michael j. kennedy
ABOUT
A writer/teacher/researcher interested in problems & puzzles like this:
“How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.”
~ Virginia Woolf; "On Craftsmanship" [1937]
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"Caring for myself [&yourself&ourselves] is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare."
~ Audre Lorde; "A Burst of Light"" [1988]
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“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities [1972]
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"i ponder of something terrifying
cuz this time there's no sound to hide behind
I find over the course of human existence
one thing consists of consistence
and it's that we're all battling fear
oh dear, I don't know if we know why we're here
[...]
there are things we can do
but from the things that work there are only two
and from the two that we choose to do
Peace will win and fear will lose
and [so] there's faith and there's sleep
we need to pick one please because
Faith is to be awake and to be awake is for us to think
And for us to think is to be alive
[;...] you know you need to try to think.
~ 21 Pilots; Car Radio; [2013]
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“Nuns taught us there are two ways through life, the way of Nature and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow."
- Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life [2011]
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"In 2012, Pedro Reyes, an artist from Mexico City, convinced his government to donate [...] guns to him and he turned them into musical instruments.
So somewhere there's a tambourine, a drum set, a guitar,
All made by things that were used to take people's lives,
But now they create sound that puts life back into people's bodies,
Which is you say a weapon will always be a weapon,
But we choose how we fight the war,
And from this I learned that even the most destructive instruments can still create a melody worth dancing to,
And sometimes don't we also call that a battle?
I wonder how long it took to convince the first rifle that it can
hold a note instead of a bullet but
still fire into a crowd and make
~ Rudy Francisco; The Heart & the Fist, [2013]
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"[...] to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt. How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things."
~ Elaine Scarry; The Body in Pain: The Making & Unmaking of the World, [1985]
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[...] and the Queen gave birth to a child who was called Asterion.
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[Asterion] - "Another ridiculous falsehood has it that I, Asterion, am a prisoner.
Shall I repeat that there are no locked doors, shall I add that there are no locks?
Besides, one afternoon I did step into the street; if I returned before night, I do so because of the fear that the faces of the common people inspired in me, faces as discolored and flat as the palm of one's hand.
The sun had already set, but the helpless crying of a child and the rude supplications of the faithful told me I had been recognized.
The people prayed, fled, prostrated themselves; some climbed onto the stylobate of the temple of the axes,
others gathered stones.
One of them, I believed, hid himself beneath the sea."
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[Later] - The morning sun reverberated from the bronze sword.
There was no longer even a vestige of blood.
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[Theseus] - "Would you believe it, Ariadne?
The Minotaur scarcely defended himself."
~ Jorge Luis Borges; The House of Asterion [1964]
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"It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions."
~ Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Within a Budding Grove. [1913]
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"There is no direction here, neither lines [nor tracks] of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made - at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all-round assholery."
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow [1973]
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"The universe is no narrow thing, and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part of any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."
~ Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West [1985]
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"Language is 'for' communicating, but when we come to such phenomena as poetry and made-up names and languages, the function of communication and the construction of meaning become as impenetrable to intellect alone as the tune of a song."
~ Ursula K. Le Guin; Words Are My Matter [2019]
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"Self-persuasion underlies all rhetoric in external relations; it makes use not only of the very general, practically effective propositions [...] but also of self-understanding through self-externality. So the most daring metaphor, which tried to embrace the greatest tension, may have accomplished the most for man's self-conception: trying to think the God absolutely away from himself, as the totally other, [t]he[y] inexorably began the most difficult rhetorical act, namely, the act of comparing himself to this god."
~ Hans Blumenberg; trans. Robert M. Wallace, "An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric" [1971]
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​​“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky; The Brothers Karamazov [Nov.,1880]
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"Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other."
~ Albert Camus; The Rebel [1951]
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"One of the great problems of history is that the
concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as polar opposites, so that
love is identified with a resignation of power,
and power with a denial of love.
What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive,
and that love without power is sentimental and anemic…
power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice,
and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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"With that promise, off and away Athena the bright-eyed goddess flew
like a bird in soaring flight
but left his [Telemachus's] spirit filled with nerve and courage,
charged with his father's memory more than ever now.
He [Telemachus] felt his senses quicken, overwhelmed with wonder -
this was a god, he knew it well and made at once
for the suitors, a man like a god himself."
~ Homer; trans. Robert Fagles, The Odyssey, Book 1 - "Athena Inspires the Prince"
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"Wars have a way of overriding the days just before them. In the looking back, there is such noise and gravity. But we are conditioned to forget."
~ Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow [1973]
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"The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging along with it innocent souls all along the chain of life."
