Ropes were dropped over, and presently three huge antediluvian-looking tortoises, after much straining, were landed on deck. They seemed hardly of the seed of earth.
there is an expectation of the mystical here... they seemed hardly of the seed of earth / there are comparisons to the tortoises on relics but also maybe something about them as the "future" as worldly something that doesn't fit into the framework of modern society / could be equally Jurassic or future
“I see no contradiction to the gifts of any man in passing his breathing spells in useful reflections,” the scout replied. “As to rush, I little relish such a measure; for a scalp or two must be thrown away in the attempt. And yet,” he added, bending his head aside, to catch the sounds of the distant combat, “if we are to be of use to Uncas, these knaves in our front must be got rid of.”
who are the "knaves" that he is referring to ?
ou may here see the philosophy of an Indian fight. It consists mainly in ready hand, a quick eye and a good cover.
"the philosophy" is such an interesting word by definition it means "the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline" I wonder why a less permanent word wasn't used like style.
Hurons were compelled to withdraw, and the scene of the contest rapidly changed from the more open ground, on which it had commenced, to a spot where the assailed found a thicket to rest upon.
I wanted to note the changing of the tides of the battle in relationship to the change of environment from the "open ground" to the "thicket". What is the significance of this ? Especially knowing European tactics of war? Are the Delawares being inexplicably tied to whiteness?
He knew that the Huron encampment lay a short half mile up the brook; and, with the characteristic anxiety of one who dreaded a hidden danger, he was greatly troubled at not finding the smallest trace of the presence of his enemy
"not finding the smallest trace of the presence of his enemy" this made me think a lot about space and the notion of taking up space - whether it be noticeable or discrete and the difference between that and not occupying the space at all. As well as the difference between space in say "battle and warfare" and the extension of that to the social.
These tribes have not been driven from place to place, like their Northern brethren; but they have been gradually enclosed within narrow limits, like the game within the thicket, before the huntsmen plunge into the interior. The Indians who were thus placed between civilization and death, found themselves obliged to live by ignominious labor like the whites. They took to agriculture, and without entirely forsaking their old habits or manners, sacrificed only as much as was necessary to their existence.
What does Tocqueville mean by social conditions, is he describing a social Darwinism of sorts?
These are great evils; and it must be added that they appear to me to be irremediable. I believe that the Indian nations of North America are doomed to perish; and that whenever the Europeans shall be established on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, that race of men will be no more. *i The Indians had only the two alternatives of war or civilization; in other words, they must either have destroyed the Europeans or become their equals.
As I was reading, I couldn't help notice the grammar of futurity and the conditional that was being explored there.
General Jackson, whom the Americans have twice elected to the head of their Government, is a man of a violent temper and mediocre talents; no one circumstance in the whole course of his career ever proved that he is qualified to govern a free people, and indeed the majority of the enlightened classes of the Union has always been opposed to him.
what does it really mean when an idea becomes the political belief or political thought of the majority? Tocqueville does not really go into this as he is more concerned with the consequence of the popularity of the idea-the danger or experience of the majority.
The United States have no metropolis, but they already contain several very large cities. Philadelphia reckoned 161,000 inhabitants and New York 202,000 in the year 1830. The lower orders which inhabit these cities constitute a rabble even more formidable than the populace of European towns. They consist of freed blacks in the first place, who are condemned by the laws and by public opinion to a hereditary state of misery and degradation.
There seems to be such a large emphasis on no center metropolis... Tocqueville is almost trying to point towards the vastness of America which adds to its romantic narrative. However, more specifically I think the reason behind this is to make a claim towards the idea that America can't hold a true unity.
we shook hands, and parted in a friendly manner, in the midst of a dreary wilderness; and he informed me of the course and the distance to the trading-house, where I found he had been extremely ill-treated the day before.
why was he ill treated ?
On perceiving that he was armed with a rifle, the first sight of him startled me, and I endeavoured to elude his sight, by stopping my pace, and keeping large trees between us; but he espied me, and turning short about, sat spurs to his horse, and came up on full gallop.
he's hiding behind nature!
