Daiquiri

[perhaps best read with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aRKZFR5imM
or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvHNmx41fo0 , depending on preference ]

I had a dream... and i cannot remember much of it... just pieces. images, feelings. and in that dream i was deep in the woods of louisiana. on the road. sitting in the back of a car besides two people i knew. we were coming from somewhere, somewhere in the distance, and had just come off a bridge.

and a friend told me the part of the brain that deals with love, any love, is the part that deals with obsession.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz4ZKLSf06w&feature=related

"my mirror twin, my next to kin, i'd know you in my sleep. and who but you would take me in, a thousand kisses keep."

i was wicked worn and wayward, wandering in the pale glimpses of a fire. of a heat that sizzles at my skin, that bends my black hairs back. that opens like dawn upon the brown shore of my body where the ocean of the world ends and the land that is my spirit will begin... porous... breathing. the soil of spirit rising from the waters of that place, that place of sign and song... a space that calls us...
the fire from within and the fire from without, cooled with silence, moist with mystery... and if this world were ever dry, it'd be a coffin canvas. like the ocean, we must move or we break all the ships, sailing or not, and choke all that swims below the wave. So move, move my love, like the nourishing nile that is never static, never defined. like that light that tosses its signature across the sky when pulled just fast enough. the shore made a door at the flicker of a--
and what is that fire? shooting up roads in the darkness, still-life in the eyes of the fish-oil and brilliant amber lamps that give us our glow and shadow, we feels the music push into us, move throughout our fingertips, and your voice that pulses through the world, boils the world hollow when you scream, drains it dizzy when you're soft. and soon we will be silent. and in that space, the space we find in dreams, we are bound. like a moon and its shadow.

and a friend told me love was selflessness

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBbk9laJfsw

i could walk into the very pupil of darkness; stay there with me. Wrap the words you whispered near my ears and speak softly, speak sideways, speak like fire falling from the sky, speak like the world will be set aglow with that brightness. if the night was scarred with fire and it heaved from its soars the late evening wind, then what was i? If the night was a wounded beast with the desperate breath, and the lunar scab, it moves through me. if this is where i go, in the very stomach of that question... the question of purpose... when no one can hear you. if this is what i am, the very engine of my mind caught in tar of ceaseless monologues, stirred by the feet that walk home, alone, when the traffic is light and fast, when the world is a wobbling giant of electric light... that darkens the rooms when turned on. that covers in florescent what craves true illumination... if this is what i am...

i tried to give my love, and because it was not clean, my love was turned away.

the maddest of dreams; love is the maddest of dreams. Bright with lunacy, it is starlight at its best. It the moon in which we dance the secret dance, the moon in which we remember the mad, and jealous love of our gods and goddesses. God of Israel, what did you feel? how they left you alone in that silent sky. silent but for the rumblings of the restless wind and aching thunder. how you would not let them break that contract, break your heart, because a god without a people is not a god for long... is a god with what purpose...what destiny?
but then you read the story again and it was a God who leaned in from the deepest of deeps and the highest of highs, who moved across faceless waters to mold you, and to bring you back to Eden, so you would understand, in all your forced isolation... you still kept within you the breath of the most high. Is this the story of that kind of love? is the kind of love that Shiva knew? and what was it that flowed from that land of the Ganges, that seeped into the Greek tongue, that fell onto the lips of those tribes who were perpetually lost? is it the joining of the soul and the cosmic mind? or do you wrap yourself in long sheets Ikkyu's zen poetry, the wet ink reflecting on your skin, and abandoned the idea of a soul, abandoned any love that binds together...

and so we floated in space

i went to the river and i cleaned my love. and i tried to give it again, but my love was then too old

and you can get dressed in your oiled rags of glory, and your hair full of dirt and sunlight. you can go barefoot in the streets, douse yourself in glossolalia. say that we are haunted by the past like smoke haunts the throat, yet we are unable to cough ourselves pure. And you reach out to hold her as if you were holding onto air, just once though one could sense poison waiting, waiting. you can put on that dusty sackcloth and pull at your hair. you can go to the temple, defiled once again, and mop the blood and replace the stone, but it was the hope you had lost long ago. you can gain another eye and with your insight put demons to dust, but it blurs your mirror. you shine it. you shine it. but the bodhi tree is in its fall... no matter what channel... you destroyer of worlds... you turn the lights on... you turn them off... and no matter how many pieces the setting solar song tossed into the wind, there is no one to gather them. you break the mirror... but you've found yourself in a thousand shards.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biGopjaBGXg

The water's cold and is no longer warm. and so i learned to stitch myself into yet another Frankenstein. another 3 day long season finale, returned from the dead, rise in rating. another light that came back from across the icy waters.

in this world i wear the memories of your touch, a touch so deep it fed me, wear it like a second skin, a second bone.
and what of the end of it, the end of love? does it grab you so tightly that you break apart like the ground breaks when roots are torn away? Are you nothing but the mummy wrapped in its ancient cloth, afraid the death it sealed in will decay even more in the open air?

i journeyed for the 40 days and found myself torn in those 40 ways, but i came back with 40 stories and a new love taken not from the mountain near the sky, but from a garden. it wasn't THE garden, you said, and you would not accept my love

i saw the moon curved into the redness of its shell, falling into the blackness that is space, the space the ocean falls into. The stars above were grafted in the water, phosphorescent life jumping on us, jumping off us. I moved with the water as if i were seaweed caught in a current, but you stood there, eyes out into the darkness. i remember when you kissed me on the cheek, the electric air that hovered between your lips so close to my face, and the soft smoke that fell on my skin.

in the dream, there was fire. it fell from the sky and i remember thinking cuba had hit us with its nukes. and it struck the place we were driving from... and fire swallowed the area. deep in the yellows and oranges. took the green and grey away... and i thought how fortunate it was we escaped. and then beside us, right beside us another spit-fire crashes besides the car. i thought to myself... this is death. and the world began to slow. and i looked to the young woman besides me and kissed her. the world became blue and red with stellar lights from the explosion, swept in the firecracker shades and danced over by the pin drops of starshine. i kissed her again, thinking that in the last moments of life, before the engulfing death, i wanted to end this story with an expression of love... we made it to the bridge, and drove on. i didn't think it a dream then. my life was moved by it, by the thin pyrolyrical living song spoken again... but from further within me. from the lunar lull within me. i do not remember who i kissed. i remember her lips... a glimpse of her eyes... but the face i cannot get back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-oLmOm9vk0

If i understand the story correctly, the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, once had neighbors. and these neighbors, non-muslim, would gather all their waste, all the waste of their household and every morning toss the waste upon the prophet's doorstep. we are supposed to ask ourselves in all honesty how we would react. the prophet acted with patience, and continued on with his day.

... that's when i tried to forget her curly hair and her curvy cuban accent. the tiny fingers i once held within mine and mouth that gave me my first kiss. to bury her favorite color red, the tiny red heartbeat between us, the red shoes, the frida kahlo earrings i could never give her, and smell of freshly baked bread everytime we embraced.

i then in the flash flood i found that piece, the piece of love from the mythic garden. as pure a love as i ever knew, and upon giving it to you, you said, i'm sorry, but no love is a guarantee of a love back...

and you left me suspended by my own love. with no ground to find... gasping for air... in the open sky


and the prophet Muhammad noticed one day there was no waste before his door in the morning light. and he, worried, concerned, went to his neighbors and saw that they were sick and looked after them.
and after the story, he told me that when we are squeezed, like an orange, the truth of us come out. at first, we try to be kind. but with most of us, eventually the anger comes out... the hate... the refusal... the way we shiver in that creature, the night, or the way to try and dissect it, to get at the lights of the nebula, or how we try to run it over with our firsts, shaking at the air as if mix our fury into the sky to redden it. It is then we know we have work to do. It is then we know there is love left in us to find, to create, to understand.

i've loved like moonlight loose in long tree branches and i've loved because of eyes that kissed my soul and smiles that twisted it into a bright pain

and a friend told me love is infinite interest... with the courage to explore

and i could feel the waters rise near my eyes whenever i spoke to her last, the waters not of flooding, but of life. The love that is love.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aRKZFR5imM

my friend Vanessa had the best to say about it... but i forgot what she said.

you broke my heart, but i still have one... thanks to you.
and like you asked me to, i must move on.

No one asked many questions when they came in to start construction on the metaphor. Jobs were desperately needed, and there was talk that this one paid well. We didn't know how long it would take to contruct the metaphor. Micheal said it would only be a month, but as time went on, all of us working at the factory knew that it would take much, much longer than that. We were already behind schedule, so much that the captain reduced our lunch breaks in half. Half of us were too tired to notice, though, and it didn't make a different for the rest. The metaphor had already consumed every moment of their waking mind. Fred Taylor even worked in his sleep; and in the morning, the men spoke of hearing the metaphor "speak." Hughes and I would stand on rails, watching them, flicking on and off with their weilding tools in the mass of restless flesh and ever reshaping metals. He began to get very angry, so angry it affected his work. "I can't believe the captain ordered no women even near the work site. I haven't seen my wife in weeks." Joe, who had been waiting to enter the conversation for a while now, agreed. "We need every man, woman, and child working on the metaphor." I didn't say anything. Most of the town's men were working here. No one else should have to work on the metaphor. Five people had already died, even with the use of heavy machinery to do most of the tough labor. The deaths took a toll on everyone. After the fifth body was found, Tommy tried to run. That's when they locked the doors. Hughes cried. "We don't even know what the metaphor is! They don't tell us anything!" Because of the cold, we used the excess barrells to burn some of the old uniforms. All of us gathered closely to the flames. Henry kept close to me, nearly burning his hands in the fire while staring at the doors. "Maybe us being here is the metaphor. Maybe that was it all along." None of us would have that; we stopped talking to Henry. Soon, however, we began to listen to him again: at the times when we cheered when the sun began to set, or when we barked at the moon shining through the windows until it went away.
. . . Before sleep, we all came together in large clusters as the fires went out. We kept one lit to be safe, to tell ourselves stories, lullabies, of the other world.

When my soul dangles from your eyes,
your deep, redwood eyes,
i feel myself becoming dusk, becoming dust,
becoming daunted into stasis
like a fossil in the sleep of soil;
When I find myself caught in your eyes, Irene,
your cranberry ember, treetop green and shadow ash eyes,
I am aflame with we,
how constellations become snowflakes
in the spiderweb words you cast,
words: text of fire and light,
stone-sink and root-keep dances
that vanish into God,
into the Great Mystery, as the Lakota say,
like the star-trapping night that swallows secrets,
wields mystery, runs through us like lightning
jolts through the wire.
Somatic illuminations,
lost in the mirror-waters,
will speak to this.
...to you, Red Moon,
to you with crimson spirit and sunset hair,
with wolf-wise smiles and skin like lunar light
snagged on the unknown... and beautiful.
And where we make stories
with granite veins,
stories that eat paper and exhale hallucination;
our souls open to braid themselves into
the earth,
so why can't we with each other
| | |
like a coin that caught the
sun in metal,
and then let go,
there are some things
that want to be found,
that want to find you
-----
and if it lives as long as
the dawn you create in
me in the bridges of your smile,
or as the short-bloomed flower,
or like mandalas melting in the
Buddhist rivers
or the cool air of morning,
we will live it for the present,
because that is who we give it to.
As the engineer who
knows ships won't sail
the sky, but makes it
still to carry us over
waters,
at least once,
at least once,
all life in a moment,
open like spaces without
ceilings or walls,
but still with doors ajar.

ease your heavy eyelids, and come with me, for a moment,down a well made of human arms. leave the edges alone for they will bring you in. If you are quiet long enough, you can hear it breathing... down the umbilical cord--GASP--your feet will hit the burnt core of a colored circle...

Did you lose it? Come with me one more time and let me feel the way our skin hooks by the teeth. A good friend knows how to rip one apart like unleavened bread for consumption... come consume me... I saw the unborn fall from your lips, grey and cold. I looked at my hands and saw phalanges, one after the other. I touch myself like running oil.

goddamn it, get on your horse, cowboy. Gotta 'notha Inyan to kill. Goddamn it, let's lynch another one of ol' time sakes. goddamn it, i keep filling myself with back tar but i don't get nothin but more sick. i wanted to become whole, but didn't know i was made of this. I'll give you a raise if you can show me a good time. A penis is surely worth an extra .25 per dollar.  When i kiss, ain't nothin but smoke.

I carry Satan close. I am made in sin. Corruption closer to every heartbeat, the fire to the scrap iron. In the Adversary I find the tension to life. Co-creators ripping me into life...

You're standing on an iris... and the hands are closing in. You're standing on an iris. I wanna turn you inside out.

there were times when i lost myself trying to find the end of night...  mistaking the roads for my skin, and the sky as the covers of my eyes... times where a reflection does not seem like you... you don't just stop... not there, not there.

Staring at your eyes, i don't know whether to freeze in the calm blue or to burn in its reflected light... I am soothed by you (the long curves of desert dunes) and thrilled (the falling pebble shooting across the floor)

This is meant for those who sleep. Who find the ghosts of dreams seeping into the night, manifesting in the cold frost of their glasses, in crevices between every note of music. We find adventure, but will you find me? Disembodied yet so close to you i can feel your lungs expanding. We find adventure, but will you find me?

Paper hats and red crayons. Let's craft a story. I can tell you about the creation of sleep, its soft and quiet pull, the eclipse of the world by the endless black of your eyelids, a long time ago, but when i open my lips, dry from the desertification of the city, to speak to you... the newborn escaping has eyes as open as any tree to the stars. What i am really saying is I trust the exposure of such things to you...like the young skin of a mammal in the cold... like a cloth from  the oceans of sand... Let me into your heart... and into the eager mind...it is a bizarre place in the scathing neon lights and the too-too concerned billboard ads that block the moon from us. What the city has stolen from me, i can find in you. The solar and lunar lights return in the form of your eyes. All of the milk of the valleys travels across your skin. Every fruit bright with sugar in your smile... The spaces that talk to me, the shrines and the inquisitive animals in the words you speak. Rainbows at every curve of your body. Engulfing morning warmth in your concern and the awe of the distant evening in your knowings. As i finish the story, I wonder what am i to you? What songs can i give you across the far rugged mountains... the jagged teeth of this world... what gift will this tramontane have to offer?

We peel through the roads like citrus, like a close shave, like some other metaphor that made you feel you were flying a bit as we came back with our seats on low... Sundaes and fries. Every image elegant against the mind... like the watching the webs of cortex glisten with hanging drops from the mist at dawn. You are dawn, eternal.

So it felt so right it had to be out of place. The new day still under the blackness of before... the silent world roaring with the chant of the revolving heaven... where did your fingers go? I want to hold them. where did your memories rest? Let me ask them questions. Follow me into the where the shadows fall away as i follow you to where the ground grows bright. I remember tossing invisible volley balls back and forth. Whether it was the lack of imaginary exercise combined with jumping and running across the sandpit or whether it  was the feeling of escaping my shell to find that space... the space in between  that places us... i lost my breath.

You came towards me... and i brought you beside me.
Let's talk. Let's say things... and... if i can't speak it, i want to catch the words between my lips and your lips... i felt something i wish to understand. So light and small... but something that won't let go... the feeling of being miles above a canyon... of standing... beneath the immense zenith above you, the clouds... the wind... and beginning to rise... and rise.

It is a type of flight...

I keep to keep such things close to me... want to bring them within and make something incredible... where it grows... and escapes like the humming cry of a trumpet... like a butterfly from what you thought was a leaf...

like what happens when two separate hands... suddenly meet each other...

like the meaning of a song with no words and a title that does not translate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9xfKG8eCbc&feature=related

-for the music while reading; not the video

If I fall asleep in your front seat while you're driving, it is because this feels more like home than any home I've ever known... nowhere, on the road and in the night. And if I snore in your front seat, well I can't control that.

It's as automatic as my desire to touch with you just one more time.

Love, I fear the world is finally reflecting our insides to the last decimal. All our devouring begins to devour us, and I sometimes it's hard to see myself in the distortion. It's all distortion. But when the apocalypse comes, if you ask me to, I will come and find you, though, of course, I might have to find myself first.

Dropping hips to the lull of a jazz bass, let me peel away those eyelids of uncertainty from every pale streetlight. We are soaking in light, dripping in light. Lights on the roads, lights in the bedroom, lights in the kitchen, lights in the boxes of our new age that replace griots and griotes. The night sky crying and swarming with stars, pulsing with the pupil of moon, becomes a secret. We have brought the stars to earth with a light switch, so let me pull the plug for a moment. We can watch your smoke, twisting in beautiful agony like ghosts from a paper tomb. I took a drag and felt my body burn.



In Haiti, they will eat mud and vegetable oil because food prices are too high. The parasites that await in the dirt resemble those waiting in our global circuit as we eat with sharp metallic extensions of our teeth and fingers. I think there are more metaphors to be found as “cars become the new pedestrians” and digitized charisma bewitches our bands and tribes. Our most precious natural resource is irony as my homestead is on the road, gnarling on oil.

Oil... the black blood...death. We create giant teeth and claws to dig the graves of the Jurassic, to dig the graves of our ancestors, from algae algorithms into a rhythmic tyrannosaurus hex. The ghosts of the dead haunt us as our vampiric thirst meets day... Nesting in the hollows of the largest genocide the world has ever seen, we wonder why we are so sick with it. The state is founded on ghosts and human beasts of burden... and oil... Maurice said oil destroys culture. When a nation has oil, it drowns in its production, importing pretty fabrics while its own rips apart. We compartmentalize and run the wheel, samsara, awaiting our treats, unaware that the lifespan of anything decreases in a cage...

...We are bored, oh, we are bored. In retreat from hyperdrive, our disillusions at critical mass, we, like children in front the tele, stare hypnotized by the pattern of lights. Stretched thin as our nerves are shot halfway cross the universe, our spine driven into dust. We are bored, oh god, we are bored. Caught in a screen door held tight by the frame of mouths screaming for retribution,we are everywhere in the world, in the universe, and consequently nowhere at all. In China, in Kenya, in the bloodlines of South America and the pretty spiderwebs of Europe. I am surprised to find I have a body still, as the disembodiment of electric media inside me refuses to tell me the message and instead sends me halfway cross the millennium. So immediate, it beckons my help, but my hands don't reach beyond my limbs. Idols of Hermes in every cornea, my mouths of dripping with data. Bored, all pantheons in cyberspace, we are bored.

But “boredom is horror spread thin.”

Eating the flesh of virgins to imagine innocence, we choke on the bones, on the reminders of our deed.

This is a love story gone horribly wrong.

...I reach my hands, love, through the sunroof. The cold winds peel my skin away into the icy stream of near-sky. Sometimes we feel like angles traveling the stars, though we're crazed primates amongst electric forest fires. You sing as if you're the ferryman, carrying my soul through every Styx, Charon, every Styx. You turned off the lights and held my hand, and brought me through the rare silence into caverns of your thoughts, whispering canvas onto canvas... and I heard the voices of your secrets in the undulating curves of the jazz music, pulsating like a direct current into the air, into my chest... You brought me to your house. You gave me my deepest undercurrent... for a moment, for a moment, I felt more than intimacy and more than affection, more than parlor trick awe and firework wonder, and that which we cannot name we do not pass in silence. We speak with a language we forgot, we speak with a depth, with your ghost pressed into another... it's something worth living for. It's one of the few things that still mean anything.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRTjgPktoM&feature=related

You said, once, you liked me because I was a recognizer. Who else hears you? Hears what you cannot say? Who else did you bring here? Whatever incarnations stood with you before, it has been a while, you said, such a long time as you closed your eyes and grabber my fingers close... I've never been closer to anything in my life. In my life, everything is scattered and there is no one voice, only dissonance, even if beautiful dissonance, wrapped in warped static. The pale orange through your glass door, the soft light of your laptop, the empty kitchen, the darkness...
“Come on to my house, to my-y house, I'm gonna give you candy.”
I washed your dishes and we cleaned your room. You have the most amazing smile as you dance across the floor.


But it's as serious as any blood sacrifice. For, my Offerer, I have been often desperate to entertain myself, mostly in silence. I have been often desperate to gaze into the box to watch film-craft, hoping the bones in my pocket will absorb the wandering evil of these atmospheres. I hear eating charred toast every once in a while is good for you, and I never show my true face. When I do, no one is listening. You have heard me before I speak a word. I have been so idle and apathetic, I have been so bored, but my Offerer, boredom is horror spread thin. And it is the longest rising action, the ice, the frail ice that I know will break and emerge me in the freezing waters of loneliness and decay.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFDdIIITJ08&feature=related

You have exorcised every demon. And whenever you leave, the terror begins again. I write as a prayer to dispel evil. So much evil, we choke on it.

As Marshall McLuhan tells us, Narcissus comes from the Greek word “narcosis” which means “numbness.” Narcissus became numb. He extended himself but did not recognize it. Retreating, he became a closed system. Narcissus never knew it was his reflection... he thought it was something else. The overstimulation caused him to go into shock. We are overstimulized. We go into shock as a defense mechanism. We become closed systems, sensitive to our own egos. Autoamputation. I find myself in a loop. A strange loop. I become numb to it all... to what's happening to us, to me.

And Love, you are one of the few things left that lights me and refuses to leave me numb.

The loop. We are tying in all we've seen begin. And if we all cease to burn the circle is complete. My friend, we have found so many curses, so many swears. Few words are left to bless things. We have spent much time damning, fucking, bitching, dicking, shitting... Through the ages we've been clearing stages for us to stand alone to face God, the mystery, the creatrix, and we have developed no words to say to It, no mysteries to reveal. There is no tradition we have continued, no relic left. Perhaps some of us will offer our space program or our latest synthetic hallucinogen. Perhaps another warhead or a nude (though not naked) model. Perhaps It's share in stock.

We stare back at our culture, seeing only ourselves...

Some say we fall most in love with images of ourselves. I just think there's something between us. In the depths of us. Linked. You can't offer me when it comes. I can't offer you. Perhaps we can offer what we share.

It is the closest thing to sacred I know. I don't expect many others to understand. It's the figure and the ground. More so, it is touch carried into mystery.

That and the latest The Mars Volta album.

Baraka.


http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:_Zf0AtEaYKcJ:www.arch.kth.se/poiesis/marshallmcluhan.htm+the+gadget+lover+narcissus+autoamputation&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a
-to help understand the blog

The still moth against the red column.

The smoke winding from the ashtray.

I know nowhere else to go.

 

Shadows crawling across brick walls.

The smoke winding from the ashtray.

I hold your hand to feel your skin.

 

The still moth against the red column.

Shadows crawling across brick walls.

The night nibbles where the light forgets…

 Don’t forget me.

 

 

Day spills into night like paint crashing upon a canvas.

Will your hands spill into me?

You slash with color the blur of shadow.

You break open me like a jar of ice and nectar.

 

Like the red brims through the yellow obsolescing the night,

You overwhelm me.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtOtV-gE3YQ

"I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda in the West is carried out by experts who have had the best training in the world — in the field of advertizing — and have mastered the techniques with exceptional proficiency ... Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude and obvious ... I think that the fundamental difference between our worlds, with respect to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to believe yours ... and we tend to disbelieve ours."
- Soviet correspondent based five years in the U.S.

there is a man standing near the corner of two walls. He has black pants, black shoes, and a black jacket with thin white stripes discovering the edges of themselves. His skin is dark. I see the back of his head as i walk towards him and imagine him smoking. sometimes, friend, i want the world to go black... sometimes friend... i want us all red.

i sit under the palm tree and feel the wind coming and going, pulling the life of my skin  with its wild directions. who pulls the wind? i take some of the wood beneath me and i bring it to my nostrils... the soft tan against the deep mahogany of my skin, besides the dark tree, against the sharp green of the grass... the wind is cool and gentle. who pulls the color? who pulls this life...

Friend, i smell her hair against me even when she is not here.

...I wonder what we lost. I think about the older ones, the ones from long ago. The ones wore no shoes. the ones that hunted the food they ate. Some say they were all crazy and that is why they died.  Some say they had no God and that is why they died.
                                  You see, i have this book. Indigenous Theories of Contagious Disease. It starts off by telling us indigenous healers provide 80% of the medical services worldwide. i haven't read much of this book. But focuses on southern Africa and their medicine. They have many theories about where diseases and illness comes from and they are much like our theories. They have theories about how to cure these diseases and they are a bit different than ours. Whether herbs or magic, these cures worked... as my Anthropology professor tells me, magic often works. A drought in Morocco for four years and the king tells everyone to pray. and people are pouring water off their roofs--imagine! their precious water... and then... it rains. This is not a single case. Many of these people are ignored by us who have faith in our science. But if many of the diseases they are dying from now are not cured it is because these diseases are not their diseases. It may also be because after years of oppression some of their knowledge is lost. I don't know. I will not finish this book.

I go to some events on campus and my friend tells me Iraq in the worse humanitarian crises in the world. In four years more displaced and killed than in all of Sudan. There are videos of soldiers talking about how they killed children.

and i hug her and smile. I hug her and smell her hair.

"Ogun's laugh is not a laughing matter."

Ogun kills and he creates.

Some mythic figures live on... Oedipus, Siva, Aphrodite, Thor...
and there is one god with many faces across the lands of West Africa and throughout the cities and countrysides of South America, and spreading into those States United.

And his name is Ogun.

the watercolor grey of the concrete is freckled with dark stains where my feet touch and where my eyes gaze upwards. Light drones on through jaundice plastic or long rectangular florescence. It is this place of light... of illuminations that attracts so many insects... it on the corners of these lights the spiders construct their nests. What grows there is not simply life, but death becoming life.

Ogun is popularly known as the god of hunting, iron, and warfare, including modern technology in our times--anything involving metal, danger, or transportation... transportation. Maybe one can still hear the "Ogun chant" played on the radio when Nigerians changed driving to the left to right side of the road... opening the door to understanding an unusual event.

His two images... one that is terrifying ( violent warrior fully armed, endowed with fearful charms and medicines to kill his enemies) and one of a culture's ideal male (leader known for his sexual prowess who nurtures, protects, and "relentlessly pursues truth, equity, and justice"). Ogun is of the creator-destroyer archetype. "Ogun has many faces."

The spiders, light brown and the size of a child's palm gather and wait... wait. Looking at the ceiling the other night the world changed. I was walking around the ceiling, it was a wheel and i was falling around it, the bending cycle of light and shadow in the parking lot, at the edge of the open sidewalk-street where the night sky gazes.

His devotees display fiery outbursts of anger to an extent that may heedlessly harm bystanders and as easily his devotees may focus on Ogun's humanitarianism and self-reliance with "poignant recitations of heroic deeds that require outstanding levels of courage and leadership."

Thinking of Ogun as a system of classifying information--according to an inclusive or polythetic, principle--shifts the discussion of meaning. Bodies where codes flow.
As Durkheim and Mauss tell us, deities advance understanding, unifies knowledge, and gives a "first philosophy of nature," representing a theory of what life is or is about.

A deity survives primarily because of its meaning. No doubt that Ogun's popularity rose with the industrial revolution.

"Ogun clears land [and heads] for the  gods."

Iron is a mixture and I am mixed in the ideas of these intersecting world. I look at myself  a part of the whole of Ogun. I look to him as a part of my whole becoming.

Ogun can purify those who have killed.

Ogun is a site where history collects, compresses obscures and loses itself, along with the dialectical relationship between material conditions and surviving ideologies... in places escaping institutionalization and bureaucracy, it is polythetic.

As a consequence of his harmful or beneficial acts he is viewed either as a lonely, isolated figure--the quintessential marginal man or in contrast, a central force whose revolutionary and creative acts give rise to new social forms.

Ogun kills and he creates. His iron tools increase productivity but are used also to destroy the innocent. He eliminates old political orders so that new ones may grow. As a hunter he depletes the natural world to nourish the cultural one.

When I think of her and how i lost our relationship, i wonder what kind of person i am. When I think of the life i wanted to create and the damage it caused,  i wonder what kind of person i am. When i feel my lips against hers in a memory and her hand on my shoulders, i wonder if she looks upon those same images with regret... even disgust... because those moments were so beautiful to me. and for me to get joy out of something that maybe be poison to her, i wonder what kind of person i am.

"On a more abstract level, it can be said that Ogun is a metaphoric representation of the realization that people create the means to destroy themselves. He stands for humans' collective attempts to govern, not what is out of control in nature, but what is out of control in culture. He represents not so much what is inexplicable, unseen, or unknown, as what is known but not under control. He is a symbolic recognition of human limitations--human frailty,... and it is this kind of limitation that accounts for his lack of control."
The plight of the human condition inflicted by self-insight and self-recognition. Humans realize that their actions have consequences that they cannot predict and as a result that no perfect balance can be brought between being in control and being out of control..

i was out of control.

"Ogun, the hoe that opens the earth to bury us."
"we could not be humans, so the philosophy of Ogun goes, seeking control of ourselves and our social existence, if we did not experience the out-of-control phases that are necessary parts of reproducing and expanding the powers that make human existence possible." It is through will that we overcome our helplessness."

Within this contrast, definition is formed. There i am, in the contrast. And either the tension will be resolved or it will tear us apart to new life. And Ogun is neither good nor bad and yet i believe he can both. Fierce and terrible, but civilized he demanded justice, fair play, and integrity. "If appeased, he was tolerant adn protectiev, especially of the poor and dispossessed.

"Where does one meet him?
One meets him in the place of battle;
One meets him in the place of wrangling:
One meets him in the place where torrents of blood
fill with longing, as a cup of water does the thirsty."

Ogun, will you purify me? I have killed some hope. Ogou, will you purify for i have brought destruction here and no peace. Gu, i speak to you in your many names.

"Throughout the lives of persons who live according to Yoruba ways, Ogun 'opens the roads,' helping them to actualize their iwa, their character, their personality, and destiny."

For the Yoruba, beauty possesses power, the power to move and change us in substantial ways.  There is no distinction between "aesthetic" and "empowering" body arts. The body is the mind.

The body is the mind. And Ogun leaves his mark on the interior as well. And the paintbrush is a symbolic knife...

And she asked me to paint her something in order that i may achieve forgiveness.

... "there descended once upon our land a time of darkness and chaos. Fires destroyed our forests, the oceans went wild, and the heavens forgot how to make rain. Pregnant women gave birth to goats, not babies. Water holes dried up, the ground became like stone. There was no harvest. Mothers went mad watching their children die of hunger. Fights broke out among our people..."

These days i find myself not juxtaposed between the sky and ground but in the small corners and crevices between light and shadow, florescence and concrete. The threads that compose Reality become more and more irrelevant with every new moon. Like Ogun, i take on many faces. Stretching my fingers in the air and feeling the energy arising from varying degrees of difference, finding metaphors to mediate between mystery and necessity. Perhaps there are entities in workshops within uncovering the blueprints of reinvention and  metallurgy for meta(L)morphosis 

I lost Prometheus once. It was in New Orleans before the hurricane, in the dark grey stones of the French Quarter. It rained an hour before and in the puddle i saw my reflection twisted by the ripples from another's footstep. That's when...

it was told to me by the machines that there was a battle between god and death and in that battle Death wounded god, and that wound became the Sky, that the earth was god's skin healing, healing but like our dead skin it fell away. It will still, however, try to heal and become god again.

