Monthly Muse: 5/2024
Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation
Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a quote or passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Here’s the May 2024 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published this month on Handful of Earth
Contemplation
This month, I published “Lavender Has Red Hands” by Rosie Adams. This was a first in two respects: the first guest post on Handful of Earth as well as the first poetry to appear here. I have written quite a bit on the topic of Israel and Palestine since October 7th (see here, here, and here for examples). At the same time, I have sensed the limitations of prose in grappling with the situation in Gaza. “Lavender Has Red Hands,” a poem fundamentally about the incompatibility between artificial intelligence and human life, helps us think about (and, even more importantly, feel) the weight of the conflict from a different perspective.
This month also marks one year since I committed to a consistent publishing schedule on Handful of Earth. This schedule features both Weekly Groundings as well as Monthly Musings like this one, in addition to essays, articles, reviews, and interviews. This Friday’s Weekly Grounding will be #50!
Whether you have been subscribed for a year, a month, or a week, I want to thank you for reading. Stay tuned for more original writing in the next year of Handful of Earth. And if you know someone who may be interested in subscribing, please do share the publication.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to announce a
meetup that I am co-hosting with the excellent Substacker, , in Mumbai, India next month. I realize that the majority of my readers do not live in India, but if you are here, please consider registering for the in-person event. To my knowledge, this is the first Substack meetup in India. As wrote in response to my announcement of the meetup:
Provocation
“[T]here exists an essential link between poetry and communism, if we understand ‘communism’ closely in its primary sense: the concern for what is common to all. A tense, paradoxical, violent love of life in common; the desire that what ought to be common and accessible to all should not be appropriated by the servants of Capital. The poetic desire that the things of life would be like the sky and the earth, like the water of the oceans and the brush res on a summer night – that is to say, would belong by right to the whole world.”
—Alain Badiou, The Age of the Poets