John Wieners, "A poem for early risers"

I’m infused with the day                               even tho the day may destroy me

I’m out in it.                                                       Placating it. Saving myself

from the demons

who sit in blue

coats, carping

at us across the

tables. Oh they

go out the doors.

I am done with

them. I am

done with faces

I have seen before.

For me now the new.

The unturned tricks

of the trade: the Place

of the heart where man

is afraid to go.

It is not doors. It is

the ground of my soul

where dinosaurs left

their marks. Their tracks

are upon me. They

walk flatfooted.

Leave heavy heels

and turn sour the green

fields where I eat with

ease. It is good to

throw them up. Good

to have my stomach growl.

After all, I am possessed

by wild animals and

long haired men and

women who gallop

breaking over my beloved

places. Oh pull down

thy vanity man the

old man told us under

the tent. You are over-

run with ants.

                        2.

Man lines up for his

breakfast in the dawn

unaware of the jungle

he has left behind

in his sleep. Where

the fields flourished

with cacti, cauliflower,

all the uneatable foods

that the morning man

perishes, if he remembered.

                        3.

And yet, we must remember.

The old forest, the wild

screams in the backyard

or cries in the bedroom.

It is ours to nourish.

The nature to nurture.

Dark places where the

woman holds, hands

us, herself handles an

orange ball. Throwing it

up for spring. Like

the clot my grandfather

vomited / months before he

died of cancer. And

spoke of later in terror.

                        6.20.58

Charles Darwin, "Hybridism," On the Origin of Species

So that certain individual plants and all the individuals of a certain species can actually be hybridised much more readily than they can be self-fertilised!

Considering the several rules now given, which govern the fertility of first crosses and of hybrids, we see that when forms, which must be considered as good and distinct species, are united, their fertility graduates from zero to perfect fertility, or even to fertility under certain conditions in excess.

First crosses between forms is sufficiently distinct to be ranked as species, and their hybrids, are very generally, but not universally, sterile. The sterility is of all degrees, and is often so slight that the two most careful experimentalists who have ever lived, have come to diametrically opposite conclusions in ranking forms by this test. The sterility is innately variable in individuals of the same species, and is eminently susceptible of favourable and unfavourable conditions. The degree of sterility does not strictly follow systematic affinity, but is governed by several curious and complex laws. It is generally different, and sometimes widely different, in reciprocal crosses between the same two species. It is not always equal in degree in a first cross and in the hybrid produced from this cross.

In the same manner as in grafting trees, the capacity of one species or variety to take on another, is incidental on generally unknown differences in their vegetative systems, so in crossing, the greater or less facility of one species to unite with another, is incidental on unknown differences in their reproductive systems. There is no more reason to think that species have been specially endowed with various degrees of sterility to prevent them crossing and blending in nature, than to think that trees have been specially endowed with various and somewhat analogous degrees of difficulty in being grafted together in order to prevent them becoming inarched in our forests.

The sterility of first crosses between pure species, which have their reproductive systems perfect, seems to depend on several circumstances; in some cases largely on the early death of the embryo. The sterility of hybrids, which have their reproductive systems imperfect, and which have had this system and their whole organisation disturbed by being compounded of two distinct species, seems closely allied to that sterility which so frequently affects pure species, when their natural conditions of life have been disturbed. This view is supported by a parallelism of another kind; namely, that the crossing of forms only slightly different is favourable to the vigour and fertility of their offspring; and that slight changes in the conditions of life are apparently favourable to the vigour and fertility of all organic beings. It is not surprising that the degree of difficulty in uniting two species, and the degree of sterility of their hybrid-offspring should generally correspond, though due to distinct causes; for both depend on the amount of difference of some kind between the species which are crossed. Nor is it surprising that the facility of effecting a first cross, the fertility of the hybrids produced, and the capacity of being grafted together—though this latter capacity evidently depends on widely different circumstances—should all run, to a certain extent, parallel with the systematic affinity of the forms which are subjected to experiment; for systematic affinity attempts to express all kinds off resemblance between all species.

First crosses between forms known to be varieties, or sufficiently alike to be considered varieties, and their mongrel offspring, are very generally, but not quite universally, fertile. Nor is this nearly general and perfect fertility surprising, when we remember how liable we are to argue in a circle with respect to varieties in a state of nature; and when we remember that the greater number of varieties have been produced under domestication by the selection of mere external differences, and not of differences in the reproductive system. In all other respects, excluding fertility, there is a close general resemblance between hybrids and mongrels. Finally, then, the facts briefly given in this chapter do not seem to me opposed to, but even rather to support the view, that there is no fundamental distinction between species and varieties.

