Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

If God is a man, he could never understand the mundane threats women experience every single day of our lives.

— Bora Chung / “Maria, Gratia Plena” / Your Utopia

When the warming ocean does not allow for sea ice, ice we need for hunting ugruk, I wonder about her mood. When the waves, loud, high, and strong, eat at our shores—even in winter—I wonder what Papa would tell us. When it rains and rains and rains in July and the air is too muggy to dry salmon, I feel the shift. When in the fall, after the ground freezes, the mice have not yet put masru away in their caches, I wonder. About her signals. Her abrupt change. Her unpredictability.

— Laureli Ivanoff / “Weather Report” / Orion

. . . we in the United States are part of a global system in which our comfort and privilege are based on the exploitation of people and nature. And part of our privilege is that we don’t even have to know about it.

We think we can use our privileged position to “help” people who are “less fortunate” than ourselves, but we are blind to the workings of the system that creates our fortune and their misfortune, and how the two are mutually dependent. In a way, it was the same argument that the Mothers of Matagalpa were making.

— Aviva Chomsky / Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration

Anyhow, Makina had neither been naive nor lost any sleep blaming herself for the invention of politics; carrying messages was her way of having a hand in the world.

— Yuri Herrera / Signs Preceding the End of the World

Recent science has shown how trauma can change our brain chemistry and our DNA. I wonder now if my lifelong obsession with stories of mass murder is tied to my father’s memory of that moment, and others that exposed him to the violence of empire, poverty, and dictatorship in the years before I was born. The brain stores information for its own survival, and it finds a way to pass on its lessons from generation to generation. Perhaps my curiosity about organized, official violence is a biological signal sent by the survivors and the perpetrators of atrocities from a distant and unwritten history. From the Spanish Inquisition, the Middle Passage, the conquest of the Americas. Unremembered for many generations, those horrors may still be alive, in me, and in many people like me, in our instinctual desire to stare into, and to understand, the dark and bloody recesses of human history.

— Héctor Tobar / Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”

Come, let us be friends, you and I, / E’en though the world doth hate at this hour . . . Come, let us be friends, you and I, / The world hath her surplus of hatred today . . .

— Sarah Lee Brown Fleming / “Come Let Us Be Friends”

Maybe hope exists just because we think it to existence, and meaning is something you create on your own. But that’s just an individual’s subjective experience of faith. There’s no guarantee that such subjective faith will be supported by the objective situation. Why should the myriad ways of the universe conspire to realize the will of a mere individual?

I’m not trying to be cynical. I’m simply saying, by pointing out how small and insignificant I am, that whatever I do is also small and insignificant and makes no difference in this universe.

— Bora Chung / “The End of the Voyage” / Your Utopia

What I’m Listening To:

I don’t miss my mind
Doctors and nurses, tingling eye
Bleeding inside, touch me there
(That’s a modern pose)

— Kim Gordon / “I Don’t Miss My Mind”