Archive for June, 2022
Lightyear 0 will be distributed from November
Dutch startup Lightyear has unveiled its Lightyear 0 electric car that has solar panels covering its roof, bonnet and boot so that it can be charged while driving.
Source: Lightyear launches “world’s first production-ready” solar-powered car
The Ultra-Black Fish
Two hundred metres down, the light stops.
Many deep-sea creatures alive at this level
of the ocean have developed the ability to create
light for themselves. This is known as bioluminescence.
Others, on the contrary, contribute to the darkness
by adding themselves to it. Ultra-black fish are
one example, & in 2020 sixteen varieties of these were
discovered captured. The level of pigment in their
skin was so high that it was found to absorb 99.956%
of the light that touched it. Karen, a marine biologist,
made the discovery came across them by accident.
Instead of hauling up the deep-sea crabs she had been
searching for, her net produced a fang-toothed fish that
wouldn’t show up in a photograph. Held, later, in a tank
under two strobe lights, the fish became a living black hole,
with no discernable features beyond the opacity of its
silhouette. As though it had cut itself out of the image & left.
Scientists believe that the fish developed their invisibility
to aid them in escaping their predators. Another theory
suggests that the obscurity of ultra-black fish enables them
to more successfully catch their prey. It is likely that both
ideas are true. Commentators on their discovery have also
speculated that the chemical structure of the pigment could serve
the development of military & defence technologies.
Nothing was said, however, about how ultra-black fish find
& enter into relations with each other. Nonetheless, their existence
alone is evidence that, invisible as they may be to others,
they are by no means strangers to themselves.
-Victoria Adukwei Bulley
Willard Gibbs, 1855. (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.)
Rukeyser’s enchantment with Gibbs became the crucible for her lifelong stewardship of the parallels between poetry and science, her astute and abiding insight into how they help hold “the giant clusters of event and meaning that every day appear” and in doing so “equip our imaginations to deal with our lives.”
Published in 1942, Rukeyser’s majestic 446-page masterwork of antierasure grew from the seed of a fascination first germinated with her poem “Gibbs,” written as WWII was beginning to cast its umbra of terror over all that is bright and beautiful in the human spirit, unpeeling from the hallways of time the image of every genius who ever lived as an irrelevance to this apotheosis of dumb destruction. It is always the poet’s task to defend the relevance of radiance, whatever its shape and subject, and so she did. From the life of Willard Gibbs, Muriel Rukeyser drew something larger, vaster, more radiant than his life, than any life — a celebration of life itself, of the living mind and its deathless imagination and the power of that imagination to irradiate the world with the wonder of possibility. It is the connective tissue of her thought, the poetic musculature of context and concept propping up the skeleton of the dead scientist’s life, that renders Rukeyser’s book a revelation from the opening page:
Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future. Here is all the developing greatness of the dream of the world, the pure flash of momentary imagination, the vision of life lived outside of triumph or defeat, in continual triumph and defeat, in the present, alive. All the crafts of subtlety, all the effort, all the loneliness and death, the thin and blazing threads of reason, the spill of blessing, the passion behind these silences — all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.
Please read on for more on Rukeyser, Gibbs, art, science, and abstract genius here at the Source: The Twin Root of Our Confusion and Our Power in Times of Turmoil: Muriel Rukeyser on the Wellspring of Aliveness – The Marginalian
image credit: unknown
Best Intentions – Recently Published Haibun by Ray Rasmussen
Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions: it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too. ~ Aldous Huxley
Source: Best Intentions – Ray Rasmussen’s Haibun & Haiku Blog
FLOODLIGHTS
Winged creatures dazzle night sky,
illuminated Japanese sea crabs,
leg spans four metres wide,
in flight and oceanless.
This is my dream of kiamat,
Muslim school-educated endtimes—
the earth expels its bowels,
frantically, rings of volcanoes
shudder their violent excrement, holy fire,
onto the earth so ash clouds
may cool it. Darling oh darling, we say
to each other, Oh sweetling, oh
may it all be enough to stop this boil.
Furious marine life steps out of
roiling maritime, flies flung-out into the air,
stratosphere deluged with the last
of blue whales, the pockmarked grey of
coral reefs’ corpses, rickety flotsam,
gone in such few years by Earth’s watch.
All of the sentient sea is airborne,
haloed in a whitish-blue, luminaries.
I will hold up your hand and wave it
to the cephalopods, changing colour
as they hit the smokestacks’ fury of ash,
their arms swathed deep in cerulean glow.
I wish, you’ll whisper, and one will point
two tentacles out towards you as if to say—
Source: TWO POEMS – The White Review
SURVIVOR’S REMORSE, GUILT CITY
(after wiji thukul, tr. eliza vitri handayani)
a knocking-on-clavicle rage, my
concrete block of shame wrangles day round the neck with poems
that say outright what they aren’t:
naiveté-shine poetry.
unmarred by innocence, they’re
hunters with nothing to ask, made of jinn-hints that settle in the dark,
licking words,
spinning me thin as, ecstatic, they
burn in their own pile of sweat,
not stopping ’til my mouth gasps shut, they
are force of bloodied reminder, push
to cradle one
body’s history in another
set of rules, to
belabor in a school made of year-bricks, to get
at the massacre we’re born upon, as poets whisper on newly-made skins, ‘you got out’.
*Poet’s note: Wiji Thukul is an Indonesian poet-activist who disappeared in 1998. This poem is in a form called the golden shovel, created by Terrance Hayes, and is based on Wiji Thukul’s verse, as translated by Eliza Vitri Handayani: ‘My poems aren’t poetry / They’re dark words, they sweat / They push one another to get out’.
Source: TWO POEMS – The White Review
Press and hold the power button and either volume button to hard-lock an iPhone or iPad.
Danielle Moodie delivers! Beholden to you, again and again, dear dirk. – word pond
00:53:21 – Democrats are responding to the loss of abortion and greater privacy rights in the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision by beggin…
Source: Voting Blue Isn’t Enough – Woke AF Daily (podcast) | Listen Notes
jay hopler was born the mint-condition-in-original-packaging-
action-figure-w/-kill-piggy-death-grip (collector’s edition)
raised to be the bird trap in a painting by pieter bruegel the
elder he ended instead the empty birdfeeder around which
birds still gather
in between he was the horse-drawn serenade the
mythicgooberkhan the bowl of lemons every cloud that
ever looked like a lion
he was never drawn by the dawn parade to greatness though
he won great praise for his performance as the green vine
angering for life in book-tv’s the wallace stevens story
for a moment in rome he was:
he has been survived
Published by McSweeney’s on June 7, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Jay Hopler.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Source: obituary – Poetry Daily
Image: Kehinde Wiley, “Equestrian Portrait of the Count Duke Olivares,” 2005, Oil on canvas, 108 x 108 in. (274.3 x 274.3 cm), Courtesy Rubell Museum, Miami
Source: 30 Americans | NBMAA
word pond 