Roque Dalton, "Juan Cunjama, Sorcerer," trans. Hardie St. Martin

I.

My old skin
snake skin
my skin with its pale hair
holding up under waves of rain
my laughing knife-wound my knees
so solemn in their decrepitude
showing through these rags

Loved but chaste my body
kept a good distance away
from the woman caught in summer's claws
my foot the winner my hoof fool-proof
against the thorns on far-off trails

My grime my proud
loathing for the days of man
my arm and my staff sticking out
like two long-dried-up rivers 
my bones put together with ashes and spit
my veins the fire in them snuffed out
my despair with its yellow teeth
in a last-ditch fight against a laughing mask

My love the forgotten
look of the sulking boy
my manly fear
my courage of a frightened man
the weariness that makes me 
walk on

 II.

The devil and god one and the same,
the wings of the dead
make a single terrified sound

All things are the same man has only 
to arouse slow powers from their sleep
and take over the deep secrets of life
 
I know what I'm telling you
all I need is the chemistry
of black prayer to honor your footsteps
for you I blend the scattered voice of herbs
in vials never reached by the sun
I am the only free man
the only one without masters
under my roof of unlit flowers
I sleep in a coffin of red pine
and I won't die this will be my death
one more dream an awakening
simply put off for another time

My body and its wondrous glass
between it and the white worm
while hand in hand with Tlaloc
the real me walks in each raindrop
over the trees and the sea

Jaime de Angulo, Shaman Songs

Go away, big fly, go away!
Don't bother me, big fly.
I am dreaming.






Busy bee flying back to crowded hive,
You are no totem for shaman seeking power!
I am looking for a locust in the grass,
A locust whirring in the sunlight.






i will go the mountain to-night!
he will come, he will come!
he will scare me.






I climb the mountain
I am looking for a crater lake
Don't anybody follow me, I am in trouble
I must sing my bitterness to the lake,
Alone.






Coyote, my power, come!
Through the wind I call you
Through the rain, in the storm,
I, a young man, am calling you
Answer what's in my heart.






I am talking to the lake.
I am talking to all in the lake.
I am not a human being.






I am a head rolling down the hill.
I am a head calling for my power.






I run down the mountain.
I come from the lake
My power is a howling wind.






By the dark pool at sunset
the puma waits.
The shadows rise, clutching the night
i dare not go back.

Helena Blavatsky, from Isis Unveiled

If Brasseur de Bourbourg and the Chevalier des Mousseaux, had so much at heart to trace the identity of the Mexicans with the Canaanites, they might have found far better and weightier proofs than by showing both the "accursed" descendants of Ham. For instance, they might have pointed to the Nargal, the Chaldean and Assyrian chief of the Magi (Rab-Mag) and the Nagal, the chief sorcerer of the Mexican Indians. Both derive their names from Nergal-Sarezer, the Assyrian god, and both have the same faculties, or powers to have an attendant daemon with whom they identify themselves completely. The Chaldean and Assyrian Nargal kept his daemon, in the shape of some animal considered sacred, inside the temple; the Indian Nagal keeps his wherever he can — in the neighboring lake, or wood, or in the house, under the shape of a house-hold animal.**

We find the Catholic World, newspaper, in a recent number, bitterly complaining that the old Pagan element of the aboriginal inhabitants of America does not seem to be utterly dead in the United States. Even where tribes have been for long years under the care of Christian teachers, heathen rites are practiced in secret, and crypto-paganism, or nagualism, flourishes now, as in the days of Montezuma. It says: "Nagualism and voodoo-worship" — as it calls these two strange sects — "are direct devil-worship. A report addressed to the Cortes in 1812, by Don Pedro Baptista Pino, says: 'All the pueblos have their artufas — so the natives call subterranean rooms with only a single door, where they assemble to perform their feasts, and hold meetings. These are impenetrable temples . . . and the doors are always closed on the Spaniards.

" 'All these pueblos, in spite of the sway which religion has had over them, cannot forget a part of the beliefs which have been transmitted to them, and which they are careful to transmit to their descendants. Hence come the adoration they render the sun and moon, and other heavenly bodies, the respect they entertain for fire, etc.