Shall we analyze these beautiful plants, since they seem cheerfully to invite us?
there is a feeling of compulsion
But now I see the Lord had His time to scourge and chasten me. The portion of some is to have their afflictions by drops, now one drop and then another; but the dregs of the cup, the wine of astonishment, like a sweeping rain that leaveth no food, did the Lord prepare to be my portion. Affliction I wanted, and affliction I had, full measure (I thought), pressed down and running over. Yet I see, when God calls a person to anything, and through never so many difficulties, yet He is fully able to carry them through and make them see, and say they have been gainers thereby. And I hope I can say in some measure, as David did, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted.”
viewing an entire historical struggle as a "test" from god? A bit confused by this reading.
Another thing that I would observe is the strange providence of God, in turning things about when the Indians was at the highest, and the English at the lowest.
There is a divine certainty infused here
hen they bade me stand up, and said they were the General Court. They bid me speak what I thought he would give
oh the hierarchy of sexes
scattered from one end of the earth to the other, yet the Lord would gather us together, and turn all those curses upon our enemies. I do not desire to live to forget this Scripture, and what comfort it was to me.
revenge as part of scripture
I could not bear to be in the room where any dead person was, but now the case is changed; I must and could lie down by my dead babe, side by side all the night after
what a violently sad image
as the Indians told me.
what exactly is her relationship with 'indians'?
stripping off his clothes, the bullets flying thick, one went through my side, and the same (as would seem) through the bowels and hand of my dear child in my arms.
a narration of fear
unfinished and provisional character of this effort, particularly when the arrangements of power occlude the very object that we desire to rescue
this idea of effort / tireless effort/ the argument for things like effective altruism over the effort of volunteering and doing the work at the moment to evoke change is interesting to me here in a parallel way.
The archive is inseparable from the play of power that murdered Venus and her shipmate and exonerated the captain. And this knowledge brings us no closer to an understanding of the lives of two captive girls or the violence that destroyed them and named the ruin: Venus.
what does the archive look like exactly ?
ransgressing the protocols of the archive and the authority of its statements and which enabled me to augment and intensify its fictions.
I enjoyed the sentiment to look beyond on the authority of statements. I am thinking about how the Haitian Constitution was written with the intended white audience in mind and how very few written collected documents are written outside of the social hierarchy in mind - the hegemonic of the time
The loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them. So it is tempting to fill in the gaps and to provide closure where there is none
our imagings our are worst enemies.
What has been said and what can be said about Venus take for granted the traffic between fact, fantasy, desire, and violence.
this reminds me again of an attempt to view history and reality in a narrative way or account narratively when sometimes reality isn't meant to be a story but is just wrongness.
There is not one extant autobiographical narrative of a female captive who survived the Middle Passage. This silence in the archive in combination with the robustness of the fort or barracoon, not as a holding cell or space of confinement but as an episteme, has for the most part focused the historiography of the slave trade on quantitative matters and on issues of markets and trade relations.
This is so heartbreaking to read after reading and seeing what happened with OBI
I want to tell a story about two girls capable of retrieving what remains dormant—the purchase or claim of their lives on the present—without committing further violence in my own act of narration. It is a story predicated upon impossibility—
I feel like this is so important to keep in my mind as a practice.
asterisk
the asterisk returns!
. And the stories that exist are not about them, but rather about the violence, excess, mendacity, and reason that seized hold of their lives, transformed them into commodities and corpses, and identified them with names tossed-off as insults and crass jokes.
I think it's awful that people become defined by their experience (especially when its imposed) but also such a true reality.
The Zong was first brought to the awareness of the larger British public through the newspaper reports that the ship’s owners (Gregson) were suing the underwriters (Gilbert) for the insurance value of those 132 (or 140 or 142) murdered Africans. Insurance claims are part of what Katherine McKittrick calls the “mathematics of black life” (McKittrick 2014), which includes that killability, that throwing overboard. “Captain Luke Collingwood thus brutally converted an uninsurable loss (general mortality) into general average loss, a sacrifice of parts of a cargo for the benefit of the whole” (Armstrong 2010, 173).
It's so disturbing to see insurance being used in a literal sense here for humans...
