Following the opening of the Memorial For Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama towards the end of last week, we relay a few excerpts from a recent interview with the executive director of Equal Justice Initiative , Bryan Stevenson.
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Monthly Archives: April 2018
Time To Leave
For Earth Day weekend, during a year when violence against the earth appears to be accelerating, we offer a montage of three texts: Wendell Berry, Rachel Carson and DP corresponding poet Jon Swan. Images are from Rebecca Clark’s calm yet deeply moving Book of Hours, released into the vast, murky weblands with characteristic generosity and grace.
First, let us listen to the voice of Wendell Berry, in a 2003 essay that still rings true today:
Next, we retrieve a favorite passage from Rachel Carson’s magnificent Edge of the Sea, a vivid reminder of what we have — already! — lost:
And finally, the voice of our corresponding poet Jon Swan, picking up echos from a 1961 poem by Anna Akhmatova that itself begins with an epigraph from Marina Tsvetaeva, Oh Muse of Weeping…..
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Beneath the “mother” poem for the Swan, Akhmatova writes:
19-20 November 1961, Leningrad,
the hospital in the harbor. In a delirium.
And from 1926, the Tsvetaeva poem ends with the following lines:
Too much rubbish? Little sweeping? — Grieving
mountains! Poets coupled by a single dash —
suspended…
over nothingness — the no one of our
bodies. And the reliable ceiling
crowed to all the angels.
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Almost a century later
the angels, even —
are sick from us
time to leave
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Informational Dominance
Now comes writer-researcher Clara Hendrickson, with a lucid critique of the political delusion at the heart of social media. Her Boston Review essay is excerpted below, with images from Andrei Lacatusu’s project, Social Decay.
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Regarding those deeply interested and engaged with dismantling democracy, we urge brief meditation upon the following communication, that exceeds even the darkest impulse towards satire, given the events of recent days, weeks, months:
Followed by a random headline from today’s news “feed”:
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Let us give the last word to James Madison:
“As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.”
Of Plankton and Plastic
In the wake of recent research documenting the transformation of the world’s oceans into plastic soup, we turn to artist-scientist Mandy Barker, who writes:
“The aim of my work is to engage with and stimulate an emotional response in the viewer by combining a contradiction between initial aesthetic attraction along with the subsequent message of awareness. The research process is a vital part of my development as the images I make are based on scientific fact which is essential to the integrity of my work. The impact of oceanic waste is an area I am committed to pursuing through visual interpretation and in collaboration with science, hoping it will ultimately lead to positive action in tackling this increasing environmental problem which of current global concern”
In her most recent project, Barker uses John Thompson’s 19th century research into plankton as a conceptual template for proposing a new class of organism, “hatched” from degrading plastic debris. As Barker notes, plankton actually ingest plastic microfibers, thereby entering the food chain. We are what we eat.
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For more on microfibers, we urge consideration of the below video, from the producers of The Story of Stuff:
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