How do poetry and maths stitch together pictures of our fractured situation from its wreckage and relics, from the debris of hope and the well of residues that make us what we are?
“…I drifted off to where it seemed I was being towed into an abandoned harbour. I wasn’t exactly a boat but I felt my anchorlessness as a lack, as an inured, eventually visible pit up from which I floated, looking down on what debris looking into it left.” - From Bedouin Hornbook by Nathaniel Mackey
Walter Benjamin famously interpreted Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus as the angel of history, blown forwards by the storm of ‘progress’, but looking back into the past, wishing he could linger to make whole again the archive of debris and wreckage piling at his feet. Inspired by the artist R.H. Quaytman’s discovery of another painting behind the Angelus Novus, Fernando reads it as analogous to mathematical ideas that reveal how, from the scattered fragments of a shattered situation, we can stitch together a picture of the whole. This might reveal a rigid past, but also our possible transit into an open future.
Fred has been thinking about how, like the Angelus Novus, African diasporic people were literally blown away from an African past while retaining their comportment towards it. The word improvisation — so important to his thinking about blackness — comes from the Latin for ‘not’ + ‘foreseen’. To not plan ahead or to act without foresight are characteristics European ethics associated with animals, things, non-humans. But maybe improvisation isn’t the lack of foresight, but a kind of looking backward while moving ‘forwards’. It’s not that there’s not a seeing. There’s memory, a kind of historical seeing. But it tends against separation. Is this the kind of seeing that Nathaniel Mackey’s writing inhabits, under the image of a ‘wounded kinship’, located within the drift and “‘broken’ claim(s) to connection" of the Black Atlantic?
