Codi

“But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experience just becomes a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon. I just didn't want to get all wound up in any systems at all.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren

“Knowledge of the invaluable is prior to the experience of being-(de)valued. The invaluable brings value online, after all, as a bad thought or a kind of vicious offspring. It’s just that the experience of being-(de)valued helps us not forget what we already know. What we already know is given in Jacobs’s refusal to buy herself, but it persists even in those who have to buy themselves, even in those—like Jacobs—who have to sell themselves, when what we already know motivates the transaction. Take this. This is not my body. There’s no such thing. It’s not that it wouldn’t be better if it were. It’s that it wouldn’t be good enough. Blackness is a blessing of the bodiless, just as indigeneity is a blessing of the landless. They form neither repertoires of countermeasures nor collections of counter-subjective standards. They dig transverse earth and flesh to displace the total situation. They make a book like a museum for durational art, formed in walking through curational air. “The music is happening,” Monk says. “I don’t need to play.” Live album. Light blue. Bright, Mississippi flowers.”
― Kristen Case, 21, 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

“Every anthology is about what’s been excluded; these essays try to bring that close as they range from riot to recipe in their common refusal to be collected. In this sheaf, the truth of black cake has always already displaced the lie of the melting pot. In this bouquet, that truth is displaced, too. Such displacement teaches us all we can know about everything, which is that everything ain’t all; that everything’s not the erasure of exclusion but its management; that it’s not things but nothing that goes together, apart, after all. That’s why we have to look through what’s gathered here, which what’s gathered here facilitates. In this anthology, the incompleteness we desire breaks the brokenness we abjure.”
― Kristen Case, 21, 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

“When have the born again not doubled down on death?”
― Kristen Case, 21, 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive