“Ozymandias, is that you?” | x
1Roberto Harrison || from “Horses of Insight”
letter to a preznit — will they never learn?
What if we had the power to rewrite and reroute the roots of our words?
I remember one summer paddleboating in the lake — we were reading Henry V Part 1 and sipping chablis, the sun was going down — when you started speculating on the word wealth, how the circuit of its roots seemed to run through the wold (or the woods) and the well on their way to the weal. Horizontal possibilities follow, I extrapolate now, from these verticals, the solar stretch per photosynthesis & the plunge into the earth’s store of water filtered down. I see the reservoir of would in the word, the possibility it contains, more subjunctive than injunctive. The ability to gather wood — the action at the root of the Charter of the Forest, as Linebaugh reminds us — thus becomes the ability to gather would, an accumulate of agency that succeeds in changing the shape of the action, its reach and scope. Or threatens to change: that articulates a horizon and — like ants that build bridges with their own bodies (subsuming what’s impossible for the individual by means of collective cooperation) — indicates glimpses of real alternatives, however improbable they may first appear. The threat of this transformation. Would is met with wood. Barricades. The inevitable men with sticks. Even wooden bullets. Scratching at the edges of what a common wealth could be yields a raised series of common welts in the exposed flesh of a body politic investigating and enacting the possibilities — deliberately administered contusions and hematomas, ruptured spleens and fractured skulls, that manifest the threat of imagination in contact with a congenital lack thereof.
C Wright Mills & the BMW he built
John Halle, “Mortgaging the Earth”
“Hot White Andy” ~ Chicago ~ 2007