These are the asterisked histories of slavery, of property, of thingification, and their afterlives. I can’t help but see that word “risk” in “asterisk.” And to link that risk and those asterisked histories to the seas and to the beginnings of the insurance trade subtended by a trade in Africans.
this reminds me of the reading we did about how extinction is a dangerous word but now I am also thinking about afterlives that are not extinctions but become thingifcations... and that's relationship to the cycle of consumption / that is consuming and eating up histories in context of insurable risk/ which is to say: say the history of slavery and genocide and "extinctions" , the deaths acquired through these historical processes are being viewed in terms of life insurance-- let them happen/ protect against death- and maybe you'll receive cashback
But though she provides the terms and the image, if not the exact words, that give the segment its name, Aereile Jackson appears only to be made to disappear. She is metaphor.
interesting because Armi was also a metaphor of Jack's vengeance
These are symptoms of her distress. She’s not mentally ill, she tells the filmmakers—she knows she is holding baby dolls in her arms, but those dolls are placeholders for her children, who were taken from her and whom she has not seen in six years. She is identified in the end credits as a “former mother
This scene makes me think of Armi from Obi and the story of so many women and their relationship to hysteria / notably Ophelia
Wargo, talks about the dearth of programs designed to help middle-aged men like him get a new start and about the indignity of “help” in the form of a lottery that one can only win once and that gives the winner a hotel room for three days.
"indignity of help" and the scorn of help feels potent in horror
Its premise is that the oceans remain the crucial space of globalization: nowhere else is the disorientation, violence and alienation of contemporary capitalism more manifest”
this and the transatlantic slave trade as well as the sugar trade feels so relevant- am also thinking about the relationship of shapes // especially triangles and the cyclical
that is the marc, or remaining part of the Sugar Canes, after the Expression of the Juice whereof Sugar is made,)
ecological change
Understandings than those of the other Islands, and who oppos’d his Landing. Some of them were hurt by Guns, and the rest yielded, and were peaceable. Columbus, as he coasted the North side, was extremely pleas’d with this Island, thinking it surpassed any he had yet seen, for Verdure, Fertility, Victuals, &c. which he judged to come from its being water’d with Showers drawn thither by the Woods, which he had observ’d to produce the like in the Canaries and Madera before their being clear’d of Trees.
the trees in canaries and madera were cleared / toned seemed without regret or remorse just matter of fact/ which makes sense bc they cleared the trees in the America's later
Money 55. per cent. Gain, one moiety whereof goes to the Masters and Owners of the Sloops, the other to the Merchant Adventurer. There are also many Negros sold this way to the Spaniards, who are either brought lately from Guinea, or bad Servants, or Mutinous in Plantations. They are sold to very good profit; but if they have many Cicatrices, or Scars on them, the marks of there severe Corrections, they are not very saleable.
oh this is so terrible. Stock and trade and economics have such a dark backstory - I feel like slavery has become a distinct monster but after reading this particular paragraph I find it difficult to discuss Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations devoid of this context - to witness what philosophy might have inspired...
. It was some Matter of wonder to me, to think how so many People, perhaps one fourth Part of the Inhabitants of the whole Earth, should come to venture to eat Bread, made only by baking the Root of Cassada
there is a sense of universality here but I am having difficulty understanding/ clarity and expansion during discussion in class would be helpful
On this mistaken Foundation, (China, by later Discoveries, being only about eight Hours East)
It's so interesting to see the world opening up here and to understand that foundation specifically could be a mistake. To know technically your foundational understanding of the world is wrong but to not apply that thinking socially is so unfortunate.
Their Beef here is very well tasted, and good, unless when Guinea Hen weed rises in the Savannas, which is immediately after Rains, or when they are so parch’d that Cattle can find nothing else to feed on, this having a very deep Root, and being then green.
The dutiful calculation of all the things that they offer is so interesting and it reminds me so much of the other reading we had to do this weekend. I can't stop thinking about the danger of the word "extinction" and how by using it, it's easy to place the problem in the past as something settled and gone. But also the sentiment that.colonization and the colonized can never really be extinct because the effects and the current understanding of different species and the land stemmed from colonization among other reasons
Chocolate is here us’d by all People, at all times, but chiefly in the morning; it seems by its oiliness chiefly to be nourishing, and by the Eggs mixt with it to be render’d more so. The Custom, and very common usage of drinking it came to us from the Spaniards, although ours here is plain, without Spice. I found it in great quantities, nauseous, and hard of digestion, which I suppose came from its great oiliness,
relating something pleasurable as we know it (chocolate) and ascribing a negative connotation to it just for the sake of colorizing and de-valuing people... It's interesting because here, "spice" takes on such a powerful division that we still see today except it's been subverted. That it, the indignation of white people when they are jokingly made fun of for not being able to take spice and how often they might perceive that as reverse racism when it is rooted in racism against other people...