Confiding To The Ear Of the Future
Hurricane Florence. Like a massive heat-driven-machine the storm churns the Atlantic sucking up moisture. It’s path along a vector of the Bermudas and the Bahamas is aimed at North and South Carolina. Possibly as a cat 5 storm, water and wind will batter the coastal areas. What we know as civilization, homes, schools, roads, electrical grid is going to be cracked by this storm. Don’t say that civilization and Nature are unrelated. The bond is always there, silently waiting while we spend chunks of our waking lives staring into our LCD screens. Your mother, Nature, says “hello.”
Oh, the morning’s New York Times reports that the Trump administration is relaxing the restrictions on methane gas, as related to the energy companies. Methane is a greenhouse gas,–exacerbating the heat load of the atmosphere. Just in case you didn’t hear…..
Reading this morning, as if in an eye of quiet, surrounded by the swirling hubbub of the busy Starbucks counter, my eye fell upon the rays of the morning sun illuminating a row of waiting tables and chairs. Feeling the sublimity of the wood grained surfaces, and the curvatures within the design, I reached for my Iphone camera. The pressure treated wood, joined/composed in “perfect” functionality, seemed to be looking at me, waiting. Instinctively I placed my palm upon the surface of the table at which I sat and felt the texture of the grain. Life, strength, function, durability glowing in the morning sun.
And this…….
A monument
does not commemorate or celebrate
something that happened
but confides to the ear of the future
the persistent sensations that embody the event:
the constantly renewed suffering of men and women,
their recreated protestations,
their constantly renewed struggle.
Will this all be in vain
because suffering is eternal
and revolutions do not survive their victory?
But the success of revolution resides only in itself,
precisely in the vibrations, clinches, and openings
it gives to men and women at the moment of its making
that composes in itself a monument
that is always in the process of becoming,
like those tumuli to which each new traveler
adds a stone.
The victory of revolution is immanent
and consists in the new bonds it installs between people,
even if these bonds last no longer
than the revolution’s fused material
and quickly give way to division and betrayal.–excerpt from What Is Philosophy?
by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari p. 177
