The apocalypse is always a semiotic machine … [it] always functions on the level of language … it’s impossible to think the apocalypse without language.

Srećko Horvat on Against Everyone with Conner Habib, episode 258

Echidna Statue, Sacro Bosco

Clipping from The 15 Association's August 1985 newsletter.

'Nymphs Dancing to Pan's Flute' by Joseph Tomanek, (1889 - 1974)

Here, gatherings were promiscuous; there were no criteria for entrance, only that you lived anarchically, which is to say you let the space fill you up when you got there.

Marquis Bey, Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchy

The shared commitments in abolitionism and anarchism are often cast as unrealistic, too radical, or pipe-dreamy, but the castigations of realism and reform and measure are in actuality rhetorical gestures to preserve hegemony. Indeed, "Abolitionist politics is not about what is possible, but about making the impossible a reality," as Abolition writes in their manifesto. Of course, it is assumed by those proponents of "realism" that we must have at least some people who are incarcerated. Of course we must punish people who do egregious things, a world without punishment as the operative measure being a ridiculous one. Abolitionism and anarchism reject that "of course."

Marquis Bey, Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism

The State is, too, a relation, a way of dictating how people are to be interacted with. We encounter one another on the logics of intelligibility that the State demands, and that structures how one can appear to others, circumscribing subjective parts and desires that fall outside of this framework. And this is a violence.

Marquis Bey, Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism

[W]hat we think we want before the crisis that precipitates our insurgency will necessarily shift after we've attained the limits of what our coalitional knowledge could compile. It is not because we are insufficient, as if insufficiency is a deficiency rather than a willingness to risk getting at the outer limits of what we dared to think; it is because we cannot, and must not, assume that the logics and rubrics we have when moving within the maelstrom of the hegemonic—radically altered as they may—be can operate to our benefit when we've unseated the hegemon. We will need new rubrics and metrics, unrubrics and unmetrics, because a radically other-world requires radically other means to love it, to caress it, to be all the way in it.

Marquis Bey, Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism

Rayne Fisher-Quann, home for the holidays: an essay (sort of) about grief (sort of)

First sketchbook page of the year 💘

I have wanted this year to pass and, with it, all its sorrow. But I've started to sense spatial as well as temporal dimensions in the four numbers that are its name, and I'm reluctant now to let it go. A container--in the way it holds things a year might be a container, and this year is the last one that holds alive my grandmother, my friend who died in April and my friend who died in October. When you explain what you've lost to someone, even a person you know well,

you need a new language, and I don't have one. It's like falling in love: you need a new language then, but get by, somehow, because of the way passion compresses every moment into memory (the present both what it is and what it will become).

Aleda Shirley, from "The Best Way Out Is Always Through", Long Distance

KERB CRAWLER GHOST

. . . not only am I convinced that there is a lifting energy, an answering appeal and promise, in precisely this most interior ice of human loneliness, which no human love can ever quite crack, but I am also convinced—no, I cling to the notion, I ache acutely with the vaguest of aims and strain to call it faith—that there is in human love both a plea for, and a promise of, the love of God.

Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair