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Wednesday, October 28, 2020
A Proclamation Ashaki M. Jackson
Agnieszka Sejud
Agnieszka Sejud’s work oscillates around ideas of freedom, and attempts at its limitation, on a personal and political level
My hero bares his nerves Dylan Thomas - 1914-1953
My hero bares his nerves
My hero bares his nerves along my wrist That rules from wrist to shoulder, Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost, Leans on my mortal ruler, The proud spine spurning turn and twist. And these poor nerves so wired to the skull Ache on the lovelorn paper I hug to love with my unruly scrawl That utters all love hunger And tells the page the empty ill. My hero bares my side and sees his heart Tread, like a naked Venus, The beach of flesh, and wind her bloodred plait; Stripping my loin of promise, He promises a secret heat. He holds the wire from the box of nerves Praising the mortal error Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves, And the hunger's emperor; He pulls the chain, the cistern moves.
Do not go gentle into that good night Dylan Thomas - 1914-1953
Dylan Thomas - 1914-1953
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
pro-life
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Monday, October 26, 2020
Wednesday, October 21, 2020
[th(e)reat] → siege engine Trace Howard DePass
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760 CAMPBELL Ln. Ste #106-167 Bowling Green, Kentucky 42104
frunk
Noun. frunk (plural frunks) A trunk (boot, storage compartment) located at the front rather than the rear of a car.
mountain language by Öykü Tekten
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Symbols and Signs by Vladimir Nabokov
Symbols and Signs
Vladimir Nabokov
For the fourth time in as many years, they were confronted with the problem of what
birthday present to take to a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind. Desires
he had none. Man-made objects were to him either hives of evil, vibrant with a malignant
activity that he alone could perceive, or gross comforts for which no use could be found
in his abstract world. After eliminating a number of articles that might offend him or
frighten him (anything in the gadget line, for instance, was taboo), his parents chose a
dainty and innocent trifle—a basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars.
At the time of his birth, they had already been married for a long time; a score of years
had elapsed, and now they were quite old. Her drab gray hair was pinned up carelessly.
She wore cheap black dresses. Unlike other women of her age (such as Mrs. Sol, their
next-door neighbor, whose face was all pink and mauve with paint and whose hat was a
cluster of brookside flowers), she presented a naked white countenance to the faultfinding
light of spring. Her husband, who in the old country had been a fairly successful
businessman, was now, in New York, wholly dependent on his brother Isaac, a real
American of almost forty years’ standing. They seldom saw Isaac and had nicknamed
him the Prince.
That Friday, their son’s birthday, everything went wrong. The subway train lost its life
current between two stations and for a quarter of an hour they could hear nothing but the
dutiful beating of their hearts and the rustling of newspapers. The bus they had to take
next was late and kept them waiting a long time on a street corner, and when it did come,
it was crammed with garrulous high-school children. It began to rain as they walked up
the brown path leading to the sanitarium. There they waited again, and instead of their
boy, shuffling into the room, as he usually did (his poor face sullen, confused, ill-shaven,
and blotched with acne), a nurse they knew and did not care for appeared at last and
brightly explained that he had again attempted to take his life. He was all right, she said,
but a visit from his parents might disturb him. The place was so miserably understaffed,
and things got mislaid or mixed up so easily, that they decided not to leave their present
in the office but to bring it to him next time they came.
Outside the building, she waited for her husband to open his umbrella and then took his
arm. He kept clearing his throat, as he always did when he was upset. They reached the
bus-stop shelter on the other side of the street and he closed his umbrella. A few feet
away, under a swaying and dripping tree, a tiny unfledged bird was helplessly twitching
in a puddle.
During the long ride to the subway station, she and her husband did not exchange a word,
and every time she glanced at his old hands, clasped and twitching upon the handle of his
umbrella, and saw their swollen veins and brown-spotted skin, she felt the mounting
pressure of tears. As she looked around, trying to hook her mind onto something, it gave
her a kind of soft shock, a mixture of compassion and wonder, to notice that one of the
passengers—a girl with dark hair and grubby red toenails—was weeping on the shoulder
of an older woman. Whom did that woman resemble? She resembled Rebecca Borisovna,
whose daughter had married one of the Soloveichiks—in Minsk, years ago.
