Provocations (in progress)

“Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson,

Divinity School Address (CW I: 80)

“There is confession in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the grasp of hands.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Spiritual Laws” “Every gesture any human being makes is loaded, is a confession, is a revelation: nothing can be hidden, but there is so much that we do not want to see, do not dare to see.” –James Baldwin, Just Above My Head

“Poets, prophets and reformers are all picture makers – and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.” —Frederick Douglass, “Lecture on Pictures”

"The deed goes where the word fails, and life enchants where rhetoric cannnot persuade." --Theodore Parker

Novelists, poets, philosophers, activists, and painters from across the centuries...

"Literary criticism should arise out of a debt of love." --George Steiner

“Let us then examine anew the basic thesis of democracy. It does not really mean to say that all men are equal; but it does assert that every individual who is a part of the state must have his experience and his necessities regarded by that state if the state survive; that the best and only ultimate authority on an individual’s hurt and desire is that individual himself no matter how inarticulate his inner soul may be; that life, as any man has lived it, is part of that great national reservoir of knowledge without use of which no government can do justice.” -- W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Revelation of Saint Orgne the Damned”

“The reading of a poem, a poetry reading, is not a spectacle, nor can it be passively received. It’s an exchange of electrical currents through language— that daily, mundane, abused, and ill-prized medium, that instrument of deception and revelation, that material thing, that knife, rag, boat, spoon/reed become pipe/tree trunk become drum/mud become clay flute/conch shell become summons to freedom/old trousers and petticoats become iconography in appliqué/rubber bands stretched around a box become lyre.”

“Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all loses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through.” —Paul Celan, Bremen Prize acceptance speech

"And one trembles to be so understood and, at last, To understand, as if to know became The fatality of seeing thins too well" —Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"

"[The scholar] is to take his run in the past to acquire the momentum of history, his stand in the present, and leap into the future." --Theodore Parker

“I call ‘poet’ any writing being who sets out on this path [around the world], in quest of what I call the second innocence, the one that comes after knowing, the one that no longer knows, the one that knows how not to know. I call ‘poet’ any writer, philosopher, author of plays, dreamer, producer of dreams, who uses life as a time of ‘approaching.'" -Hélène Cixous, “The Last Painting or the Portrait of God"

"Feeling at its deepest — as we all have reason to know — tends to be inarticulate." --Marianne Moore

"There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differntly than one thinks, and perceieve differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all." -Michel Foucault

"The sea speaks the same language around the world's shores." Derek Walcott

"When historical visiblity has faded, when teh present tense of testimony loses its power to arrest, then the displacements memory and the indirections of art offer us the image of our psychic survival. To live in the unhomely world, to find its ambivalencies and ambiguities in the house of fiction, or its sundering and splitting performed in the work of art, is also to affirm a profound desire for social solidarity." --Homi Bhabha