Dr. Gene Scott, "The F.C.C. Monkey Band," from Werner Herzog's "God's Angry Man"

César Vallejo, "De Todo Esto Yo Soy El Unico Que Parte," trans. Nan Braymer and Lillian Lowenfels

I am the only one who’s leaving everything behind:

I am going away from this bench,

away from my underwear,

away from the general set-up, from my actions,

from my house number shattered into pieces—

away from everything, and I’m the only one who’s leaving.

Going away from the Champs Elysees

to take a turn in a strange alley on the moon.

My own death is going, too; my bed is taking leave;

and, surrounded by people, solitary, free,

my human double goes for a walk

and gets rid of its ghosts one by one.

I can withdraw from everything

because everything remains behind to give me an alibi:

my shoe, its buttonholes, also its mud,

right up to the crease in the arm of my clean buttoned shirt.

Ritual of the Bacabs, trans. Ámbar Past

Who is its mother?

Glyphs of the skies.

Glyphs of the clouds.

Who is its mother?

And it is said,

Ix Hun Tah Dzib, She of the Great Writing,

Ix Hun Uooh, She of the Glyphs.

The corresponding glyphs

that were together

separated

and so acquired

incantations

from saliva.

Margaret Randall, "the coming together"

"I am dead, dead, dead! They cut out my heart in Stanleyville. They left my lungs in Leopoldsville. My eyes they gouged out in the mines of Katanga. And they blew my brains to bits in Kasai. They have taken my rivers, my mountains, my jungles, I have nothing left but the fragments of myself that come together in you, my brothers, in the four corners of the world."

                                          —Patrice Lumumba

in the coldest year

lumumba hot chessman hot castro hot

children of Birmingham

in the coldest year

a smashing of memories a total

out with it now

the time

         the magic of it

forced through the final mesh

of long walks

patience

the nervous flowered hats

thinking we must do something do

some-thing, the

streaming demonstrators

one voice

         the long echo

violence of non-violence

cruelty of artaud

mexico’s gas

and fire hose in san francisco’s

coldest year. in this cold year

we keep each other

warm

headline on headline on

headling adding to the fire

                                      screaming

madness hanging in the air, the

hand shakes

pictures, cut outs, impossible

collage, the

weight of it all as

the pages turn, burn,

green groundbeneath it

behind it

the bringing strong

                           silent

going through the front door

at last

in the coldest year

going through the front door and

the words of lumumba

                                ‘have nothing left

but the fragments of myself

that come together in you

my brothers

in the four corners of the world.’

10/2/64

Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, La Hora De Los Hornos: Notas y Testimonios Sobre el Neocolonialismo, la Violencia y la Liberación

Sun Ra, "Differentiation," "Angelic Brothers," "Cosmic Query," "Fragments of the Alter-Future," and "Of Variable Universe," The Immeasurable Equation

Where am I now?

I am where I am before

An alter-fate of differentiated ways

From differential weighs

An alter-fate of differential weighs

From differentiated ways

Where am I now?

In the midst of uncharted field

I feel the fill-potential own

On the on-way … onward

On word

Where am I now?

No one knows

Not even I,

Yet I am here

If there is a friend to hear

My voice

I speak as the   on voice

Own-rhythm; own harmony

own melody

own-ness

Plane-potential infinity – Is.

*          *          * 

Knowledge can not know me

And wisdom cannot describe

The delicate mystery of love

For you are my friends

I call you friends

Angelic brothers

For of the world of

That which is not to the world

The unknown-twin dimension-being.

Are you as I am Other Eternal To Be. 

*          *          *

Why should a god visit earth

If to be only a slave to man

Why should a man be a slave to man

If only to be a slave to man

Or a man to God

Or a god to man?

If only to be within a state

Unnatural to his natural self

Or alter-self

*          *          * 

Fragments of the vice-future I give to you

Put them together as you natural – know

Put them together as you natural do if you can

Fragments of the alter-isnes I give to you

To have and hold accordingly until the vice-similarity of

The until the before there was.