The last time the boy had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor’s words, a
masterpiece of inventiveness; he would have succeeded had not an envious fellow-patient
thought he was learning to fly and stopped him just in time. What he had really wanted to
do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.
The system of his delusions had been the subject of an elaborate paper in a scientific
monthly, which the doctor at the sanitarium had given to them to read. But long before
that, she and her husband had puzzled it out for themselves. “Referential mania,” the
article had called it. In these very rare cases, the patient imagines that everything
happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes
real people from the conspiracy, because he considers himself to be so much more
intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in
the staring sky transmit to each other, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed
information regarding him. His in- most thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual
alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns
representing, in some awful way, messages that he must intercept. Everything is a cipher
and of everything he is the theme. All around him, there are spies. Some of them are
detached observers, like glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store
windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others, again (running water,
storms), are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and
grotesquely misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every
minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he
exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his
immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not! With distance, the torrents of wild scandal
increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a
million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther away, great mountains of unbearable
solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his
being.
When they emerged from the thunder and foul air of the subway, the last dregs of the day
were mixed with the street lights. She wanted to buy some fish for supper, so she handed
him the basket of jelly jars, telling him to go home. Accordingly, he returned to their
tenement house, walked up to the third landing, and then remembered he had given her
his keys earlier in the day.
In silence he sat down on the steps and in silence rose when, some ten minutes later, she
came trudging heavily up the stairs, smiling wanly and shaking her head in deprecation of
her silliness. They entered their two-room flat and he at once went to the mirror.
Straining the corners of his mouth apart by means of his thumbs, with a horrible, mask-
like grimace, he removed his new, hopelessly uncomfortable dental plate. He read his
Russian-language newspaper while she laid the table. Still reading, he ate the pale
victuals that needed no teeth. She knew his moods and was also silent.
When he had gone to bed, she remained in the living room with her pack of soiled
playing cards and her old photograph albums. Across the narrow courtyard, where the
rain tinkled in the dark against some ash cans, windows were blandly alight, and in one of
them a black-trousered man, with his hands clasped under his head and his elbows raised,
could he seen lying supine on an untidy bed. She pulled the blind down and examined the
photographs. As a baby, he looked more surprised than most babies. A photograph of a
German maid they had had in Leipzig and her fat-faced fiancé fell out of a fold of the
album. She turned the pages of the book: Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig, Berlin, Leipzig
again, a slanting house front, badly out of focus. Here was the boy when he was four
years old, in a park, shyly, with puckered forehead, looking away from an eager squirrel,
as he would have from any other stranger. Here was Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-
eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train
accidents, and cancerous growths until the Germans put her to death, together with all the
people she had worried about. The boy, aged six—that was when he drew wonderful
birds with human hands and feet, and suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man. His
cousin, now a famous chess player. The boy again, aged about eight, already hard to
understand, afraid of the wallpaper in the passage, afraid of a certain picture in a book,
which merely showed an idyllic landscape with rocks on a hillside and an old cart wheel
hanging from the one branch of a leafless tree. Here he was at ten—the year they left
Europe. She remembered the shame, the pity, the humiliating difficulties of the journey,
and the ugly, vicious, backward children he was with in the special school where he had
been placed after they arrived in America. And then came a time in his life, coinciding
with a long convalescence after pneumonia, when those little phobias of his, which his
parents had stubbornly regarded as the eccentricities of a prodigiously gifted child,
hardened, as it were, into a dense tangle of logically interacting illusions, making them
totally inaccessible to normal minds.
All this, and much more, she had accepted, for, after all, living does mean accepting the
loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case, mere possibilities of improvement.
She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her
husband had had to endure; of the in visible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable
fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of
this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of
neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that
cannot hide from the farmer.
It was nearly midnight when, from the living room, she heard her husband moan, and
presently he staggered in, wearing over his nightgown the old overcoat with the astrakhan
collar that he much preferred to his nice blue bathrobe.
