A rock, a river, a street

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Notes

1 I am reminded of a quote by Toni Cade Bambara from her essay “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow”: “Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I've seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges” (Bambara 1980, 163).

2 I am thinking of Renee Gladman’s artistic-ethical-philosophical praxis generally, but particularly how she imagines writing as a line making and an ecology where “all these lines together made environments of the earth, where I could put my body and you could put yours (Gladman 2018).” I am also thinking of Cheryl Wall’s literary concept of Black women writers’ “worrying the line,” which is derived from the blues: “Representing a past that is largely unwritten, remembered only in fragments of music and memory, demands of writers both a visionary spirit and the capacity for dramatic revisions of form. These writers appropriate what they find useful in multiple literary traditions in addition to the African-American: from African and European mythology to the King James Bible to Anglo-American modernism. As they ‘worry the line,’ they revise, clarify, subvert, or extend the traditions they appropriate” (Wall 2000, 1450–1451). And, finally, what comes to mind is Adrian Piper’s meditation on language, lines from her personal diary, as “depersonalized expressions,” floating in the air and on the street from her Mythic Being series (Piper 1996, 112).