*          *          *

Of variable universe

And one feels is not what words express:

The never-plane, the alter-ever on-out

Inexpressible Infinity

Atahualpa Yupanqui, "Le tengo rabia al silencio"

Hagbard Celine, Never Whistle While You're Pissing

It is now theoretically possible to link the human nervous system into a radio network so that, micro-miniaturized receivers being implanted in people's brains, the messages coming out of these radios would be indistinguishable to the subjects from the voice of their own thoughts. One central transmitter, located in the nation's capital, could broadcast all day long what the authorities wanted the people to believe. The average man on the receiving end of these broadcasts would not even know he was a robot; he would think it was his own voice he was listening to. The average woman could be treated similarly.

It is ironic that people will find such a concept both shocking and frightening. Like Orwell's 1984, this is not a fantasy of the future but a parable of the present. Every citizen in every authoritarian society already has such a "radio" built into his or her brain. This radio is the little voice that asks, each time a desire is formed, "Is it safe? Will my wife (my husband/my boss/my church/my community) approve? Will people ridicule and mock me? Will the police come and arrest me?" This little voice the Freudians call "The Superego," with Freud himself vividly characterized as "the ego's harsh master." With a more functional approach, Perls, Hefferline and Goodman, in Gestalt Therapy, describe this process as "a set of conditioned verbal habits."

This set, which is fairly uniform throughout any authoritarian society, determines the actions which will, and will not, occur there. Let us consider humanity a biogram (the basic DNA blueprint of the human organism and its potentials) united with a logogram (this set of "conditioned verbal habits"). The biogram has not changed in several hundred thousand years; the logogram is different in each society. When the logogram reinforces the biogram, we have a libertarian society, such as still can be found among some American Indian tribes. Like Confucianism before it became authoritarian and rigidified, American Indian ethics is based on speaking from the heart and acting from the heart—that is, from the biogram.

No authoritarian society can tolerate this. All authority is based on conditioning men and women to act from the logogram, since the logogram is a set created by those in authority.

Every authoritarian logogram divides society, as it divides the individual, into alienated halves. Those at the bottom suffer what I shall call the burden of nescience. The natural sensory activity of the biogram—what the person sees, hears, smells, tastes, feels, and, above all, what the organism as a whole, or as a potential whole, wants—is always irrelevant and immaterial. The authoritarian logogram, not the field of sensed experience, determines what is relevant and material. This is as true of a highly paid advertising copywriter as it is of an engine lathe operator. The person acts, not on personal experience and the evaluations of the nervous system, but on the orders from above. Thus, personal experience and personal judgment being nonoperational, these functions become also less "real." They exist, if at all, only in that fantasy land which Freud called the Unconscious. Since nobody has found a way to prove that the Freudian Unconscious really exists, it can be doubted that personal experience and personal judgement exist; it is an act of faith to assume they do. The organism has become, as Marx said, "a tool, a machine, a robot."

Those at the top of the authoritarian pyramid, however, suffer an equal and opposite burden of omniscience. All that is forbidden to the servile class—the web of perception, evaluation and participation in the sensed universe—is demanded of the members of the master class. They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling and decision-making for the whole society.

But a man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger. Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs. Furthermore, the logogram of any authoritarian society remains fairly inflexible as time passes, but everything else in the universe constantly changes. The result can only be progressive disorientation among the rulers. The end is debacle.

The schizophrenia of authoritarianism exists both in the individual and in the whole society.

I call this the Snafu Principle.

Daniel Brinton, Nagualism: A Study in Native American Folk-Lore and History

I have referred in some detail to the rites and superstitions connected with the Calendar because they are all essential parts of Nagualism, carried on far into Christian times by the priests of this secret cult, as was fully recognized by the Catholic clergy. Wherever this calendar was in use, the Freemasonry of Nagualism extended, and its ritual had constant reference to it. Our fullest information about it does not come from central Mexico, but further south, in the region occupied by the various branches of the Mayan stock, by the ancestors of some one of which, perhaps, this singular calendar, and the symbolism connected with it, were invented.

*          *          *

The indications are that the nagualists derived these numbers from the third and seventh days of the calendar “month” of twenty days. Tepeololtec, the Cave God, was patron of the third day and also “Lord of Animals,” the transformation into which was the test of nagualistic power.[42-¶] Tlaloc, god of the mountains and the rains, to whom the seventh day was hallowed, was represented by the nagualistic symbol of a snake doubled and twisted on itself, and was generally portrayed in connection with the “Feathered Serpent” (Quetzalcoatl, Cuculchan, Gukumatz, all names meaning this), represented as carrying his medicine bag, _xiquipilli_, and incensory, the apparatus of the native illuminati, his robe marked with the sign of the cross to show that he was Lord of the Four Winds and of Life.