" 'The pueblo chiefs seem to be at the same time priests; they perform various simple rites, by which the power of the sun and of Montezuma is recognized, as well as the power (according to some accounts) of the Great Snake, to whom, by order of Montezuma, they are to look for life. They also officiate in certain ceremonies with which they pray for rain. There are painted representations of the Great Snake, together with that of a misshapen, red-haired man, declared to stand for Montezuma. Of this last there was also, in the year 1845, in the pueblo of Laguna, a rude effigy or idol, intended, apparently, to represent only the head of the deity…' "*

The perfect identity of the rites, ceremonies, traditions, and even the names of the deities, among the Mexicans and ancient Babylonians and Egyptians, are a sufficient proof of South America being peopled by a colony which mysteriously found its way across the Atlantic. When? at what period? History is silent on that point; but those who consider that there is no tradition, sanctified by ages, without a certain sediment of truth at the bottom of it, believe in the Atlantis-legend. There are, scattered throughout the world, a handful of thoughtful and solitary students, who pass their lives in obscurity, far from the rumors of the world, studying the great problems of the physical and spiritual universes. They have their secret records in which are preserved the fruits of the scholastic labors of the long line of recluses whose successors they are. The knowledge of their early ancestors, the sages of India, Babylonia, Nineveh, and the imperial Thebes; the legends and traditions commented upon by the masters of Solon, Pythagoras, and Plato, in the marble halls of Heliopolis and Sais; traditions which, in their days, already seemed to hardly glimmer from behind the foggy curtain of the past; — all this, and much more, is recorded on indestructible parchment, and passed with jealous care from one adept to another. These men believe the story of the Atlantis to be no fable, but maintain that at different epochs of the past huge islands, and even continents, existed where now there is but a wild waste of waters. In those submerged temples and libraries the archaeologist would find, could he but explore them, the materials for filling all the gaps that now exist in what we imagine is history. They say that at a remote epoch a traveller could traverse what is now the Atlantic Ocean, almost the entire distance by land, crossing in boats from one island to another, where narrow straits then existed.

Our suspicion as to the relationship of the cis-Atlantic and trans-Atlantic races is strengthened upon reading about the wonders wrought by Quetzo-Cohuatl, the Mexican magician. His wand must be closely-related to the traditional sapphire-stick of Moses, the stick which bloomed in the garden of Raguel-Jethro, his father-in-law, and upon which was engraved the ineffable name. The "four men" described as the real four ancestors of the human race, "who were neither begotten by the gods, nor born of woman," but whose "creation was a wonder wrought by the Creator," and who were made after three attempts at manufacturing men had failed, equally present some striking points of similarity with the esoteric explanations of the Hermetists;* they also undeniably recall the four sons of God of the Egyptian theogony. Moreover, as any one may infer, the resemblance of this myth to the narrative related in Genesis, will be apparent to even a superficial observer. These four ancestors "could reason and speak, their sight was unlimited, and they knew all things at once."** When "they had rendered thanks to their Creator for their existence, the gods were frightened, and they breathed a cloud over the eyes of men that they might see a certain distance only, and not be like the gods themselves." This bears directly upon the sentence in Genesis, "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life," etc. Then, again, "While they were asleep God gave them wives," etc.

Exuma, "The Obeah Man" (1970)

Gonzalo Ceja, "Lengua"

Jorge Sanjinés, "La nación clandestina" (1989)

Roberto Tejada, from Gift & Verdict

Not a word of my surrounding not a half-whispered
go to catch the rattled ought of a third concurrent

universe unlatched the more you wait, chalk drawn
thick of old around the marred bodies left

by the citizen squads our authorities facilitate, fail
to prosecute, guilt being therefore—quote/unquote

or so the papers—a ‘willful negligence,’ a ‘scathing
complicity’ in the bloodlust rife until ‘wolves

lower’ incite the end of illness, until the highland
collide of cricket jaguar issue running water

when physical comfort, when bodily prowess
and sovereign shape are rendered command

over the meaning of a nimbus once in sprigs
of goldenrod or Indian paintbrush, chalice

owing to rock crystal and featherwork, ivory!
carved in supple limbs, remote gazes and crusty

wounds, gold-leaf reredos in bellows pyramidal
from an organ pipe: an opulence wrought from

the nightmare of native oblation, of X-ian zeal
waged on local hands in effigies, Saint James

the Greater made in Goa and the Philippines,
or Rose of Lima, in a ministry of Indians

and slaves fallen victim to epidemic, heroically
to God and in penitential practice so extravagant

—cat claws and fish bones across her wasted
flesh—as to be the subject of ecclesiastic inquiry

into questions of faith, soundness of mind
stretched the length and breadth of his midrib

and torso in taut spasms, teeth clenched and lips
in a slather of animal darkness in time spent under

thickets, our twin intelligence a forearm and fist
in fast strokes around gleam and edge, tips

wet with each other, then deeper, to a clump
of hair and fingers guiding the back of his

head, mouth over gloss and curvature, blade
inextinguishable when too-slow a swelter released

in sounds of who, whose ah spread soaked along
his back and thighs rubbed sleek across

the wonder imperfections of form, lips abruptly
pursed to each moan pillowed by the sudden

hush of skin a spirograph, his dark upper
eyelids and lashes down his own limbs

now in aftermath-order and lucible enormity

Oswald de Andrade, "Cannibal Manifesto" aka "Brazilwood Manifesto," trans. Mary Ann Caws and Claudia Caliman

Only Cannibalism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. 

