Shifter Magazine's Dictionary of the Possible (Discussion at New School)

Occult

Discussion Leaders: Mimi Winick & Thom Donovan
Saturday, Nov 1, 4-6 pm
The Bark Room at the New School
2 West 13th Street, Room M101

Recommended Reading:
Fred Moten “Black Mo’nin'” pg. 59, from Loss edited by David Eng
Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster
Gauri Viswanathan, “Spectrality’s Secret Sharers: Occultism as (Post) Colonial Affect,” in Beyond the Black Atlantic: Relocating Modernization and Technology. Ed. Walter Goebel

Brandon Shimoda's "For Beth Murray"

April 15, 2009*

There is a kind of empathy that so fully transcends both genuine intimacy and imaginative projection that it conjoins the empathic individual to the person or thing or animal under attention with such infusing force that that individual becomes a kind of embracing, breathable liquid. We are, in fact—as individuals, as people—a kind of liquid, an embodied, bone-and-flesh kind of liquid—and yet we are not exactly meant to invent ourselves into the revelation of that fact, anymore than we are meant to be gathered together in this room without our clothes on—shorn of hair and teeth, bled of eye, disarmed, drawn and eviscerated. There is a kind of empathic individual, that by nature of pure, embodied listening and response, makes of herself a pulsing, prismatic community, and by pure, embodied listening and response, transfigures herself into a wilderness—a state alternating between clarified loneliness and voluminous possibility, however the two might be synonymous.

Life is unbearable for its dimension. We measure it both brief and interminable. Yet dimension—or in this sense, duration—is not the province or concern of genuine empathy, nor is it the province or concern of genuine poetry. An island, for example, is singular for the fact that it neither begins nor ends. It is—that is, it is happening; it happens—it receives and lets go. And yet, an island is also not singular at all, for every thing being exactly an island—a body, the inverse of a body, a wilderness, the razing of that wilderness, surrounded by water, and water.

*composed by Brandon Shimoda, on the occasion of his Spare Room series reading with Murray in Portland, OR, 2009. Also check-out Shimoda's page for Murray's The Island.

Impassed

The withered breast

With eyes of love

Do we look at gifts

Of death the eyes

Of a God whose

Gaze freezes red shift

In our veins until

The corpse of a sac

Wriggling calls out

Its new name having

Passed that thresh-

hold impassed

Aren’t we embodying it

To meet this way

In a grave summarizing time

As such crouched because

No one is free

From pain so sing

With me a song

Whose words are chronic

Weaning the lover back

From the gradual black

Red shift frozen before

Life began death began

To take away my love from me

Singing in a cadence

Of the unthinkable.

--for Beth Murray, composed spring 2012