi-industrial foreground sound, a compound of hum, buzz and whirr. Sometimes we’re jammed tight against them, while others go about their business in the middle distance or far enough away to be barely heard. Around the 14-minute mark a frame drum kicks in, though kick is the wrong word; later, from about 27 minutes, there’s the twang of a stringed instrument, sometimes sort of reminiscent of a sitar, being plucked or hammered at a stately pace, low, loose and sort of fret-buzzed. A little, or long, some while later, with a series of guttural vowel sounds, the vocalizations begin, and these develop to become more like spoken language or singing, though in deep growls not unlike some sort of gentle black metal. This becomes a deliberate attempt to harmonize with the drone: Haino’s increasingly loud, close-miked utterances momentarily drown out the drone, then match it and then become it, more more than less, as the mysterious stringed instrument drops out. The vibrations Haino dredges from his vocal cords are, inevitably, terminated by inhalations, and the effort towards harmonizing with the drone dwindles into something not unlike snoring, then muffled barking, as the drone returns to the fore. New tones reverberating and interacting at a higher pitch seems to clear the track for take-off as the last minutes tick down: the overtones at this stage sound like phantom cicadas, ha, the return of the psychedelicized cicadas, were you expecting that? I wasn’t, and somewhere very far away, almost as much felt as heard, auto-tuned cherubim seem to lead us into an endlessly diminishing recessional, continuing beyond my ability to hear it, if there’s anything to hear. But I digress …
strange letters began to arrive at the office
full of worldly and otherworldly requests
one lucid dream interlude
one migration narrative
some Ptolemaic astrology
some hospital telepathy
related I suppose to the no visitors’ aspect of the lockdown
We visit a moon of Saturn, we contemplate Mars, we circle asteroids with a strange anticipation, we like the sound of wormhole, remember Thel who talks with a worm? I was 27 years old and I was using colored pencils to draw several hybridized human bodies with prostheses like claws, a bicycle wheel, a fountain pen, as if I were at the cyborg-nude figure drawing school of some Academy of Celestial Fine Arts. Then it dawned on me that I needed something in writing to be able to complete my drawing, which was becoming increasingly similar to a page from an atlas of comparative anatomy. But what sort of captions could I add, and, more importantly, in what language? Suddenly I was scribbling lines that twisted and curved in curlicues and arabesques. And from that tangle of ink I slowly distilled a calligraphy complete with upper- and lower-case letters, punctuation and accents. It was script that contained the dreams of many other types of script. In other words, “The void surrounds me and eats my belly. Everything is grey, a slow descent into a warm and acrid cell nucleus through scattered images whose logic is as atomized as the territories I go through. Abandoned houses face the sea and the wind in the contaminated landscape. Being there, breathing cold air, memories of an outside world slowly dissolve. Verb and matter mingle into recurrent shapes, an obscene blend of physics and ecstasy, a vision of unleashed forces that crush us into a mass of rubble and deadly lies.” I mean, I keep thinking of a pair of cheap, thick athletic socks with “sport” written on the bottom as they are slid on to the feet of a dead man. He’d wanted to be buried in those socks. Why those socks? Waking up from a nightmare. Sunken, contorted faces giving way to a cascade of silvery hair. And the stringy, sticky blood clots getting pumped out of a victim of COVID-19. Of which there are well over half a million now. “Can’t we have a little optimism?” Rand Paul pleads.