The unique law of the world. The disguised expression of all individualisms, all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties. 

Tupi or not tupi that is the question.

Against all catechisms. And against the mother of the Gracos.

I am only interested in what’s not mine. The law of men. The law of the cannibal.

We are tired of all those suspicious Catholic husbands in plays. Freud finished off the enigma of woman and the other recent psychological seers. 

What dominated over truth was clothing, an impermeable layer between the interior world and the exterior world. Reaction against people in clothes. The American cinema will tell us about this. 

Sons of the sun, mother of living creatures. Fiercely met and loved, with all the hypocrisy of longing: importation, exchange, and tourists. In the country of the big snake. 

It’s because we never had grammatical structures or collections of old vegetables. And we never knew urban from suburban, frontier country from continental. Lazy on the world map of Brazil.

One participating consciousness, one religious rhythm.

Against all the importers of canned conscience. For the palpable existence of life. And let Levy-Bruhl go study prelogical mentality.

We want the Cariba Revolution. Bigger than the French Revolution. For the unification of all the efficient revolutions for the sake of human beings. Without us, Europe would not even have had its paltry declaration of the rights of men.

The golden age proclaimed by America. The golden age. And all the girls.

Filiation. The contact with the Brazilian Cariba Indians. Ou Villegaignon print terre. Montaigne. Natural man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the Surrealist Revolution and the technological barbarity of Keyserling. We’re moving right along. 

We were never baptized. We live with the right to be asleep. We had Christ born in Bahia. Or in Belem do Pata.

But for ourselves, we never admitted the birth of logic.

Against Father Vieira, the Priest. Who made our first loan, to get a commission. The illiterate king told him: put this on paper but without too much talk. So the loan was made. Brazilian sugar was accounted for. Father Vieira left the money in Portugal and just brought us the talk.

The spirit refuses to conceive spirit without body. Anthropomorphism. Necessity of cannibalistic vaccine. For proper balance against the religions of the meridian. And exterior inquisitions.

We can only be present to the hearing world.

We had the right codification of vengeance. The codified science of Magic. Cannibalism. For the permanent transformation of taboo into totem.

Against the reversible world and objectified ideas. Made into cadavers. The halt of dynamic thinking. The individual a victim of the system. Source of classic injustices. Of romantic injustices. And the forgetfulness of interior conquests.

Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays.

Cariba instinct.

Death and life of hypotheses. From the equation I coming from the Cosmos to the axiom Cosmos coming from the I. Subsistence. Knowledge. Cannibalism.

Against the vegetable elites. In communication with solitude.

We were never baptized. We had the Carnival. The Indian dressed as a Senator of the Empire. Acting the part of Pitt. Or playing in the operas of Alencar with many good Portuguese feelings.

We already had communism. We already had a surrealist language. The golden age.

Catiti Catiti
Imara Notia
Notia Imara
Ipeju*

Magic and life. We had relations and distribution of fiscal property, moral property, and honorific property. And we knew how to transport mystery and death with the help of a few grammatical forms.

I asked a man what was Right. He answered me that it was the assurance of the full exercise of possibilities. That man was called Galli Mathias. I ate him.

The only place there is no determinism is where there is mystery. But what has that to do with us?

Against the stories of men that begin in Cape Finisterre. The world without dates. Without rubrics. Without Napoleon. Without Caesar.

The fixation of progress by means of catalogues and television sets. Only with machinery. And blood transfusions.

Against antagonistic sublimations brought over in sailing ships.

Against the truth of the poor missionaries, defined through the wisdom of a cannibal, the Viscount of Cairo – It is a lie repeated many times.

But no crusaders came to us. They were fugitives from a civilization that we are eating up, because we are strong and as vindictive as the land turtles.

Only God is the conscience of the Uncreated Universe, Guaraci is the mother of all living creatures. Jaci is the mother of vegetables.

We never had any speculation. But we believed in divination. We had Politics, that is, the science of distribution. And a socio-planetary system. 

Migrations. The flight from tedious states. Against urban scleroses. Against Conservatives and speculative boredom.

