Sublime

I am black, and have been plundered and have lost my body. But perhaps I too had the capacity for plunder, maybe I would take another human’s body to confirm myself in a community. Perhaps I already had. Hate gives identity.

Language is source of misunderstandings.

Poets and clowns have always risen up against the oppression of creative thought by dogma. They expose literal-mindedness with metaphor. They demonstrate the follies of seriousness in a framework of humor. Their intimate wonder dissolves certainties, banishes fears, and undoes paralysis.

I realized that he was not so much inventing his own sentences as using the disiecta membra of other sentences, heard some time in the past, according to the present situation and the things he wanted to say, as if he could speak of a food, for instance, only with the words of the people among whom he had eaten that food, and express his joy only w

« Mes contemporains et moi nous marchons de plus en plus dans des routes si différentes, quelquefois si contraires que nous ne pouvons presque jamais nous retrouver dans les mêmes sentiments et les mêmes pensées.

Patriotism requires that we accept the superstition of our specialness, parrot the propaganda of our destiny, and repeat the lie of our chosenness. But what if we told the truth? What if, like poet Derek Walcott, we considered that “I had no nation now but the imagination.” What if we looked to the stars and reckoned with our planetary interconnect