Sure, Rand, why not? In a Sunday night interview in the Oval Office with Brian Kilmeade of the Fox News Channel, amid talk of how vital statues are to understanding American history, Kilmeade pointed to a famous Frederic Remington statue that sits in the Oval Office and asked if it was of Teddy Roosevelt. Trump said “yes.” It is not. The sculpture is called “The Bronco Buster” and is an unidentified cowboy. He and Roosevelt don’t look the least bit alike. So maybe it really is time we stop giving white people who seek to weaponize the police against Black people cutesy little nicknames like “BBQ Becky” or “Central Park Karen.” Perhaps it’s time for more fitting monikers like “Terrorist Tammy” or “Killer by Police Kathy.” In Montclair, NJ, a white woman has been dubbed “Permit Karen” after she confronted her Black neighbors to question them about whether they had a permit to build a patio on their own property. At some point during the argument, the white woman accuses the Black man of pushing her and she calls the police. That’s where the video starts. In a FaceBook Live video posted Monday, the Black neighbor — identified as Fareed Nassor Hayat — included a lengthy caption where he denies putting his hands on the woman and said all he did was ask her to leave. “It has happened again,” Hayat wrote. “White entitlement and black hate embodied in Susan who lives on Marion Road and works at the EPA, called the police to lodge a false report of assault against me when told to leave our property. Susan, aka ‘Permit Karen,’ came onto our property three times within thirty minutes to demand to know if we had the proper permit to install a stone patio in our backyard, on the other side of the fence of her yard. When asked if a permit was required by law, she said she didn’t know, but insisted we answer her questions and submit to her demands, or she would call the police to force us to stop improving our home.” Hayat goes on to say that he and his wife did the research, consulted with their contractor and “verified when building and safety arrived” that they did not need a permit to build “a stone patio this size” on their property. If this white woman doesn’t even know whether or not a permit is required, why the fuck is Public Menace Patty out here policing her neighbors in the first place? Fortunately, several of the Black couple’s neighbors can be seen in the video coming to their defense and denouncing Walking Hate Crime Wendy as the racist harasser that she is. “In this climate right now you are, especially, not supporting members of our community here?” one neighbor asks her. Other neighbors simply told her she needed to go the hell away. The cabinet doors stand slightly, tantalisingly open, but all they reveal is a sliver of darkness. We can’t see within, no matter how hard we crane our necks and how dangerously we lean close, almost falling into the forbidden zone. Those in the second rank hook their fingers through the belt loops of those in the first to stop them toppling over. they say, ‘What can you see? tell us what you see.’ Those ranked further back take up the refrain, somewhat plaintively, for their vantage is poor and they can have little idea of what’s going on. Does the cabinet still contain what the worn labels say? The room is hot and the windows run with condensation. We yearn for the gloves and syringes, but they will never be ours, no matter how long we wait. We yearn because yearning is one of the few things we can do, for which permission has been granted. In truth, however, we’ve waited so long it’s hard to recall precisely what our expectations were, or why those syringes and gloves meant so much to us.
[Note: John Cohen, quoted in blurb for his Do Not Disturb My Waking Dream, in Steidl Verlag, “Steidl Newsletter no 46”, email rec’d 25 Jun 020, approx. 6:00am PDT; JBR; Lucille Clifton, quoted in Siglio Press, “Online events, open reading period, 25% of June sales donated to Black Lives Matter and Campaign Zero”, email rec’d 25 Jun 020, approx. 7:54am PDT; JBR, including his “After César Vallejo” at Zeitgeist Spam, 23 Jun 020 (cf. Cesar Vallejo, “Black Stone on a White Stone” (tr. Clayton Eshleman); Associated Press, “‘Godzilla dust cloud’ from Sahara blankets Caribbean on its way to US”, at Guardian, 23 Jun 020; Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (tr. Harry Zohn); JBR, Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (tr. Harry Zohn), Bob Marley, “Redemption Song”; blurb for Somnath Bhatt and Nicolás Jaar, Nada, in Printed Matter, “Printed Matter at Virtual Brooklyn Art Book Fair New Edition from Somnath Bhatt and Nicolás Jaar”, email rec’d 25 Jun 020, approx. 