Tal como no Sermão de Santo António aos peixes, Padre António Vieira desenvolve no Sermão de Santa Teresa uma rede de relações simultâneas entre o Céu e a Terra. O que ele adiciona no Sermão de Santa Teresa é o evangelho, que serve de luz do Céu na Terra. E o fim de essas relações é sempre a prática. Podemos ver cada conceito que Vieira emprega—céu, terra, evangelho, luz, etc.—como máquina verbalizada (mais ou menos em sentido deleuziano) que procura ligar-se com outras máquinas para impulsioná-las e assim tecer mais ligações.

I spent a good deal of the morning going over the brief pastoral scenes in Ebrahim Golestan’s Yek atash (A Fire, 1961). Forugh Farrokhzad edited the film, and it seemed worth it to go over the film shot by shot. In one early scene, an oil fire explodes, startling a group of goats grazing nearby. After a bit, the goats become accustomed to the fire and return to grazing. For whatever reason, the film presents these goats as sheep—that is, they are explicitly described as گوسفندان (gusfandan) rather than بزها‎ (boz-ha).

One of the best aspects of academic research is working with people in other disciplines. Last year, I co-authored an essay with Arhaan Gupta-Rastogi (Sacred Heart School). A budding specialist in computational biology, Arhaan taught me a ton about the science and history of blood transfusion. We then combined this with Oswald de Andrade’s mention of “blood transfusors” in his 1928 Manifesto antropófago. Several months later, our work has been accepted in a forthcoming issue of Hispania.

Early European explorers such as Christopher Columbus and Pêro Vaz de Caminha attempt to take power over the world they encounter by mapping it (conceptually and literally). For Franco Farinelli, our maps do not represent the earth so much as the earth has come to take the form of our maps. This has the effect of smoothing over all meaningful alterity and reducing the world to what Byung-Chul Han has referred to as the “Hell of the same."

Way back in 1987, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions released a song called “Mainstream” on an album by the same name. The chorus goes like this: “Swimming is easy when you're stuck in the middle of the Mississippi/All you have to do is crawl.” The idea is simple: when you’re in the mainstream, you don’t need to work very hard. The current carries you, and any version of the Australian crawl, however weak, is enough to take you out to sea.

What is the pastoral? This is difficult to define, as there are several criss-crossing traditions dating back at least to Theocritus in the third century BCE (and maybe Hesiod, depending on whom you believe). The term itself comes from the Latin pastor or “shepherd,” and indeed the pastoral often involves shepherds, others impersonating shepherds, and still others dialogically engaging in what readers immediately recognize as pastoral speech. But there is much more to it.

Over two decades have passed since Aníbal Quijano published “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America,” but the essay still resonates. In 2009, I participated in a panel on Quijano’s essay, and my short paper is below. It shows my thinking over a decade ago (hardly where it is now, but there is at least a family resemblance between my former self and me), but it also proposes questions that continue to interest me.

Going through some old notes, I came across an outline I pieced together on a Richard Rorty essay devoted to idealism and textualism that really impacted me. I was a big Rorty fan in graduate school, and I’ve probably never drifted that far away from his brand of pragmatism. I always felt he had a “clear mind, full heart” approach to the humanities in general, even if he was publicly circumspect about philosophy. He was probably right about that, too.

As Ettinger articulates it, the matrix is a dimension of the human psyche that exists beside the phallic. It’s a parallel track. The matrix, however, is grounded in female sexual difference, arising from our “universal intrauterine experience.” Hannah Arendt correctly points out that we are all born, but Ettinger takes this one step further, pointing out that we all develop in a womb.

“The House is Black” is a deeply Iranian movie that calls attention to a specifically Iranian social problem; its spoken elements similarly deal with a long tradition of Persian poetry and themes easily recognizable for its Persian-language viewers. That said, there is a profound theorization of poetry itself at work here that intersects with ideas on poetry and ethics from Europe, Africa, and North America during the same period.

We can design a machine, but can we ever predict what it will do when coupled with other machines? In this way, we are all connected, as eddies and swirls move and redirect water without ever being separate from the sea itself.

Two summers ago, my family and I decided to spend an afternoon at Lisbon’s Jardim Zoológico. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that our eldest daughter made the decision to go and wouldn’t relent until we took her there.