BLACK JOURNAL: 26; ALICE COLTRANE (1970) dir. ST. CLAIR BOURNE

"Contact images? Images that touch something and then someone. Images that cut to the quick of a question: touching to see or, on the contrary, touching to no longer see; seeing to no longer touch or, on the contrary, seeing to touch. Images that are too close. Adherent images. Imageobstacles, but obstacles that make things appear. Images coupled to each other, indeed even to the things of which they are the image. Contiguous images, images backing each other. Weighty images. Or very light images that surface and skim, graze us and touch us again. Caressing images. Groping or already palpable images. Images sculpted by developer, modeled by shadow, molded by light, carved by exposure time. Images that catch up with us, that manipulate us, perhaps. Images that can ruffle or chafe us. Images that grasp us. Penetrating, devouring images. Images that move our hand."

—Georges Didi-Huberman, Contact Images

Roberto Bolaño

The opposite of anxiety is not calmness, it is desire. Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility of relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known. There is nothing mysterious about the anxious state; it leaves one teetering in an untenable and all too familiar isolation. There is rarely desire without some associated anxiety: We seem to be wired to have apprehension about that which we cannot control, so in this way, the two are not really complete opposites. But desire gives one a reason to tolerate anxiety and a willingness to push through it.

Open to Desire

Mark Epstein

this is probably the former closing dishwasher in me but few things are as personally satisfying as washing the dishes at the end of the night . something something michael chabon “either a surrealistic nightmare of the ordinary or a plunge into the warm waters of beautiful of routine” quote

the full quote from the mysteries of pittsburgh which has nothing to do with washing dishes but nevertheless has stuck with me

Enzo Mari, puzzle animals Sedici Pesci | sixteen fish, oak wood, 1960. Still in production, Danese, Milano

Guy Bourdin
Charles Jourdan, Ad Campaign, ca. 1970

Nouvelle Vague (Jean-Luc Godard, 1990).

domenico gnoli

[S]peed itself might be understood as debilitating. […] Berlant moves us away from the event of trauma or catastrophe, proposing that “slow death occupies the temporalities of the endemic.” This echoes the transformation of the epidemic into the endemic whereby […] “death becomes durational.” Displacing military encounters, genocides, and other discrete time frames of traumatic events […], slow death occurs not within the time scale of the crisis, not of the [singular moment or] event […], but in “a zone of temporality … of ongoingness, getting by, and living on, where the structural inequalities are dispersed, the pacing of their experience intermittent […].” In this nonlinear temporality, for it starts and stops, redoubles and leaps ahead, […] “[…] slow death describes populations marked out for wearing out.” […] Slow death is, quite simply, “a condition of being worn out by the activity of reproducing life.” […]

More trenchantly, some are living the disability that does not get codified or recognized as such […]. Mingus highlights populations (institutionalized, incarcerated, racialized) for whom claiming the term and identity of disability is difficult given many are already stigmatized as nonnormative, and deemed in need of fixing, by the medical-industrial complex. […] To this end, Mingus avows: “[…] [W]e need to think of […] a model of disability that embraces difference, confronts privilege and challenges what is considered ‘normal’ on every front […].” Thus a political agenda that disavows pathology is intertwined with a critique of the embedded structures of […] eugenics propagated by the medical-industrial complex and its attendant forms of administrative surveillance […]. [D]ebility […] [is] endemic, perhaps even normative, to disenfranchised communities: […] not that which is to come or can be avoided, but a banal feature of quotidian existence that is already definitive of the precarity of that existence. […]

If debility is endemic to disenfranchised communities, it is doubly so because the forms of financialization that accompany neoliberal economics and the privatization of services also produce debt as debility. This relationship between debt and debility can be described as a kind of “financial expropriation” […]. Debt peonage […] is an updated version of Marx’s critique of “choice” under capitalism. Debt as enclosure, as immobility, is what Gilles Deleuze writes of […]: “Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.” This is especially true […] in the United States, where health care expenses are the number one cause of personal bankruptcy, a capacitation of slow death through debt undertaken to support one’s health. This theory of human capital entails that […] one is, as Geeta Patel points out, paying for one’s own slow death, through insurial and debt structures predicated on risk and insecurity, and essentially forced into agreeing to one’s own debilitation. […] More perniciously, one could suggest, as does Geeta Patel, that finance capital enforces repeated mandatory investments in our own slow deaths, continually reproducing the conditions of possibility that enable the sustained emergence and proliferation of debility, capacity, and disability.

—

Text by: Jasbir K. Puar. “Introduction: The Cost of Getting Better.” The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. 2017. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph contractions added by me.]

Narcisse by Gustave Moreau (1890)

Total eclipse of the Sun, July 1860, illustrated by astronomer Warren de la Rue.

صفوان داحول
Safwan Dahoul

-Orchard in Bloom with Poplars-