Nabokov lolita

 

Aren’t the forces of order supposed to be better at this by now?

 One month ago, Columbia students set up an encampment on the university’s lawn and demanded that its administration divest from Israel, kicking off a wave of student occupations at schools around the country. Deeva Gupta, a graduate student at Columbia, reported on the encampment over the course of April. “The student movement is committed to an embodied revolution, one which implicates them as well,” writes Gupta. “For many, supporting the encampments has come to stand in for rage at the depoliticization of academia, at the surveillance of student life, at the managerial conquest of the university, and at the impossible, deadening sense that people with moral conviction can wake up every day and witness something horrific—but be unable to do anything about it. These disgruntlements have coalesced in the sentiment ‘Palestine is the vanguard for our collective liberation,’ which universalizes the particular. This is what revolutions do.” 

For further reading on the student encampments: A. C. Corey (who’s previously written for n+1 about the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta) wrote about the brutal police responses to student protesters. “It’s been a while since cops have been this rough with this many of the children of the comfortable middle classes—not to mention those classes’ professionally established adults.” Why, Corey asks, have police “stoked what could’ve been a very familiar type of peaceful demonstration at a single university into a nationwide, high-temperature resurgence of the Palestine solidarity movement?”

Also recently published on nplusonemag.com: an excerpt from Justin Taylor’s novel Reboot, out now from Pantheon. “On a long enough flight you could screen the whole movie of your life, director’s cut and all the bonus features,” writes Taylor. “But the Portland–LA flight was barely two hours, and I wasn’t looking to root around in the archives of my memory palace. I was mulling and brooding, yes, but not over ancient history.” 

And from the archives: Andrew Liu on Steph Curry, Moira Donegan on Maggie Nelson, and fiction by Mark Doten.

PS: If you enjoy the work n+1 publishes, you’ll likely also be a fan of our comrades at Jewish Currents. For the next two weeks, subscribe to both magazines at the special discount price of $93 $54—that’s more than 40% off the price of each!

The Crypt Seed By Jackie Wang

 

The Crypt Seed

Jackie Wang

The seed is a wound in the form of a little girl buried alive. Buried inside me the sol de la terre. What do I remember of last night’s dream, that the children were painting a mural that spread beyond the surface of the wall. There was a blue spirit a benevolent ghost with no eyes that hung over the children like a cloud reaching out its arms. Did the image fatigue me? I was fatigued by everything. There were space chairs facing the walls and I kept falling asleep.  Cry at my library carrel. Cry when I step off the bus. A crystal-clear sky over midtown and I no longer have the energy (will?) to masticate subjective experience. Wrote nothing about the breakup. It’s as though nothing actually happens to me.  I wanted a quiet life—to keep the casket. They don’t even notice I’m half-here, while the other half lives in the crypt. Go down to the grotto with your headlamp and crowbar. Release the girl lost and afraid. I’m not here. No one touches her. Reserve a little for myself. To self-witness. But what’s become of my mind there is no world. What did I want to say to him—that there’s a crypt-shaped seed I show to no one: it is my fate. The impossibility of making a day, leaking one’s soul for want of an angel. The night was forever. And pearls of light rained down on me I lost myself in the lonely expedition toward the center of everything I would become: nothing there’s no time but love was a thing hanging in the air at night when I’d stalk the streets with my heart in my mouth.  Bury my heart in the haute mer. Find me not I’ve flushed it to spare myself the humiliation of being seen. She’s nowhere to be found or maybe there’s a casket bobbing on the ocean with a note inside that says, “The secret to survival is to disappear.”

Adult tetris

 

Little soul lost, little shining ghost William Archila

 

Little soul lost, little shining ghost

William Archila

Little soul lost, little shining ghost, prepare yourself to descend into the small chambers that flicker like fireflies. Prepare cattle & rapid fire which should be the pallor, tenderness of patient flowers. I want to tell you about my childhood, ten times the nerve, which is stitching darkness, which is mine alone tattooed, black as the black craters in an isthmus, worse than the worst mind during the war deranged, always the strange order of smoke, always in praise of the elder tongue, which I’d like to think, is afraid of the dark forest of trees. But never mind all that, how it mocks what is & what is not. All the while I didn’t know when I claimed you my apostrophe I meant an adagio with ink, meant dead ringer in the wind, but worst. What remains is this deer at the edge of the woods, my dappled antlers my toiled meaning & no meaning making music like a heretic. After all what is a soul crawling out of the black dirt if it has no teeth or nails.

Copyright © 2025 by William Archila. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 1, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets

How Shall I Scam Thee? (Sonnet 45-47)

 

How Shall I Scam Thee? (Sonnet 45-47)

How shall I scam thee? Let me count the ways.