From William James and Voronoff. Transfiguration of taboo into totem. Cannibalism.

The pater familias is the creation of the stork fable: a real ignorance of things, a tale of imagination and a feeling of authority in front of curious crowds. 

We have to start from a profound atheism in order to reach the idea of God. But the Cariba did not have to make anything precise. Because they had Guaraci.

The created object reacts like the Fallen Angel. Ever since, Moses has been wandering about. What is that to us?

Before two Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil discovered happiness. 

Against the Indian de tocheiro. The Indian son of Mary, the godson of Catherine of Médicis and the son-in-law of Don Antonio de Mariz.

Happiness is the real proof.

No Pindorama matriarchy. 

Against Memory the source of habit. Renewed for personal experience.

We are concrete. We take account of ideas, we react, we burn people in the public squares. We suppress ideas and other kinds of paralysis. Through screenplays. To believe in our signs, to believe in our instruments and our stars.

Against Goethe, against the mother of the Gracos, and the Court of Don Juan VI.

Happiness is the real proof.

The struggle between what we might call the Uncreated and the Created – illustrated by the permanent contradiction of man and his taboo. Daily love and the capitalist modus vivendi. Cannibalism. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into a totem. The human adventure. Earthly finality. However, only the pure elite manage to realize carnal cannibalism within, some sense of life, avoiding all the evils Freud identified, those religious evils. What yields nothing is a sublimation of the sexual instinct. It is a thermometric scale of cannibalist instinct. Once carnal, it turns elective and creates friendship. Affectivity, or love. Speculative, science. It deviates and transfers. We arrive at utter vilification. In base cannibalism, our baptized sins agglomerate – envy, usury, calumny, or murder. A plague from the so-called cultured and Christianized, it’s what we are acting against. Cannibals.

Against Anchieta singing the eleven thousand virgins in the land of Iracema – the patriarch Joa Ramalho the founder of Sao Paulo.

Our independence was never proclaimed. A typical phrase of Don Juan VI – My son, put this crown on your head, before some adventurer does it! We expel the dynasty. We have to get rid of the Braganza spirit, the ordinations and snuff of Maria da Fonte.

Against social reality, dressed and oppressive, defined by Freud – in reality we are complex, we are crazy, we are prostitutes and without prisons of the Pindorama matriarchy.

Note: *"The New Moon, or the Lua Nova, blows in Everyman remembrances of me" from The Savages, by Couto Magalhaes.

Felipe Alfau, from "Chromos"

The moment one learns English, complications set in. Try as one may, one cannot elude this conclusion, one must inevitably come back to it. This applies to all persons, including those born to the language and, at times, even more so to Latins, including Spaniards. It manifests itself in an awareness of implications and intricacies to which one had never given a thought; it afflicts one with that officiousness of philosophy which, having no business of its own, gets in everybody's way and, in the case of Latins, they lose that racial characteristic of taking things for granted and leaving them to their own devices without inquiring into causes, motives or ends, to meddle indiscreetly into reasons which are none of one's affair and to become not only self-conscious, but conscious of other things which never gave a damn for one's existence.


In the words of my friend Don Pedro, of whom more later, this could never happen to a Spaniard who speaks only Spanish. We are more direct but, according to him, when we enter the English-speaking world, we find the most elementary things questioned, growing in complexity without bounds; we experience, see or hear about problems which either did not exist for us or were disposed of in what he calls that brachistological fashion of which we are masters: nervous breakdowns, social equality, marital maladjustment and beholding Oedipus in an unfavorable light, friendships with those women intellectualoids whom Don Pedro has baptized perfect examples of feminine putritude, psycho-neuroses, and hallucinations, etc., leading one gently but forcibly from a happy world of reflexes of which one was never aware, to a world of analytical reasoning of which one is continuously aware, which closes in like a vise of missionary tenacity and culminates in such a collapse of the simple as questioning the meaning of meaning.


According to Don Pedro, a Spaniard speaking English is indeed a most incongruous phenomenon and the acquisition of this other language, far from increasing his understanding of life, if this were possible, only renders it hopelessly muddled and obscure. He finds himself encumbered with too much equipment for what had been, after all, a process as plain as living and while perhaps becoming glib and searching if oblique and indirect, in discussing culturesque fads and interrelated topics of doubtful value even in the English market, he gradually loses his capacity to see and think straight until he emerges with all other English-speaking persons in complete incapacity to understand the obvious. It is disconcerting. 

Kenneth M. Morrison, “The Cosmos as Intersubjective: Native American Other-Than-Human Persons”

Hallowell anticipates what Dennis Tedlock and Karl Mannheim (1995) call dialogical anthropology, a view that seeks to understand cultural reality as it emerges in engaged and embattled conversation. In center-staging such a conversation between humans and cosmic beings, Hallowell rejects a spiritual view of religion. He favors, instead, locating religious life in the world as a matter of responsibility between human and other kinds of being. Hallowell also prefigures current concerns for understanding human reality in terms of its sensual character, particularly in relationship to the body, and the externalization of self which occurs in acts of breath, song, dance, and gesture (see Classen 1993a and b). In demonstrating that religious life transpires in the ethical acts of powerful persons (Lee 1959), Hallowell points to the provocative insight that Native American religious life is negotiated between humans and other kinds of personal beings (Fienup-Riordan 1983).

Hallowell lays out interpretive principles which are still poorly understood. He examines what he called ‘a relatively unexplored territory – ethno-metaphysics’ (1975, 143)… In demonstrating that humans, plants, animals, and cosmic beings share the same nature and socio-religious motives towards each other, Hallowell moves beyond an anthrocentric view of Ojibwa reality. Hallowell insists, moreover, that social-scientific methodologies in their own right, and in their complicity with non-Indian metaphysical and theological categories, seriously distort the actualityof the Ojibwa’s world (1975, 143-4).

Hallowell realizes that non-Indians assume ethnocentrically that their cosmological system is universal. He also understands that western ontology holds that a hierarchical dissimilarity exists between categories of being – divinity, humanity, and nature – which simply does not fit the Ojibwa’s cosmology (cf. Miller 1955).  Hallowell writes: ‘In this paper I have assembled evidence … which supports the inference that in the metaphysics of being found among these Indians, the actions of persons provides the major key to their world view’ (1975, 144).

Before Hallowell, such ‘person objects’ (1975, 144) – an unhappy phrase because, given the thrust of Hallowell’s argument, the Ojibwa perceive such entities as intentional beings whose character and purposes can be understood in their actual behavior – were usually called spirits because they seem to exist on a plane, in a dimension, or a realm separate from, and greater and more powerful than, everyday existence. In religious terms, scholars often think of these beings as the focus of visionary mysticism and magic, belief or faith (Hollenback 1996). In scientific terms, claims about the reality of these beings’ existence were ascribed to superstition, imagination and psychological projection. Without empirical evidence, these beings’ existence could not be verified, and Native American views about them could not be proven (Trigger 1991). It follows that both religious and scientific perspectives hold that Native American reality systems are supernaturalistic (Hultkrantz 1983).

Hallowell learned empirically, and to the contrary, that humans and those entities he came to call ‘other-than-human persons’ share with human beings powerful abilities, including intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, the ability to discern right from wrong, and also the ability to speak, and therefore to influence other persons. In Ojibwa thought, persons are not defined by human physical shape, and so the Ojibwa do not project anthropomorphic attributes onto the world (1975, 154-7). Hallowell insists, rather, that the Ojibwa world is a behavioral system; a social system, in which powerful persons are remembered, and they themselves emerge, in myth and lore. Moreover, other-than-human persons address and empower human beings in dreams and visions, present themselves as kinfolk and engage humans in daily life, and empower humans to embody them in ritual performances.

Hallowell shows that, because the Ojibwa do not recognize the cosmic dimension that non­Indians define as nature, their Cosmology does not proceed in terms of the nonempirical domain called the  supernatural (1975, 151). Ojibwa people recognize-that animals, plants, the Sun, Moon, and stars, and even ‘objects` are persons because they themselves behave as such. In this behavioral distinction, Hallowell contends that real-world, daily life transpires in the interactions of persons, human and otherwise. Ojibwa people experience themselves as being at the center of world order, not as pre-eminent beings, but certainly as essential to vital cosmic relations which make persons interdependent. Hallowell reveals a world in which both the Ojibwa and other-than-human persons express mutual responsibility, and thus give structure, pattern, and coherence to the multiple centers and related boundaries of cosmic life. At the same time, the Ojibwa understand that antagonistic relations among persons create disorder,  including hunger, illness and social estrangement… In Hallowell’s view, the Ojibwa do not recognize a cosmic hierarchy running from the least to the most perfect being. The Ojibwa emphasize the ontological similarity, rather than the dissimilarity, of all beings…

Every day (one should also say every night), human beings and animals communicate in dreams, a state of consciousness which bridges cosmological dimensions, including objective time and space (1975, 164-8). In such dream states, human beings are not only addressed by entities who live in other space-time dimensions; they also respond in kind, acknowledge mutual responsibility, and so motivate everyday behavior… Hallowell concludes that Ojibwa reality consists of interpersonal encounters with other-than-human persons, and not in the objective or supernatural character of a world upon which non-Indians insist for reasons of both science and faith…

