Remy Charlip, via Camille Brown.
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Hiroshi Sugimoto: Glass staircase at Go'o Shrine, Naoshima, Japan, 2002.
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The sun's rays glanced off the earth at a low angle, bent and twisted through the atmosphere, and refracted in the icy air. Mirages, fogbows, sun dogs, mock moons, and other tricks of the light were so common the men learned not to trust their eyes. On windless days, when suspended ice crystals drifted slowly through the air, they formed prisms that refracted light and made it seem as if there were multiple suns in the sky. The most spectacular such illusion, known as a parhelic circle, caused four false suns to appear at the cardinal points of a halo around the real sun. When conditions were perfect, two perpendicular lines of light, vertical and horizontal, connected these illusory orbs, intersecting in the center to form an enormous talismanic cross. The sight filled even a man as scientifically inclined as Lecointe with reverential awe. "You feel there is something else besides the earth," the captain described. "This sort of religiosity makes you sense a God, not a specific God, but a vastly superior being."
Julian Sancton, Madhouse at the End of the Earth.
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What will become of all that has piled up within you, so much, so much, an enormous stock of memories and habits, deferred questions, frozen answers, thoughts, emotions, tender feelings, hardships, everything there, everything there, what will become of it all the moment life extinguishes within you? The disproportionate size of this pile—and all of it for nothing?
Elias Canetti, "Fifty Disguises: Selections from The Book Against Death." The Paris Review, 1/5/2022.
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INTERVIEWER
What happened when they arrested you?
OSWALD
They read me my rights and asked whether I knew I was breaking the law, and did I want to come easily or did I want to be an obstruction. And I said, “I’m happy to be arrested, because I don’t believe it’s an offense,” and that I didn’t want to come easily, and so I lay down and imagined my heaviest self. I was imagining I was made of gold or lead, just enjoying the difficulty the police were having picking me up. They drove us to some tents, where we gave our names and addresses and were given bail. There was a scene with the officer who arrested me, who kept saying that I was Section 12, and the officer who was writing it down, saying, “Are you sure?” Because Section 12 means up to fourteen years in prison. Section 13 is up to six months in prison or a fine. The officer kept saying, “Yep, Section 12,” but when I looked at my form a couple of weeks later, I saw that she had actually written Section 13. It was confusion. They didn’t really understand why they were arresting old women with signs.
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Movements need signals and symbols and performance as much as they need on-the-ground commitment.
Protest marches and rallies and strikes and daily calls to elected officials send signals and generate performance and create points of entry that lead to action. A signal from one person becomes action in another. Signals, virtuous or otherwise, help to rally people around a collective cause. So, let your signal be virtuous! Let it inspire! Voicing individual support or disapproval for something you care about creates a ripple effect that begins to change public sentiment, shift culture, alter voting choices, and rejigger patterns of patronage and consumption.
What I want to say to all of the folks with platforms, or without them, wondering if it makes a difference to say anything is, of course it does you giant ding dongs!
Erin Boyle, "Go ahead, send out a signal." Make/Do, 1/28/2026.
(Related: With a post, Erin and Garrett Bucks have raised $25,000 for rent relief in Minneapolis.)
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The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.
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Tomorrow: a strike.
And be ready to help Springfield, Ohio, where a 30-day ICE surge is planned.