“I can’t sleep!” he cried.
“Why can’t you sleep?” she asked. “You were so tired.”
“I can’t sleep because I am dying,” he said, and lay down on the couch.
“Is it your stomach? Do you want me to call Dr. Solov?”
“No doctors, no doctors,” he moaned. “To the devil with doctors! We must get him out of
there quick. Otherwise, we’ll be responsible.... Responsible!” He hurled himself into a
sitting position, both feet on the floor, thumping his forehead with his clenched fist.
“All right,” she said quietly. “We will bring him home tomorrow morning.”
“I would like some tea,” said her husband and went out to the bathroom.
Bending with difficulty, she retrieved some playing cards and a photograph or two that
had slipped to the floor—the knave of hearts, the nine of spades, the ace of spades, the
maid Elsa and her bestial beau. He returned in high spirits, saying in a loud voice, “I have
it all figured out. We will give him the bedroom. Each of us will spend part of the night
near him and the other part on this couch. We will have the doctor see him at least twice a
week. It does not matter what the Prince says. He won’t have much to say anyway,
because it will come out cheaper.”
The telephone rang. It was an unusual hour for it to ring. He stood in the middle of the
room, groping with his foot for one slipper that had come off, and childishly, toothlessly,
gaped at his wife. Since she knew more English than he, she always attended to the calls.
”Can I speak to Charlie?” a girl’s dull little voice said to her now.
“What number do you want? . . . No. You have the wrong number.”
She put the receiver down gently and her hand went to her heart. “It frightened me,” she
said.
He smiled a quick smile and immediately resumed his excited monologue. They would
fetch him as soon as it was day. For his own protection, they would keep all the knives in
a locked drawer. Even at his worst, he presented no danger to other people.
The telephone rang a second time.
The same toneless, anxious young voice asked for Charlie.
“You have the incorrect number. I will tell you what you are doing. You are turning the
letter ‘o’ instead of the zero.” She hung up again.
They sat down to their unexpected, festive midnight tea. He sipped noisily; his face was
flushed; every now and then he raised his glass with a circular motion, so as to make the
sugar dissolve more thoroughly. The vein on the side of his bald head stood out
conspicuously, and silvery bristles showed on his chin. The birthday present stood on the
table. While she poured him another glass of tea, he put on his spectacles and reëxamined
with pleasure the luminous yellow, green, and red little jars. His clumsy, moist lips
spelled out their eloquent labels—apricot, grape,
The Antithesis of Use Value and Exchange Value
The Antithesis of Use Value and Exchange Value
“The capacity for all products, whether natural or industrial, to contribute to man’s subsistence is specifically termed use value; their capacity to be given in exchange for one another, exchange value.... How does use value become exchange value?... The genesis of the idea of (exchange) value has not been noted by economists with sufficient care. It is necessary, therefore, for us to dwell upon it. Since a very large number of the things I need occur in nature only in moderate quantities, or even not at all, I am forced to assist in the production of what I lack. And as I cannot set my hand to so many things, I shall propose to other men, my collaborators in various functions, to cede to me a part of their products in exchange for mine."
(Proudhon, Vol. I, Chap.II)
M. Proudhon undertakes to explain to us first of all the double nature of value, the “distinction in value,” the process by which use value is transformed into exchange value. It is necessary for us to dwell with M. Proudhon upon this act of transubstantiation. The following is how this act is accomplished, according to our author.
A very large number of products are not to be found in nature, they are products of industry. If man’s needs go beyond nature’s spontaneous production, he is forced to have recourse to industrial production. What is this industry in M. Proudhon’s view? What is its origin? A single individual, feeling the need for a very great number of things, “cannot set his hand to so many things.” So many things to produce presuppose at once more than one man’s hand helping to produce them. Now, the moment you postulate more than one hand helping in production, you at once presuppose a whole production based on the division of labour. Thus need, as M. Proudhon presupposes it, itself presupposes the whole division of labour. In presupposing the division of labour, you get exchange, and, consequently, exchange value. One might as well have presupposed exchange value from the very beginning.