Sam D. Gill has shown, for example, that Native Americans think of ‘religion’ in performative terms, as transformative speech acts in which communication shapes all ethical purpose (1982, 11; 1987b). In these terms, ritual modalities like song, dance, smoking, and drumming imply acknowledgment and mutuality. Ritual processes draw human and other-than-human persons into active communities, particularly in rites in which names, masks, costumes, bundles, sand paintings and pipes embody cosmic persons in forms with whom humans can interact, feast, and celebrate solidarity… Such ritual systems are poorly interpreted in the credal, dogmatic, textualized and institutionalized forms of religion that characterize church-based religions.

In fact, as has been demonstrated amply for the Navajo (Gill 1977), Yaqui (Yoeme) (Evers and Molina 1987), and Lakota (Bunge 1984; Powers 1986), Native American languages encode the insight that speech is a power all persons share. As Gary Witherspoon (1977) has shown, the Navajo think of language as generative rather than, as in European convention, representative. Navajo speech does not encode realities which might exist independently, objectively apart from itself. In Witherspoon’s interpretation, Navajo words do not mirror reality. Words do not stand for or, as is often said, symbolize any reality apart from themselves. On the contrary, Navajo speech embodies the speaker’s intentionality, and extends the self beyond the body, to shape a reality coming into being in the field of interpersonal dialogue. Speech influences and motivates a cosmos of relationships and social processes (Witherspoon 1977).

Such a view of language has revolutionary importance for the study of Native American religions in terms of the personal entities who constitute them (Morrison 1992a, b). A generative view of Native American languages requires scholars to recognize that non-Indian languages assume that words have a representative character in relation to an external reality which is objective. One major consequence has been the pervasive misunderstanding of Native American symbolism as encoding and representing a reality that is otherwise unseen, non-empirical, and ‘spiritual’ in character (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Sam Gill partially addresses this misrepresentation in arguing that Native American symbols have a performative significance which their use evokes (Gill 1982, 59-82). But Gill does not go quite far enough.

Native American ‘symbols’ are generative because they themselves are persons. So-called ‘sacred,’ ‘symbolic’ objects are intentional beings. Walens, for example, documents the complex ways in which Kwakiutl feast dishes have distinctive lives of their own, and link ‘the household of the chief who owns them and that of the spirit who gave them’ (1981, 57). In the Southwest, for another example, Kachina masks are embodiments, in which a human person gives physical form to cosmic persons encountered in dreams. Embodied as well in dance, what appears as a ‘spiritual’ difference between human beings and the kachina merges as an essential truth of cosmological correspondence (Gill 1982, 71-2). Similarly, at both Zuni and Hopi, prayer-sticks extend the life-bearing breath of human beings, and thus extend human intentionality towards non-human others. The being of the prayer-stick is inhaled by cosmic kachina persons who, thus nourished, extend themselves in rain. Rain in turn nourishes corn, who in turn feeds human beings. In these ways, Kachina masks, rain, corn and prayer-sticks are not ‘sacred’ in the sense of referring to, or revealing, another pre-eminent order of reality. On the contrary, they are each intentional beings, whose needs are bound up with the desires and needs of all persons (Fulbright 1992).

Barbara Mor, from "Oil"