*          *          *

The conclusion to which this study of Nagualism leads is, that it was not merely the belief in a personal guardian spirit, as some have asserted; not merely a survival of fragments of the ancient heathenism, more or less diluted by Christian teachings, as others have maintained; but that above and beyond these, it was a powerful secret organization, extending over a wide area, including members of different languages and varying culture, bound together by mystic rites, by necromantic powers and occult doctrines; but, more than all, by one intense emotion--hatred of the whites--and by one unalterable purpose--that of their destruction, and with them the annihilation of the government and religion which they had introduced.

José Emilio Pacheco, "Tree Between Two Walls," trans. Gordon Brotherston and Ed Dorn

Trapped between two nights
(between two armies who unthread and rewind
the unending sound of their reciprocal guarantee;
between two pits, two waiting basins
tense with water dull to the edge;
between two skies rushing together;
two eroded cliffs that throw themselves by habit down into crabbed stark halves;
two chains of mirrors, grand navigable walls;
two winged beasts each biting the other's tail),
the day shines,
turns on its air and its memory;
lets fall its dates, its cities, its faces.
The day,— prompt horseman, flaking angel —
raises its great sword of clarity;
its sword a sea of light which rises keenly,
like a cup lips never touch and in it the concentration of the world,
or the flower stem which rams the marble of this defenceless question
— devouring eye, carnivorous fiesta in the thickness of the clock upon the minute.


The day is consumed in its progression
and its ruins are spread over a scorched demesne.
But you, Señora, thrive on this long obeisance,
on the bare edge of this occurrence which reaches us from the distance,
from some riddled sky in which order
is beginning to crush the bloodless stones.

The day passes over my forehead just as the sea warps thought;
walking, the day grows old and I look at its back,
its broken palmer's feet, galleyslave's feet, its footstep chained
until it touches the suns who conquer the abyss.


And while the day journeys to the red gateways
— the extremes of punishment, frontiers where all permanency ends —
the night displays its gift, its hair ablaze, — its light,
its tongue which stains all things with darkness,
its face no one any longer looks upon;
a river-spate it is which takes wings
and rises to tear down eyes from their hypnotic demesnes.
Night wars and dreams in its fluvial territory
— a wellspring absorbed into the hour which oars on
until it is sunk in an eyelid.


Then, when the impenetrable and hollow day
begins to rise and snakes and laughs,
then I let fall your name:
a sheaf of roman letters which like a wild river sound.
And from your name the moon and its splendid lineage rise;
but your name reaches me lank and used, an unkept promise,
a delusion which has sailed out from eyes in ruins,
a conquered island which flares and is consumed:
a dull coin I hid in the air.


But that face, a tower which watched over the water of summer was your face,
a tomb of hollow quicknesses in which the world excavates a testament
while an abandoned night pays court, in each valley,
in each crenelation of the space
that unchanging wind ploughs.


Everything is clear my love;
everything is the whirlwind and fleeting wind;
everything interrogates and accuses us.
But nothing answers,
nothing persists, nothing rises against the journey of the day,
the sun is unwound and no longer pulses and is a cry in the desert;
each resurrection is an insult
and to awake is the corrupt a dream.


Behind us, time fights against the sky
like a snuffed thing that flickers beyond its ending,
a harp without sound on which the wind plays the tune of its own wear;
the blaze darkened by the moss and water at the foot of the plateau;
a great tree flowing
on the moving lode of its fluency of sap,
the wall of darkness
where the world abandons our entwined name;
the end of the burning
— this long slow fire ingesting its own brilliancies face downward —
but it is invulnerable

— despoilation, sweeping defeat —

because everything ends above the night . . .

Because everything is extinguished upon you, strange shore,

smiling plantation, where the thunder buries its sounding.

Like burning ivy you scale yourself,

reflect, like crystal, your inflexible whiteness.

Efraín Barquero, "Así Te Enterraron"

el once de septiembre

  (a mediodía)

el once de septiembre

  (bajo el humo)

el once de septiembre

  (a sangre llena).

Recuérdaló.

   Recuérdaló.

        Recuérdaló.

              Recuérdaló.

Con odio.

Con amor.

                         Ó¡

                       L

                     A

                   D

                 R

               É

             U

           C

         E

      !R

La Habana, Diciembre de 1973.