I scam thee to the depth and breadth and height

of your stupidity

For whenever I have no liquidity

My empty soul and bank account is replenished

by your gullibility.

I scam thee to the level of every day’s

most quiet needs, with Trump Water, Vodka, and Steaks,

Camo Kitchen Dish Towels,

Stars and Stripes Throw pillows (half-price special break!)

I scam thee freely, my compliant prey.

I scam thee purely, as you sing my praise,

and fill your online shopping carts with

MAGA hats and golf shirts

Inaugural Fleece You Suckers Blankets

and Never Surrender Hi-top Gold (flavored) Sneakers

which will never touch the dirt I heap upon you followers.

I scam thee with the passion put to use

In my old grievances about stolen elections

and my inability to maintain an erection

or an insurrection

Still, I’ll happily take the cure, even as I let you risk

Covid infection.

I scam thee with a love I’ll never lose

unlike my bankrupted casinos and failed

Shuttle airline, football team, University,

mortgage company, GoTrump (not Travelocity)

and the ultimate scam of selling you ephemeral bytes

of NFT images and crypto currency

The Art of the Steal.

I scam thee with all my breath,

leers, and tears, and tiny piece of ear.

I scam thee and all you do is cheer

for all my life

and if God choose

I shall scam thee even better after death.

(Apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

Planet Dread By Safiya Sinclair

 Planet Dread

Safiya Sinclair

Dreadnought, I. Dread from the sea I was drawn, I blue as dread, tender dread, taloned as our future dread. Dread the constellation I was born under, dread I slept under, dread the waves of history, blustering red. Dread my mother’s calm. Dread the harpy’s song. Dread she nursed me, dread she named me. Dread my girlhood under sugar cane. Dread the hurricane. I was a child of dread a psalm of dread, dread pressed into my palm like the blessed herb. A divine dread, Rastaman said. Before I could speak there was dread, before I could stumble. Dread roamed the shore a ghostly spume, dreadless thread of the woman I’m erasing, dread my one coastline crumbling to sea rise, to abyss. Dread my dead tooth unmaking the veil, dread the ointment I, dread the wound I, dread the wail I, dread the johncrow’s eye, smoke of black clouds heralding only dread. Skirmish of youth, my constant banner of dread. Dread at home, dread to the bone, my father dangling his guillotine of dread. Dread as daily bread. Nursed dark by decades of dread, teachers recoiled at my knotted thorns of dread. How the white girls blanched with dread. Scorned for the hair on my head. Beware my Blackheart of dread, the reckless haunt of my dread, girl born of nothing but salt-air and dread. Girl who bore nothing but a vision of dread. Such a savage, dread. Thrum of the natty dread. Congo Bongo dread. Martyred was the dread. Brother still the dread. Blood of my dread. Babylon maiming families of dread, pastors railing against our dread, dread the crown of heavens I wear upon this head. Dread at the root, dread of the fruit. Sister of dread. Daughter of the dread. First woman giving birth to her dread. A gorgon stoning every baldhead, dead.

We Dreamed You Keisha-Gaye Anderson

 

We Dreamed You

Keisha-Gaye Anderson

I see her face when my lids surrender to the limits of this battered body and it makes the cane ash sting less in my throat. She has fat brown cheeks red satin ribbons floating on fluffy plaits. She hums, traaa-la-la-la-la, so sweet like a sugar in a plum. She skips along a carpet of flamboyant petals, red like  the rose apple she nibbles on an already full belly. Laughter like a bird song no thick memory whatsoever of who sent her into this future finally free.

time, space, and thought

 

1. Images

   Videos

   Exploring "time, space, and thought" requires an integrated evaluation across philosophy, physics, and cognitive science. We can structure the analysis into three interrelated axes: metaphysical foundations, scientific formalization, and cognitive representation.

   ---

   1. Philosophical Foundations

   (a) Kantian Perspective

   Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) revolutionized the understanding of space and time:

   • Space: Form of outer sense, providing the framework for perceiving objects.
   • Time: Form of inner sense, structuring the sequence of inner experiences.
   • Thought: Intellectual representation (conceptual cognition) presupposes space and time for coherent judgments.

   Kant asserts that space and time are a priori intuitions, meaning they are conditions imposed by the human mind to make experience possible. Objects do not inherently possess these dimensions; rather, our perceptual framework organizes phenomena within them. Mathematically, space can be represented as a manifold, and time as a one-dimensional continuous axis, both serving as structuring scaffolds for experience.