There are nets in the eye that catch the light, images

like wild beasts are gathered in, tints of flesh

moving through high grasses, blades of helicopters rounding up

stray clouds, a white horse

rears behind a chain-link fence, a woman convulses

thru the thick eyelashes of death, hidden cameras who capture

earth like prey, angles of skin thrashing and

 the steel neighing of the wind, and bodies falling slowly

inward to the spread retina,

as the drowned sink thru darkening lenses of the sea

skeins groping, gathering what is done, naked bodies

on ocean bottom wrapped in

bailing wire, blind maps, powerlines coiled as serpents, veins

of rabid dogs, ancient fish swim by,

growing gears and claws, the brain

is drawing black lines around the faces of windows, bored guns

stretch out calm along the sides of sharks

submarines sunk between small buildings, dinosaurs

in extinct shoulders of engineers, stars, what is left of

neon wedged in dark throats

shiny black lines stitch up anemones, vulvas, the sucking mouths

of the great crowd, continents

wounded like beasts trailing bandages of water, images

twist in the brain like

snapshots of caught fish, trussed

with ropes of salt and imploding umbilical knots

mortices and scales of deep museums, reptiles of

cold walls, long echoes, the weight of oceans on locked glass cases

of eyelids, cracks in stone where horses

are leaping, hooves thrashing out

nerve-nets hang in underground rooms, strung with pale tissue,

wrenches of iron, ganglia open their mouths

and the wind screams thru them, tapestries evolve thru skulls

in perstaltic rolls, the history of protoplasm

of surgery, of mirrors, lost civilizations with their skins

preserved around steel bowels, calcium blueprints

in the tile of floors where

people danced ten thousand years below the sea

sunk in beds of gravity and black fire, basalt

stitches in flagellates and cities from

our still bones, and bellies of spiders drift among the waters

with silent engines, all nets are loosened

in a steady breathing,

and tightened again, and loosened again, as photons and

worlds are woven and undone by

the retina, as eons sink thru night

with its webbed hands.

Barbara Mor, "Letter [to Clayton Eshleman]"

        May 17, 1990                   

. . .

Yes, I live in a desert reptile state, which is as Castaneda describes the southwest state (of mind): hypnosis. Hip gnosis. Slow and heavy-moving, while the scenery is neon. Image a gila monster with a cheroot, or the zoot-pachuco as nagual. But, as a Mexican writer (Reyes) noted, Mexican men escalate to death faster than any on earth. I was born and raised within the decor of this mood, but life with Pancho has of course intensified it. Life on Tuscon streets with an Aztec-Mayan streetfighter will of course Intensify It. It is a matter of enormously condensed and suspended energy, can blow up Universe with any microflick of the tail. But: is wholly uniliterary, unhistoric. These exist still packed in DNA; as Pancho says, "I am the Book." No-word dream-state of images, magnetic fields, and body action. It needs a good translator. The energy of verbal work, writing, is a high-speed or short-wave radiation. My brain works, but it is long waves, below the sound-threshold. I  mean I don't hear much going on in there: the metallic drone of the Malabar caves, one-way traffic on Lead St. . .

Homero Aridjis, "An Anonymous Conquistador Recalls His Passing Through the New Land," Trans. George McWhirter

I slept on beds of stone.
I had a serpent of stone for a bolster
in a feather chamber where the image
of death flickered back at me off every wall.


The roof was a puddle of mud.
Earth lay on my face
and my legs were as blue as the sky.
Like a splinter of noon,
a humming bird flew out to the left of my dream.


In the flint of the night, 
my body blended with the gods'.
On my brow I had a gust of blood,
black sandals for outstriding the wind on my feet
and through my hand a hole for spying on mankind.


Drunk on ritual, I dug in the obsidian knife
and tore out the heart of the sacred dead.
Swift messengers carried
the flames I kindled in his chest
to the four corners of unlit space.


In the stained face of the forest goddess
I saw hidden the heavenly blaze (we all quest for
in books) in the eyes of that nameless animal
whose everyday form, or tread of whose passing
I could never know, or hear, or imagine.


One day, out of my own darkness, I arrived
at a sleeping village,
with golden plugs through my ears and stripes down my face,
and smiling infinitely with light
the sea crested in my eyes.


Since then,
my life is a bolt of lightning
clad like a man, or
perhaps in rags,
perhaps in shadows.

Norman Brown, "Metamorphoses II: Actaeon"

Saint Actaeon, the hermit; initiate wearing the horns of consecration; like the sorcerer in the paleolithic cave at Trois Frères, a man masked in a stag’s head. Antlers as tines, or tongues, or branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain; a ladder of perfection. . .

I will tell the truth, perhaps it will seem a lie: I felt myself turned from my proper shape, and I was transformed into a solitary wandering stag, running from wood to wood; and I am still fleeing from the rage of my own hounds.

George Economou, "Carmen Mentulae"

Good men to lay down

to use him frankly

                           Natura’s puppet.

When she pulls the string

from above the clouds

                                    there’s no choice

but to follow men’s goddess

                                             or to dream

The god Priapus saw I,

                                    and with hys sceptre in honde.

That’s the king to make a garden

of your garret:

                      Lucretius and Lactantius

                      discussed it

but Martial wrote with his.

         Saepe soloecismus mentula nostra facit.

Another fucking grammatical error?

Somebody knew what he was doing

when he put it in the first declension

with all those feminine nouns.