But M. Proudhon prefers to go the roundabout way. Let us follow him in all his detours, which always bring him back to his starting point.
In order to emerge from the condition in which everyone produces in isolation and to arrive at exchange, “I turn to my collaborators in various functions,” says M. Proudhon. I, myself, then, have collaborators, all with different function. And yet, for all that, I and all the others, always according to M. Proudhon’s supposition, have got no farther than the solitary and hardly social position of the Robinsons. The collaborators and the various functions, the division of labour and the exchange it implies, are already at hand.
To sum up: I have certain needs which are founded on the division of labour and on exchange. In presupposing these needs, M. Proudhon has thus presupposed exchange, exchange value, the very thing of which he purposes to “note the genesis with more care than other economists.”
M. Proudhon might just as well have inverted the order of things, without in any way affecting the accuracy of his conclusions. To explain exchange value, we must have exchange. To explain exchange, we must have the division of labour. To explain the division of labour, we must have needs which render necessary the division of labour. To explain these needs, we must “presuppose” them, which is not to deny them – contrary to the first axiom in M. Proudhon’s prologue: “To presuppose God is to deny him.” (Prologue, p.1)
How does M. Proudhon, who assumes the division of labour as the known, manage to explain exchange value, which for him is always the unknown?
“A man” sets out to “propose to other men, his collaborators in various functions,” that they establish exchange, and make a distinction between ordinary value and exchange value. In accepting this proposed distinction, the collaborators have left M. Proudhon no other “care” than that of recording the fact, or marking, of “noting” in his treatise on political economy “the genesis of the idea of value.” But he has still to explain to us the “genesis” of this proposal, to tell us finally how this single individual, this Robinson [Crusoe], suddenly had the idea of making “to his collaborators” a proposal of the type known and how these collaborators accepted it without the slightest protest.
M. Proudhon does not enter into these genealogical details. He merely places a sort of historical stamp upon the fact of exchange, by presenting it in the form of a motion, made by a third party, that exchange be established.
That is a sample of the “historical and descriptive method” of M. Proudhon, who professes a superb disdain for the “historical and descriptive methods” of the Adam Smiths and Ricardos.
Exchange has a history of its own. It has passed through different phases. There was a time, as in the Middle Ages, when only the superfluous, the excess of production over consumption, was exchanged.
There was again a time, when not only the superfluous, but all products, all industrial existence, had passed into commerce, when the whole of production depended on exchange. How are we to explain this second phase of exchange – marketable value at its second power?
M. Proudhon would have a reply ready-made: Assume that a man has “proposed to other men, his collaborators in various functions,” to raise marketable value to its second power.
Finally, there came a time when everything that men had considered as inalienable became an object of exchange, of traffic and could be alienated. This is the time when the very things which till then had been communicated, but never exchanged; given, but never sold; acquired, but never bought – virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience, etc. – when everything, in short, passed into commerce. It is the time of general corruption, of universal venality, or, to speak in terms of political economy, the time when everything, moral or physical, having become a marketable value, is brought to the market to be assessed at its truest value.
How, again, can we explain this new and last phase of exchange – marketable value at its third power?
M. Proudhon would have a reply ready-made: Assume that a person has “proposed to other persons, his collaborators in various functions,” to make a marketable value out of virtue, love, etc., to raise exchange value to its third and last power.
We see that M. Proudhon’s “historical and descriptive method" is applicable to everything, it answers everything, explains everything. If it is a question above all of explaining historically “the genesis of an economic idea,” it postulates a man who proposes to other men, “his collaborators in various functions,” that they perform this act of genesis and that is the end of it.
Wednesday, October 14, 2020
genesis 1
The Beginning
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
6 And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” 7 So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.
9 And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. 10 God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.
11 Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. 12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.
14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.
20 And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” 21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” 23 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.
24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
27 So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
29 Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.
31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.
Footnotes
- Genesis 1:26 Probable reading of the original Hebrew text (see Syriac); Masoretic Text the earth
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