~ Thomas Pynchon; Gravity's Rainbow [1973]
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"'Temporal bandwidth' is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "â–³t" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even - as Slothrop now - what you're doing here,"
~ Thomas Pynchon; Gravity's Rainbow [1973]
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"Think of the ego, the self that suffers a personal history bound to time, as the grid. The deeper and truer Self is the flow between cathode and plate. The constant, pure flow. Signals - sense-data, feelings, memories relocating - are put onto the grid, and modulate the flow. We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero."
~ Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow [1973]
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FILLING STATION
"The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than of convictions, and of such facts as have scarcely ever become the basis of convictions. Under these circumstances, true literary activity cannot aspire to take place within a literary framework - that is, rather, the habitual expression of its sterility. Significant literary work can only come into being in a strict alternating between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that better fit its influence in active communities than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book - in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment. Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil all over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know."
~ Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street [1928]
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"The true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked along."
~ Franz Kafka; Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way [1917-1919]
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"Love art in yourself, and not yourself in art."
~ Konstantin Stanislavski; My Life in Art [1937]
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"I dwell in Possibility -
A fairer House than Prose -
More numerous of Windows -
Superior - for Doors -
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Of Chambers in the Cedars -
Impregnable of Eye -
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky -
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Of Visitors - the fairest -
For Occupation - This -
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise" -
~ Emily Dickinson; I dwell in Possibility [1862]
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"I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are 'yours' and which are 'mine.' It's past sorting out."
~ Thomas Pynchon; Gravity's Rainbow [1973]
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"In the trenches of the First World War, English men came to love one another decently, without shame or make-believe, under the easy likelihoods of their sudden deaths, and to find in the faces of other young men evidence of otherworldly visits, some poor hope that may have helped redeem even mud, shit, the decaying pieces of human meat... It was the end of the world, it was total revolution (though not quite in the way Walter Rathenau had announced) [...] and despite it all, despite knowing, some of them, of the betrayal, while Europe died meanly in its own wastes, men loved. But the life-cry of that love has long since hissed away into no more than this idle and bitchy faggotry. In this latest War, death was no enemy, but a collaborator. Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper. ..."
~ Thomas Pynchon; Gravity's Rainbow [1973]
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"For fourteen hours yesterday, I was at work - teaching Christ to lift his cross by numbers, and how to adjust his crown, and not to imagine the thirst till after the last halt. I attended his Supper to see that there were not complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands at attention before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha."
~ Wilfred Owen; in a letter to Osbert Sitwell [early July, 1918, England]
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"To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult."
~ Thomas Pynchon; V [1963]
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"In war it is not just the weak soldiers, or the sensitive ones, or the highly imaginative or cowardly ones, who will break down. Inevitably, all will break down if in combat long enough […] As medical observers have reported, “There is no such thing as ‘getting used to combat’ … Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their experience.” Thus – and this is unequivocal: ‘Psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare.”
― Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War [1989]
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"Saudade is presented as the key feeling of the Portuguese soul. The word comes from the Latin plural solitates, "solitudes," but its derivation was influenced by the idea and sonority of the Latin salvus, "in good health," "safe." A long tradition that goes back to the origins of Lusophone language, to the thirteenth-century cantiga d'amigo, has repeatedly explored, in literature and philosophy, [philosophy & rhetoric,] the special feeling of a people that has always looked beyond its transatlantic horizons. Drawn from a genuine suffering of the soul, saudade became, for philosophical speculation, particularly suitable for expressing the relationship of the human condition to temporality, finitude, and the infinite."
~ Barbara Cassin; Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon [2014]
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- 16 -
"The two languages of philology - the language of longing and the language of knowledge of longing - speak with one another. But the second can only repeat [wiederholen] what the first says; the first can only overtake [herholen] what is said by the other one. In this way they speak one another, speak themselves asunder, and speak their asunder."
~ Werner Hamacher; "95 Theses on Philology" [2009, spring]
~ {translated by Catharine Diehl}
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"The words we read and the words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbols never perfectly match. Eros is in between."
~ Anne Carson; Eros, the Bittersweet [1986]
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"From our 'mythology' of the instincts we may easily deduce a formula for an indirect method of eliminating war. If the propensity for war be due to the destructive instinct, we have always its counter-agent, Eros, to our hand. All that produces ties of sentiment between man and man must serve as war's antidote."
~ Sigmund Freud in a letter to Albert Einstein; Why War? [Vienna, September, 1932]
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"Let me tell you a story about war. A man
says to another man Can I tell you something?
The other man says No."
~ Richard Siken; War of the Foxes [2015]
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"But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can't be imagined before it is made,
can't be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
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A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak."
~ Denise Levertov; Making Peace [1987]
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"I feel compelled to narrate that side of peace which the standard textbooks of history and political science tend to ignore - a personal account of one player and the human dimension of an impersonal process. While the fate of nations and the course of global politics are generally perceived in abstractions and sweeping moves, something remains to be said about the view from within."
~ Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, PhD; This Side of Peace: A Personal Account [1995]
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he/they/them