Guillaume Apollinaire, "Lettre-Océan"

Jorge Reyes, "Nahual Negro"

Laurette Séjourné, Agua Quemada

Julián Ríos, Larva: Midsummer Night's Babel, "Die Mutter," Trans. Richard Alan Francis, Suzanne Jill Levine, and the Author

Voluminous veiled Indian in a shimmering blue-gold sari, shaking a large cowbell around the puppet: Tan! Tan! Tricky trapping lover, such a wicked web he weaves. I suppose you saw me coming? And I'm sure you were merrily recalling your conquered Indians. The one with thick braids and tight jeans, the olive-skinned pharmacist in Paddington? The big dark one who gave you the time of day in the newspaper stand in Bayswater? The fallen apple of Brooke Green? All of the same strain. [1] Ay! Ay-yee! Yoga with me, come to my bed (hu! who? nothing at all?), bogus [2] boatman! turn, ford across, sink down without beating around your mature Magna Matron, what a bhang gang-up! [3] She'll flood you right out of your streambed. Get my drift? Believe in me, schemer, believe in the ring of my bell. Sing, lover, to the sound of my crazy ballad. Mad guru: Samsara is shamshare. Gai saber. Sic. Bho Bhoh! Not the gay cock anymore, something in your gullet? Upa, sir. Come in! Tout de go, à go-go, I have a vacancy for my vacuous friend. Let's return to the beginning, rude antagonist. In the beginning was the Vacuum... [4] Amen. Atman. Mute of mantra, and voice. Maya, yeah, peripatetic Mayeutic. I was muttering prayers with my disciples along that shady path in Holland Park and back there alone on a bench, you were writing with your little finger in the dirt... Doesn't Daddy Longlegs have any paper? Time of lean kine, [5] beggar? And with a branch you erase what you write (sanscretinizing?) and raise a cloud of dust... To cover yourself with dust? Brave, sadhu! [6] You stayed unmoving a minute. Pondering, poetaster? And you raised your head. Admiring my charms? C'mon you boob, stare at someone else. Want to see my marked face? and she unveiled, showing a face covered with black beauty marks. Look, profligate, look what you did to me. Or were you merely looking at my garments? The fringe of my neckline barely veiling my enchantments... I was scared and I'm always off-limits, prohibited, get it? I'll see you again. Coward! We'll meet again someday, you were thinking. And you recognized me a few days later on that poster while waiting for the bus on Hammersmith Road. London welcomes the Divine Mother. Fascinated by the perfectly round circle adorning my forehead? Till lack of decency drove you to add more dots. And still laconic, you finished by mutating my name. Vaca matta? Vaca loka? Vaca tapada! Sí señorito, veiled cow! I'll vaccinate you. I'll anoint you with my five... [7] Give it to him hard. Coward! You profaned my face, my name and my message. [8] All spotted, full of dots. Look at this one between my eyebrows, dot for tad! because it's the last thing you'll see. The old mole! Make a magic mountain of a molehill, man. A hilarious old story. Cowabunga! Go on, blind man, and she cowbelted him, take one below the belt!
---The Divine Mother?! Vac Tapadandah...

***

[1] Already the final dissolution?:
Il disoluto (punito!) tributary of affluent women.


[2] Bogy. Bogy:
Row better, Volgar boatmen, beau gars! Boogie man, don't bogart that little man in the boat. Bogha boogie.


[3] Un Gange passe...:
Passa a guado! Gangelically. Acqua cheta... All the rivers run into the seal... Vale meglio passare sotto silenzio el río... Acqua in botta! A riverderci!


[4] In the beginning was the Vac...:
In the beginning was the Vacuum, and the Vacuum was with Vāc, and Vāc was God and Goddess. Vāc, the Word, was made flesh. The word created the world. And without this originary goddess, Vāc, we wouldn't have voice or vocative or devil's advocate...


[5] Sacred cows?:
Wise counsel: all of them are sacred, despite all the bum steers... Lean kine, fattened calves, all are couched in his vocowbulary, feeding his cow-and-bull stories.


[6] Sad sadhu...:
Always playing sadhumusickissed.


[7] Pancagavya?:
Sacrilege... Utter on, daffy ding-dung, spooner up some more bilk and mutter, a recurd of yearning for your dunga din... You'll be in the dungeon after the purification.


[8] LONDON WELCOMES THE DIVINE MOTHER:
Below, the full-moon face (between her eyebrows a dot that would soon multiply) about to pass on to a more virulent phase (Mariyamma, the goddess of smallpox?), completely dotted. Chicken pox?:


. . . .
. .. . . .. .. . . ..
.. . . .
. . . .. . . .. . . .
. .


And under the portrait, with a few alterations:


HER HOLINESS
VACA TAPADA


(Unspotted cow?!) It also announced that her sacred words would be free for everyone for one holy week in the Horticultural Hall, Westminster.