Notebook
— Eve Sedgwick, from “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You”
Normally, fear seeks to conserve. Change is perceived as a risk, and thus as something dangerous. For every change can be a change for the worse. The sociologist Frank Furedi calls this the ‘conservatism of fear.’ This policy opposes change – it wishes to maintain the status quo. If it is to embrace a change, it is a matter of reaching back to something more ‘original.’
— Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Fear
“We learn to fear crime in a way that does not reflect the actual threat of crime in our streets. Rather, we transfer to crime other fears for which we have no mode of expression.”
The Village (2004)
excerpt from “Flooding,” a work-in-progress
All fear comes from our loving something.
- St. Thomas Aquinas
Free Solo (2018)
Harvard Project Implicit Questionnaire
The MySafe Project is a safe supply initiative formed in response to the overdose crisis — providing people with a safer, regulated supply of opioids to prevent drug overdoses. https://mysafe.org/
“The political problem centers on what to do with the energy that fears and traumas produce.”
The Victory, René Magritte, 1939
“To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.”
— René Magritte
Dark Abstraction, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1924
“We cannot, however, will away this vulnerability. We must attend to it, even abide by it, as we begin to think about what politics might be implied by staying with the thought of corporeal vulnerability itself, a situation in which we can be vanquished or lose others. Is there something to be learned about the geopolitical distribution of corporeal vulnerability from our own brief and devastating exposure to this condition?”
William Bunge, An Atlas of Love and Hate: Detroit Geographies in 1969
To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may -- in ways we might prefer not to imagine -- be linked to their suffering, as the wealth as some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Trompe-l’Oeil Still Life with a Flower Garland and a Curtain, Adriaen van der Spel, 1658
“Fear is the anticipation of pain.”
C. 1900
Shadrack began a struggle that was to last for twelve days, a struggle to order and focus experience. It had to do with making a place for fear as a way of controlling it. He knew the smell of death and was terrified of it, for he could not anticipate it. It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both.
-Toni Morrison, Sula
Laura Kasischke
Anne Carson
The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
-James Baldwin
In a very real sense, the surging water in an ocean does not move; rather, energy moves through it. In this same sense, the energy of violence moves through our culture.
-Gavin De Becker, The Gift of Fear
Jenny George
By the “algebra of need” I simply meant that, given certain known factors in an equation and the equation comprising a situation of absolute need — any form of need — you can predict the results. Leave a sick junkie in the back room of a drugstore and only one result is possible. The same is true of anyone in a state of absolute hunger, absolute fear, etc. The more absolute the need, the more predictable the behavior becomes until it is mathematically certain.
-William S. Burroughs, Jaguar Magazine 1966
Bluets, Maggie Nelson
Kay Ryan
Portrait of a Carthusian, Petrus Christus, 1446
You cannot fold a flood
And put it in a drawer,—
-Emily Dickinson
Rebecca Solnit
“One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. ”
To pass from conception to execution, to produce, to bring the idea to birth, to raise the child laboriously from infancy, to put it nightly to sleep surfeited, to kiss it in the mornings with the hungry heart of a mother, to clean it, to clothe it fifty times over in new garments which it tears and casts away, and yet not revolt against the trials of this agitated life—this unwearying maternal love, this habit of creation—this is execution and its toils.
— Balzac, Cousin Bette
Diego Rivera, Infant in the Bulb of a Plant, from the Detroit Industry murals
1932-1933
“seed of paradise” by Manal Shoukair
nylon-encased pomegranates
1914—Yesterday for the first time in months, an indisputable ability to do good work. And yet wrote only the first page. Again I realize that everything written down bit by bit rather than all at once in the course of the larger part is inferior, and that circumstances of my life condemn me to this inferiority.
1917—Distractedness, weak memory, stupidity. Days passed in futility, powers wasted away in waiting….
Franz Kafka
“Misogyny seems like a tool for society to rid itself of an outstanding, ever-growing debt to women, by devaluing what has been given. Nobody can bear the idea of having been given gift after gift that they cannot reciprocate—or repay.”
Alicia Suskin Ostriker, “A Wild Surmise; Writing and Motherhood."
Art Is a Guaranty of Sanity by Louise Bourgeois
Here is the artist-mother’s bar graph: line one—the multiplying size and need of her expression—held up against line two—the rapid dissolution of time. To write is to be in conversation with yourself, to preserve a state of being so you can conclude a sequence of thinking and feeling.
-Claudia Dey, “Mothers as Makers of Death”