   (b) Post-Kantian and Phenomenological View

   Hannah Arendt emphasized that cognitive processes themselves traverse a mental spacetime continuum:

   • Thought simultaneously engages temporal recollection (past) and anticipation (future).
   • The "location" of thought is non-spatial in the ordinary sense: it occupies a conceptual nowhere, structured by mental attention and reflective activity.
   • Human cognition constructs the experience of time and space by situating the agent between past and future, producing a psychological present.

   This philosophical lens highlights that space and time are inseparable from conscious thought, forming the substrate for mental modeling, planning, and memory.

   ---

   2. Physical and Scientific Frameworks

   (a) Relativity and Space-Time

   Einstein's theories unify space and time into four-dimensional spacetime:

   • Spatial coordinates and temporal measurement are relative to the observer's frame of reference.
   • Time dilation and length contraction demonstrate that space and time are not independent absolutes but elastic quantities influenced by motion and gravity.
   • Phenomena previously thought distinct (space vs. time) are now linked in a dynamic metric, calculable via:

   $d{s}^2=-c^{2}d{t}^2+d{x}^2+d{y}^2+d{z}^2$

   or, in general relativity:

   $d{s}^2=g_{\mu u}d{x}^{\mu }d{x}^u,$

   where (g_{\mu
   u}) is the spacetime metric tensor.

   (b) Quantum and Cognitive Implications

   Modern physics, particularly quantum gravity, suggests that at the Planck scale ($\sim 10^{-35}\text{m}$), space and time may be quantized, forming a "spacetime foam" where classical continuity fails. This aligns with the philosophical notion that space-time structures are conceptual frameworks rather than ontologically continuous absolutes.

   ---

   3. Neurocognitive Perspective

   • Our nervous system encodes space-time relationships to guide perception and action.
   • Sensory systems detect changes, forming temporal sequences essential for movement and decision-making.
   • Cognitive science treats space and time as modes of thinking: mental maps (spatial) and internal clocks (temporal) integrate to inform anticipation, memory, and problem-solving.
   • Experiments on saccadic eye movements, visual delay, and motion perception illustrate that temporal and spatial processing are interdependent in behavior.

   ---

   4. Synthesis: Time, Space, and Thought as a Triad

   1. Time provides the structural ordering of events and thoughts.
   2. Space allows for the localization and relational mapping of entities.
   3. Thought mediates experience, integrating temporal succession and spatial configuration into coherent cognition.

   This triad implies a co-constitutive relationship:

   $\text{Thought}\underset{}{\overset{\text{mediates}}{\leftrightarrow }}\text{Time}\mathrm{\&}\text{Space},$

   where thought both depends on and shapes our experience of spacetime, forming the bridge between subjective cognition and objective physics. Philosophically, space and time are mind-instituted structures; physically, they are measurable yet relative; biologically, they are processed through neural representations governing perception, memory, and action.

   ---

   5. Implications and Perspectives

   • Ontology: Space and time are not inherently “things” but forms of experience and frameworks for representation (Kant, Arendt).
   • Physics: Objective measurements depend on observer-relative spacetime; fundamental discreteness may emerge at quantum scales.
   • Cognition: Thought is embedded in, and partially constructs, spatiotemporal experience; mental time travel alters the phenomenology of experience.
   • Interdisciplinarity: Understanding reality requires integrating philosophical, physical, and neurocognitive insights into a holistic model of spacetime-consciousness.

   ---

   Conclusion

   Time, space, and thought are interconnected dimensions of reality:

   • Philosophically, they are a priori conditions structuring experience.
   • Physically, they form an elastic spacetime fabric responsive to mass, energy, and velocity.
   • Cognitively, they are processed through neural systems enabling abstraction, memory, and anticipation.

   This synthesis suggests the profound thesis that thought itself is inextricably spatiotemporal, simultaneously constrained by and shaping how reality is experienced and conceptualized.

   ---

   References

   1. Melnick, A. Space, Time, and Thought in Kant, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989.
   2. Arendt, H. The Life of the Mind, 1978.
   3. Einstein, A. Relativity: The Special and General Theory, 1916.
   4. Nijhawan, R., Khurana, B. Space and Time in Perception and Action, Cambridge University Press, 2010.
   5. Sciencenewstoday.org. "7 Mind-Bending Theories of Space-Time."

   This triadic framework—thought entwined with space and time—remains central to contemporary philosophical and scientific discourse.

   

   Wikipedia

   Philosophy of space and time - Wikipedia

   

   Inward Quest

   Are space, time and thought really all the same thing?

   

   Cambridge University Press & Assessment

   Space and time: the fabric of thought and reality

   

   View all