Today i was reminded of solitude. And though we are never really alone, there often exists no one to tell one's secrets to. And attempt to connect through the holes in our body, and when the mouth cannot speak, we will try to make wounds in  you to hear you. So what is inside can come outside. But there are other ways. There are tricks the Spider knows...
i try not to look into your eyes. but when i do, in your eyes i see the other world. Tezcatlipoca is staring back at me, awaiting shattering eyes...

And Legba hides in the backseat of a Spider's jeep.

But it was not always like this. This is what we tell ourselves in myths. But it will not always be like this is  what we find in hope.

And as days die into younger days, i find more and more that i am only intimate with shadows and hallways, artificial lights and tree bark, neon and concrete, sky and spiderwebs. I don't think i am putting you on as an audience when i write these notes. I think i am trying to take you off, trying to put me aside and be intimate.

But i cannot now because the library is closing and i can't feel it. I take these buckets and try to give back to the pool of light from the monitor. I try to open myself but...

I miss your fingers. I miss opening up to travel. So instead, i talk to trees and i talk to circuits... i find spirits where there may only be delusion. I try to find you but i just may find the spider's web instead. And there is of course always Tezcatlipoca staring through us. I say

The wicasa wakan wants to be by himself. He wants to be away from the crowd, from everyday matters. He likes to meditate, leaning again a tree or rock, feeling the earth move beneath him, feeling the weight of that big flaming sky upon him. That way he can figure things out. Closing his eyes, he sees many things clearly. What you see with your eyes shut is what counts.
The wicasa wakan loves the silence, wrapping it around himself like a blanket--a loud silence with a voice

Faces forming in a stream of bodies bouncing down the concrete path where the sun talks with shadows upon the fallen leaves of autumn. And someone's red hair. A man in sweating as he yells but he does not see the crowd that  sees him. I know this kind of man. He is staring at something inside himself. He is staring at a demon amorphous across the collection of jeans and sunglasses. I bet he was born in one of those hospitals where people play dress up and dissect toys. I bet he turned on the box that turned you off. I bet he was never given a name, not a real one, but just a tag that he feels the need to remove because it makes his skin itch. Yes, this kind of man.

Once i knew a young woman with dark curly hair and my arms would wrap around her arms wrapping around me and it felt as if you were rolling down something rolling around you... for an instant and an instant only. Today i saw the same young woman except i was not near her and i could not smell her hair. When Iriguay mentions the phallus, she tells us that it is in constant need of a hand, a language, of something other than itself to be satisfied. When Iriguay talks to me from the page, she says the phallus also needs to dominate.

Daiquiri: What if i am not the phallus?
Luce: That's something only children ask.

...Ellul tells us that everything in the Bible is contradiction and that there is revelation only as the contractions hold together... that truth is made up of actual contradiction, that the "either-or" mode the West has been engaged in for centuries has caused us to forget the great synthesis. "But (I would say almost ontologically) we are unable to accept the existence of opposites or to hold together two ends of a chain that are logically exclusive." The knowing in great synthesis is not the knowing of technique. The knowing of technique... is a knowledge of disjunction and exclusion...

"It is Ellul's charge that technique is an essentially reductionistic intentionality and that reducing all to the political is the first phase of its dominance. If technique is all-encompassing, that is not Ellul's fault."

            The sky looked even more beautiful with the sunglasses on. Orange tint giving contrast to the blue and white, a dialog now forming on                 the lens.    I think something in the pink wig i was wearing caused me to cough. So eventually i took it off.

Ghosts, I hear, often repeat the tasks they've done in life. I look to the sky... distant. I've begun to notice all sky  gods are male. Ellul says that when he was alive, he was never surrounded by music like we are today. There is music everywhere today. It is a constant enclosure, regenerating a certain state of neurochemical rewiring...
Friend, did you know the males of the Crocodile People, of the Bakwena tribe, will go through scarification, hundreds maybe thousands of scars on their bodies, tiny cuts covered with ash, to become a man. The blood loss during the rite of passage is considered the mother's blood. After this ritual, i hear, you are no longer related to her.

Ellul became a Marxist in his teens and a Christian at 22.

not finished yet

New mouths open up.