Notes
明亮的自我2023-01-19
人们常说「发现、接纳自我的黑暗面」，“Embrace your dark side”, 诸如此类。
但有时，真正令人害怕的或许是明亮，过于明亮的那一面：stellaire, solaire, la part du feu.
即使过去的回忆或痛苦是黑色，处在抑郁中的主体有更深的黑色：并不来自夜晚，也无处休息，终日被黑色的太阳照耀。
在此处，尝试接受这一切，体验那些自由、无法控制的情感、力量。当所有语言也不足以表达身体的感受，当所有动作也无法完全释放精神的张力：像是瞥见真实过于耀眼的光芒。
Emily Dickinson:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —以及再一次，雪莱的 Adonais：
The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.The breath whose might I have invok’d in song
Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar…I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar : 黑暗中的诞生。
歌唱、邀请火焰、生命的源泉是一种狂喜。然而这并非没有风险：my spirit’s bark is driven.
For the fire of life is a consuming fire.
And to live in time is to be consumed by time...Then, how do one survive this fire? I think once more of Moby Dick:
Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.
L'indigestion du Mal2023-01-16
ses paroles acides remontent en reflux
à ma bouche, sa haine me brûle
et me donne mauvaise haleine.je crache alors ce feu en friche, je gueule
comme un chien éperdu, et je vous retourne enfin,
mesdames et messieurs, vos chères dégueulasseries.
Definitions against poetry2023-01-15
A voice reads itself out loud from
a memory of lost harmonics :
it is not satisfaction of a desire,
but the desire itself that is lacking...
could one desire to desire?
could one sing in the absence of oneself, unaware, unknown?
but then, what is speech, what are those sounds,
rage, loss, murdered revenge?
I would read myself to sleep, or death
or indifference, when no one hears for
I say that conversation is promise-making:
how they profer, as if language is free,
all those wonderful things: I need you,
I will be with you,
I love you…
and what should I call this void,
this emptiness of my self-same conversation,
this monologue that I have become, this eternal soliloquy?
here promises break down, even despair depletes…
one feels nothing,
desires nothing,
is nothing:
nothing that still speaks,
nothing that is,
is speaking,
is,
as it is as nothing is and breaks:
as if oneself.
a difference of language would kill me...2022-12-31
“…I cannot understand the gospel; between us there is a difference of language that, if I were to understand it, would kill me.”
And that is how it always is with “the poet” in relation to the gospel; for him it is the same with respect to the gospel’s words about being a child. “Oh, would that I were a child,” says the poet, or “Would that I were like a child, ‘Alas, a child, innocent and happy’ — alas, I have prematurely become old and guilty and sorrowful!”.
The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, Soren Kierkegaard
Fire, Rock2022-12-31
But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay.
— Jeremiah 20:9Is not my word like as a fire? saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?
— Jeremiah 23:29VI
The rock cannot be broken. It is the truth.
It rises from land and sea and covers them…It is the rock of summer, the extreme,
A mountain luminous half-way in bloom
And then half way in the extremest light
Of sapphires flashing from the central sky,
As if twelve princes sat before a king.VII
Far in the woods they sang their unreal songs,
Secure. It was difficult to sing in face
Of the object….— Credences of Summer, Wallace Stevens
Palm Oil, Unilever, slave trade2022-09-27
在一篇关于棕榈油的文章里读到 Unilever 的历史：
The brutal and exploitative way Lever secured access to oil palms in the Belgian Congo set the pattern for the modern palm oil industry. In 1911, he signed a contract for 1.8 million acres of oil palm land. It is astonishing that Unilever still bears the name of a man who wrote in a letter to one of the company directors that ‘it is a well-known fact that the brain of the African ceases to be capable of receiving new impressions when he arrives at the adult stage.’ He called his palm oil settlement Leverville and said that the palm groves there were ‘the grandest sight I have ever seen in any part of the world’. But it wasn’t a grand life for the Congolese who worked there. Like other foreign palm oil magnates, Lever turned the wild palm groves of Africa into sterile plantations, which were managed by a new company he created: Huileries Congo Belge or HCB. When Sidney Edkins arrived to work there in 1911, he found that ‘hardly a village was to be seen’ in the region because forced labour ‘had practically exterminated the existing population for a distance of fifty miles either side of the track’. In 1915, one HCB official admitted that most of the workforce of Leverville consisted of slaves who were handed a workbook, a machete and a blanket and set to work. It was said that few men would choose to work there, especially given the harsh way they were treated by the company bosses, who demanded that strict targets be met whatever the season. Many of the workers were teenagers and children who pushed wagons or loaded the palm fruit onto boats.
在有关十七世纪英国奴隶处境的文章 My Runaway Slave, Reward Two Guineas 里读到：
There are some obvious clues. Penn had commanded the fleet that captured Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655 and Batten’s brother-in-law had spent time there. English merchants already had considerable experience of trafficking humans directly from Africa. ‘Procure as many hides, [elephant] teeth, and wax as you can,’ the Guinea Company instructed one of its captains embarking for the Gold Coast in 1651, and also ‘buy for us 15 or 20 young lusty negers of about 15 years of age, bring them home with you to London.’ Among the aristocracy and gentry, it had become fashionable to be waited on by dark-skinned boys and girls. A year after he admired Mingo’s dancing, Pepys noted in passing that his patron, Lord Sandwich, had acquired ‘a little Turk and a negroe’, who were to be made to work as pages for the earl’s daughters.
English involvement in transatlantic slaving expanded significantly during the 1660s, under the enthusiastic leadership of the new king, Charles II, and his brother, the future James II. In 1665, it was James’s eagerness to capture Dutch slave-trading forts on the West African coast that set off the second Anglo-Dutch war. In the last quarter of the century, English ships carried almost 300,000 African captives to the Americas. These new colonial ventures helped to power a rapid increase in London’s size and wealth. The city’s population tripled between 1600 and 1720 to more than 600,000 people. Its docks grew busier, its fleets larger, its merchants ever richer. Between the 1660s and the 1680s, imports of sugar from West Indian slave plantations into London tripled in value; every year, two thousand ships queued up to offload cargo from around the world. It was only the beginning: by the 18th century, the British led the world in buying and selling enslaved human beings, using their forced labour to underpin a global system of racialised capitalism and imperial power.
想到 Milton 晚年其实也见证了英国奴隶贸易的开端，然而他并没有写多少与此相关的东西，相反是殖民主义的支持者……