FOUR HUNDRED AND SIX

From Being Mortal by Atul Gawande.

“This has been the persistent pattern of how modern society has dealt with old age. The systems we’ve devised were almost always designed to solve some other problem. As one scholar put it, describing the history of nursing homes from the perspective of the elderly “is like describing the opening of the American West from the perspective of the mules; they were certainly there, and the epochal events were certainly critical to the mules, but hardly anyone was paying very much attention to them at the time.”
….
The sociologist Erving Goffman noted the likeness between prisons and nursing homes half a century ago in his book Asylums. They were, along with military training camps, orphanages, and mental hospitals, “total institutions”—places largely cut off from wider society. “A basic social arrangement in modern society is that the individual tends to sleep, play, and work in different places, with different co-participants, under different authorities, and without an over-all rational plan,” he wrote. By contrast, total institutions break down the barriers separating our spheres of life…”

FOUR HUNDRED AND FIVE

“Yours / The Life That I Have” — a poem code issued to Violette Szabo of the SOE by Leo Marks and used for encryption during WWII.

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours.
The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.
A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause.
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.

FOUR HUNDRED AND FOUR

Kate Marvel, from We Should Have Never Called It Earth.

“To be a climate scientist is to be an active participant in a slow-motion horror story. These are scary tales to tell children around the campfire. We are the perfect, willfully naïve victims: We were warned, and we did it anyway. Dark fairytales, of course, are as old as human history, and we tell them for a reason. But here, the culprit is the teller, both victim and villain.

The moral of this fable is murkier than the simplicity a children’s tale demands. At the end of the story, the fear persists. We continue to burn fossil fuels and the gases they make continue to trap heat, warming the air, the land, the shallow seas. The heat is mixed deep into the ocean, a long slow slog to equilibrium. There is no way to stop it.

What do I tell my son? A monster awaits in the deep, and someday it will come for you. We know this. We put it there.”

FOUR HUNDRED AND TWO

Adrienne Rich on love via Maria Popova.

An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

FOUR HUNDRED AND ONE

From How to do nothing by Jenny Odell.

“This love of one’s subject is something I’m provisionally calling the observational eros. The observational eros is an emotional fascination with one’s subject that is so strong it overpowers the desire to make anything new. It’s pretty well summed up in the introduction of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, where he describes the patience and care involved in close observation of one’s specimens:

When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book — to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.

The subject of observation is so precious and fragile that it risks breaking under even the weight of observation. As an artist, I fear the breaking and tattering of my specimens under my touch, and so with everything I’ve ever “made,” without even thinking about it, I’ve tried to keep a very light touch.”

THREE HUNDRED AND NINETY EIGHT

James Livingston in Aeon.

So this Great Recession of ours … is a moral crisis as well as an economic catastrophe. You might even say it’s a spiritual impasse, because it makes us ask what social scaffolding other than work will permit the construction of character – or whether character itself is something we must aspire to. But that is why it’s also an intellectual opportunity: it forces us to imagine a world in which the job no longer builds our character, determines our incomes or dominates our daily lives.

In short, it lets us say: enough already. Fuck work.

Certainly this crisis makes us ask: what comes after work? What would you do without your job as the external discipline that organises your waking life – as the social imperative that gets you up and on your way to the factory, the office, the store, the warehouse, the restaurant, wherever you work and, no matter how much you hate it, keeps you coming back? What would you do if you didn’t have to work to receive an income?

And what would society and civilisation be like if we didn’t have to ‘earn’ a living – if leisure was not our choice but our lot?

THREE HUNDRED AND NINETY FOUR

From FrameWork 5/17, Katie Lyle on Shirley Wiitasalo (thank you James).

To begin, you might lie down with your eyes closed allowing all of the room to fall away except the floor beneath you. Letting the push of gravity sink your weight, feeling the horizontal leveling of your body as it settles against the hard surface. You might let your muscles relax, and each bone soften at its edges until your skin is slumped loose against the flat, cool surface. Taking a moment to let the nape of your neck relax and the back of your head flatten like a soft, old grapefruit. Let your head flop to one side, if it needs a resting place, and let the weight of your skull be supported by the bony cartilage of your outer ear and cheekbone. You might imagine that you are a soft puddle, an onion skin or body-shaped trapdoor. An intricate outline of a body traced, around each hair on your head and each finger from the tip of your nail into the soft webbed tissue between them. We might be careful to consider the difference between imagining the body and paying attention to it.

That being said, to think about something in detail (one part of the body at a time) involves the necessity of forgetting something else. To think about the body like this inevitably means forgetting another part of yourself, forgetting about associations or narratives except for the ones presented in the very moment.

THREE HUNDRED AND NINETY THREE

From Rob Horning’s Sick of Myself.

“And the creation of identity in the form of a data archive would seem to fashion not a grounded self but an always incomplete and inadequate double — a “self partially forced from the body.” You are always in danger of being confronted with your incohesiveness, with evidence of a past self now rejected or a misinterpreted, misprocessed version of one’s archive being distributed as the real you.”

THREE HUNDRED AND NINETY TWO

Junot Díaz, quoted this morning in theread.

“Nations are very antagonistic, they pick enemies, they pick borders, they create borders, they create characters and mythologies that exclude. And, I always think that the nation is its silences, the nation is its exclusion, and for someone like me, in the art that I do, its disavowed dead. Because the nations’ love to create stenographs for its good dead, the dead that it recognizes, the dead that wanna help perpetuate its project of the nation. But, there is also an enormous population of its disavowed dead, the victims of this national project, the people who are decimated because of the national project.

I tend to define the nation by who’s on the other side of the bayonet. And, who doesn’t get a tomb, and who doesn’t get memorialized, and who doesn’t get mourned. And, yet, that’s as much a part of what a nation is as whoever we decide to toast on whatever holiday.”