”Friheten föds om natten, oavsett var, i ett hål i muren, där de isiga vindarna passerar." (René Char)

 ”It’s a game very much about odd corners and margins: interstitial places. As huge as the game is, it never takes its players into the main parts of Meldrew House proper, always scuttling instead through attics, basements, and secret crawlspaces. If you try to step into the main rooms of the house, or even somewhere you might be spotted from a window or doorway, the game promptly ends with you swept up into your family’s quotidian concerns: ’You have missed the point entirely,’”

https://if50.substack.com/p/1993-curses

One of McLuhan’s editions of Finnegans Wake showing his abundant marginalia

One of McLuhan’s editions of Finnegans Wake showing his abundant marginalia

 

"In the first place we must banish from our minds the prejudice in favour of duration, as if it had any advantage as compared with transience: the imperishable mountains are not superior to the quickly dismantled rose exhaling its life in fragrance."

Hegel, The Philosophy of History (1822) p. 221

 

 ”… from the grandeur and majesty of beings celestial, they judge it altogether unsuitable to hold the Gods enclosed within walls, or to represent them under any human likeness. They consecrate whole woods and groves, and by the names of the Gods they call these recesses; divinities these, which only in contemplation and mental reverence they behold.”

(Tacitus, Germania, IX)

 

 ”Och deras värld ett grusat kummel 

Och deras tro en död mystär” 

(Frans G. Bengtsson)

 

 ”… every young person is a Gnostic Christian, a spark of alienated self-awareness trapped inside layers of matter, navigating a social world made all the more powerful by the fact that no one believes in it. Punk responds to that world with apocalyptic fire, post-punk with apocalyptic cold and stasis. And after a few years you want to say to that younger self, to the punks, and sometimes to Fisher, that loving this world, compromised as it is, does not have to be conservative, that love is also an opening up of possibilities.”

Turning Nothings Into Somethings

How can we embrace our ambivalence, about ourselves, about others, and make it not in to the nihilistic dead-end of our politics, but rather the starting point for thinking of a new politics, beyond “left” and “right”?