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the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.
A delight I wish to now imagine and even impose, given that beneficent dictatorship [of one’s own life, anyway] is a delight, all new statues must have in their hands flowers or shovels or babies or seedlings or chinchillas—we could go on like this for a while. But never again—never ever—guns.
Susan Sontag said somewhere something like any technology that slows us down in our writing rather than speeding us up is the one we ought to use.
What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?
the flower kissing, the moving so close to another living and breathing thing’s breath, which in this case is that of the lily I planted six years ago, will in fact kill you with delight, will annihilate you with delight, will end the life you had previously led before kneeling here and breathing the breathing thing’s breath, and the lily will resurrect you, too, your lips and nose lit with gold dust, your face and fingers smelling faintly all day of where they’ve been, amen.
it is the first day of winter, which is also the shortest day of the year, and so represents to me a kind of deepening, a kind of engagement with an interior, out of which we will emerge, to return to again, to emerge again, ad infinitum. One day we won’t emerge, by which I don’t mean me, I mean we.
it’s magic, really, how language stokes the imagination, and the imagination language;
the clunky, clumsy attempt at linguistic inclusion can itself be a kind of elegance. Try harder, I’m saying. Think better, I mean.
fading and disappearance are sound’s essential characteristics.
we need more roller-skating bad.
Perhaps delight is like a great cosmic finger pointing at something. That’s not it. Perhaps delight is like after the great cosmic finger has pointed at something, and that something (which in all likelihood was already there, which is why I’ve enlisted a cosmic finger rather than a human one) appears. A-ha! Or, Whoa! Yes!
is a fact, that one of the objectives of popular culture, popular media, is to make blackness appear to be inextricable from suffering, and suffering from blackness.
Clever as hell if your goal is to make appear natural what is, in fact, by design. And the delight? You have been reading a book of delights written by a black person. A book of black delight.
delight doesn’t truck with ought. Or should, for that matter.
