“Western leaders and diplomats,” she wrote, “think they live in a world where rules matter, where diplomatic protocol is useful, where polite speech is valued. All of them think that when they go to Russia, they are talking to people whose minds can be changed by argument or debate. They think the Russian elite…
How to Kill by Keith Douglas Under the parabola of a ball, a child turning into a man, I looked into the air too long. The ball fell in my hand, it sang in the closed fist: Open Open Behold a gift designed to kill. Now in my dial of glass appears the soldier…
The tendency of all … who have ever wanted to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life,…
All revolutions are aesthetic… Taste is power, and power is politics… So taste has enormous power to shape history. If it makes your scalp tingle, it’s art. “Bad taste is real taste, and good taste is just the residue of someone else’s privilege.” Jazz exemplifies the possibly doomed experiment of being totally free, with…
A Russian invasion of Ukraine would look like the kind of war that has been largely absent in the past 80 years and that was once common. It would involve a powerful nation setting out to expand its regional dominance by taking over a neighbor. A war like this — a voluntary war of…
Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower By Rainer Maria Rilke Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change….
Saturday, late February, and out-of-doors is bitter cold. This is the cold season, a time suited for reflection. Waking early, making my way to Starbucks, two thoughts were looping in my mind. I checked my iphone news feed soon after rising. I felt relief that Ukraine is not yet fighting, dying to fend off…
Capitalism is an extractive circuit which quite literally crisscrosses the world. 1. Its global value chains stretch through physical infrastructure and “frictionless” financial flows at the speed allowed by telecommunications; fossil fuels; and geophysical, technological, psychosocial, and bodily limits and “optimizations.” 2. It connects economically and ecologically dispossessed agricultural communities in the Global South…
Took a walk yesterday; a mid-winter warmup, the sidewalk was melted clear of ice. Walking past Almond Marsh I felt sad, resonating with the gray sky, the muted brown of the decaying cattails. The melt water was a sheen of reflected light upon an ice covered marsh. The world before me appeared ethereal drained…
Yesterday I wondered if they celebrate February 14 as Valentine’s Day in Ukraine. I consulted the Oracle, no longer at Delphi. The answer: yes they do. That it is possible to celebrate love when surrounded by serried ranks of armor, self-propelled artillery, motorized infantry seemed a truly human image of resistance. We ought to…
