Ronny Heiremans
Distress Sale
Early one Sunday morning everything outside –
the child’s canopy bed and vanity table,
the sofa, end tables and lamps, boxes
of assorted books and records. We carried out
kitchen items, a clock radio, hanging
clothes, a big easy chair
with them from the beginning
and which they called Uncle.
Lastly, we brought out the kitchen table itself
and they set up around that to do business.
The sky promises to hold fair.
I’m staying here with them, trying to dry out.
I slept on that canopy bed last night.
This business is hard on us all.
Read more in English : Notes on travel and theory
Everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome : the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, successive lateral offshots in immediate connection with an outside. [. . .] And directions in America are different : the search for arborescence and the return to the Old World occur in the East. But there is the rhizomatic West, with its Indians without ancestry, its ever-receding limit, its shifting and displaced frontiers. There is a whole American "map" in the West where even the trees form rhizomes. America reversed the directions : it put its Orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that the earth came full circle ; its West is the edge of the East.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
It’s Sunday and they hope to catch the trade
from the Episcopal church next door.
What a situation here! What disgrace!
Everyone who sees this collection of junk
on the sidewalk is bound to be mortified.
The woman, a family member, a loved one,
a woman who once wanted to be an actress,
she chats with fellow parishioners who
smile awkwardly and finger items
of clothing before moving on.
The man, my friend, sits at the table
and tries to look interested in what
he’s reading – Froissart’s Chronicles it is,
I can see it from the window.
My friend is finished, done for, and he knows it.
What’s going on here? Can no one help them?
Must everyone witness their downfall?
This reduces us all.
Someone must show up at once to save them,
to take everything off their hands right now,
every trace of this life before
this humiliation goes on any longer.
Someone must do something.
I reach for my wallet and that is how I understand it:
I can’t help anyone.
Raymond Carver
Fires (1983)
Other articles in this chapter
Oui, je crois qu’il existe un peuple multiple, un peuple de mutants, un peuple de potentialités qui apparaît et disparaît, s’incarne en faits sociaux, en faits littéraires, en faits musicaux (...)
Félix Guattari
(...) Through something like Brecht’s estrangement-effect, naming as renaming can provide insight into what we call history, its making no less than its retelling, especially history of the spirits of the dead as the mark of nation and state, but I have in mind, by renaming, something else as well - namely the evocation of a fictive nation-state in place of real ones so as to better grasp the elusive nature of stately being. After all it is not only the writer of fiction who fuses reality with dreamlike states. This privilege also belongs, as Kafka thaught, to the being-in-the-world of the modern state itself.
Michael Taussig, preface to The Magic of The State, Routledge, 1997.
At the end of ’62 John Ford’s "The man who shot Liberty Valance".
Stoddard confesses the whole story for the first time, but the newspaper editor refuses to publish it and burns the notes his reporter took. "When the legend becomes fact," the editor says, "print the legend."
... my brain is frozen. I have to break free from this culture of mechanical reproduction and the thick incrustration who die on the surface ...
C’est ce personnage de tueur déjanté qui, dans le film de rob Zombie "house of 10000 corpses" , face aux quelques filles de la sélection des cheerleaders qu’il s’apprête a massacrer fait cette citation qui pourrait, peut-être, rappeler quelque peu l’esprit de Walter Benjamin dans une version plus arrogante et moins civile : " ... mon cerveau est gelé, je dois me libérer de cette culture de reproductions mécaniques et des incrustations qui meurent a la surface ... "
Les gens qui ont entendu le coup frappé à la porte du domaine s’avancent, courbés d’effroi.
Walter Benjamin
If we pause for a moment on the meaning of "states" as the "conditions in which we find ourselves", then it seems we reference the moment of writing itself or perhaps even a certain condition of being upset, out of sorts : what kind of state are we in when we start to think about the state ?
Judith Butler & Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who sings the nation-state ?, Seagull Books, 2007.
The Potential Estate website • www.potentialestate.org • Confirm your interest here!