7:02am PDT; “Definition: ‘Fold’”, at Simon O’Sullivan; Tracy, aka ChiggerRidge, from Ravelry, 25 Jun 020; image: Daisuke Yokota, Matter/Burnout; Sylvia Wynter, quoted in Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKitterick, “UNPARALLELED CATASTROPHE FOR OUR SPECIES? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations”, in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (ed. Katherine McKitterick); Anne Waldman, “Extinction Aria pt II,” on her album Sciamachy, quoted in Ruby Brunton, “An Album Against Extinction: Sciamachy”, at BOMB, 25 Jun 020; John Coulthart, “Scarabus, a film by Gérald Frydman”, at {feuilleton}, 23 Jun 020; JBR; Susan M Schultz, “Meditation 75”, at Susan M Schultz’s Blog, 25 Jun 020; Humberto Maturana Romesín and Gerda Verden-Zöller, The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love (ed. Pille Bunnell) (sort of, I fucked a whole lot lot with this one); JBR; Gabrielle Bernstein, “10 Simple and Beautiful Ways to Connect with Your Spirit Guides”, at Gabby (w/ a bit of Dante, a bit of Donovan …); JBR; John Cage, quoted in Victoria Nebolsin, “John Cage, Forager of Music and Mushrooms”, at Hyperallergic, 23 Jun 020; M NourBese Philip, “Fuck Poems”, at Jacket2, 22 Jun 020; “Karen Chamisso”, quoted in Roger Gathman, “all the Karen Chamisso poems so far”, at Limited, Inc., 2 Dec 019; CA Conrad, in CA Conrad and Brenda Iijima, “An Interlude on Poetics as Dirt”, at ON; Henry Parland, “All of us …” (tr. Johannes Göransson); JBR; “Offshore Asian-Facing Betting Sites Taking Bets on Coronavirus Case Numbers”, at Casino,.org, 16 Apr 020; Hakuin Zenji, Complete Poison Blossoms from a Thicket of Thorn (tr. Norman Waddell); JBR; Wanda Phipps, “Waltzing Nostalgia”, at EOAGH, 27 Jun 020; Timothy Liu, “The Crisis”, “Face Not Recognized, Try Again”, at EOAGH, 27 Jun 020; JBR; Georges Didi-Huberman, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, quote in Didi-Huberman’s “Light against Light”, at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 28 Jun 020; JBR; Tom Cohen, “On Ranjan Ghosh & J. Hillis Miller, Thinking Literature Across Continents”, at Academia.edu; Thomas A Clark, The Mountains of Holland; JBR; Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture; JBR; Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism; JBR; image: Trine Søndergaard and Nicolai Howalt, Dying Birds, at Borch; anonymous song quoted in Federico García Lorca, “Deep Song”, at Poetry in Translation; Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Çant di amor / Chant d’amour,” in Adulte? Jamais: une anthologie (1941-1953) (tr. into French by R. de Cecatty), quoted in Georges Didi-Huberman, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, quote in Didi-Huberman’s “Light against Light”, at BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)), 28 Jun 020; Katherine Tutrone, “Invading Cicadas May Turn Into Sex-Crazed Zombies This Summer”, at Vice, 27 Jun 020; JBR; Susan M Schultz, “Meditation 78 (more or less)”, at > Susan M Schultz’s Blog, 28 Jun 020; JBR; Isidore Ducasse, Comte De Lautréamont, Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror) (tr. Guy Wernham); JBR; Martin Pengelly, “Trump retweets video of white St Louis couple pointing guns at protesters”, at Guardian, 29 Jun 020; JBR; Robin Purves, “Subject of the drone”, at Academia.edu; Anne Waldman, “Legend, a Tease”, “Citadels Thel Leaves Ringing”, in Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born; Luigi Serafini, “Rome, an unspecified day in September, 1976”, in Decodex, pamphlet in a pocket on the inside rear cover of Codex Seraphinianus; JBR; Antoine D’Agata, quoted in blurb for his Fukushima, as found at Amazon; JBR; Peter van Agtmael, quoted in Magnum Flow, at Magnum Photos, 1 Jul 020; various online news sources, 1 Jul 020; images: Antoine D'Agata, from Images made in hospitals in Bordeaux, Marseille, Argenteuil, Nancy and Paris throughout April and May 2020. France. © Antoine d’Agata | Magnum Photos, embedded in “I’m Starting to Feel the Pain”, at Magnum Photos Newsroom, 1 Jul 020; JBR; Heather Cox Richardson, “Letters from an American”, 30 Jun 020, sent me via email by K; Zack Linly, “New Jersey Karen Harasses and Calls Police on Black Neighbors for Building a Patio on Their Own Property”, at The Root, 1 Jul 020; Brian Marley, “The Asylum”, in The Shenanigans, at Grand Iota]