María Sabina, Mujer Espíritu

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Space," Phenomenology of Perception

The phantasms of dreaming, of mythology, the favorite images of each man or indeed poetic imagery, are not linked to their meaning by a relation of sign to signified, like the one existing between a telephone number and the name of the subscriber; they really contain their meaning, which is not a notional meaning, but a direction of our existence. When I dream that I am flying or falling, the whole significance of the dream is contained in the flight or the fall, as long as I do not reduce them to their physical appearance in the waking world, and so long as I take them with all their existential implications. The bird which hovers, falls and becomes a handful of ash, does not hover and fall in physical space; it rises and falls with the existential tide running through it, or again it is the pulse of my existence, its systole and diastole. The level of this tide at each moment conditions a space peopled with phantasms, just as, in waking life, our dealings with the world which is offered to us condition a space peopled with realities. There is a determining of up and down, and in general of place, which precedes "perception." Life and sexuality haunt their world and their space. 


Primitive peoples, in so far as they live in a world of myth, do not overstep this existential space, and this is why for them dreams count just as much as perceptions. There is a mythical space in which directions and positions are determined by the residence in it of great affective entities. For primitive man, knowing the whereabouts of the tribal encampment does not consist in locating it in relation to some object serving as a landmark---it is to tend towards it as towards the natural abode of a certain peace or a certain joyfulness, just as, for me, to know where my hand is, is to link up with that agile power which is for the moment dormant, but which I can take up and rediscover as my own. For the augur, right and left are the sources of the lawful and the forbidden, just as for me my right hand and my left are respectively the incarnations of my skill and my awkwardness. In dreaming as in myth we learn where the phenomenon is to be found, by feeling that towards which our desire goes out, what our heart dreads, on what our life depends. 

Roberto Harrison, "Snake Vision: A Poetics"

Listening to and understanding the birds

Learning to breathe from the horses (after walking twelve miles barefoot)

Learning from the weather

To learn from Saint Francis of Assisi as Hardt/Negri discuss him, the new revolutionary, and to come to terms with their “multitude” … the basics of knowing animals and how that might have political/spiritual implications—not overtly political, from this angle? Sometimes, but from the other side—the many animals of my life (220 rabbits… snakes… 7 lovebirds… many others)—animals need us to speak softly to them—snakes make circles, rabbits make cylindrical tunnels

Talking from the other side of the word

*          *          *

The cockroach has an evenly distributed nervous system. One can crush its head and it will walk away, decentralized nervous system —> decentralized poetics—no need for centers of power? no reason for centralized understanding of a give poem? web—noosphere—supermind?

Seeing all the ancient animals returning

People take on a multitude of faces—many are ancient Indian heros/heroines returning in the final days (for a moment).

If, as Pound says, all ages are contemporaneous, I conclude that all worlds are coexistent here as well

*          *          *

MOLA—fabric art done by the Kuna Indians of Panamá, usually made in pairs as the Kuna believe everything arrives in the world in pairs—I am unknown to the Kuna but aim to help them, as I was raised with many of their Molas on the walls of our home—cloud systems transporting the souls from below the line to here—making signs for them (and all, from all of Latin America) to arrive. They will arrive who are not us.—signs are everywhere—Burroughs—“READ THE SINGS.” a hyper overflowing of meaning—learning to swim through that—MOLAS becoming to me what the Chinese ideogram was to Pound (vibration—to lead back to Sri Aurobindo, red and black sound and vulnerability—to lead back to Lorca’s black sound,… animals, duality, MOLAS always there)

I’ve heard of a National Geographic article which discusses a strong sense of ESP among the Kuna

*          *          *

Lezama Lima’s image—cosmic writer of place—symbolizing grammatically—baroquely—unify—mestizaje—“The knowledge that is not ours and the not knowing that is ours form for me true knowledge.”—“The penetration of the image into nature engenders supernature.”—“I attain the tetractis, the number four, God.”—“The image is the reality of the invisible world.”—“Poetry… is the image attained by the man of resurrection.”—“I try in my system to destroy Aristotelian causality by seeking a poetic state of unconditionality”—“… the poetry of a return to magic spells, to rituals, to the living ceremony of primitive man.”

Vallejo and his indianness and solitude—again, mestizaje—silence—numbers—compassion—emotion—“the whole song/squared by three silences”—“And don’t strike 0, which will be so still/until it wakes the 1 and makes it stand”—“a trine between the two”—“Armor-plate this equator, Moon.”—“it ends up being all numbers,/the whole of life”—“in the insane search/for the known one”—“Make way for the new odd number/pregnant with orphanhood!”—“doubt your excrement a few seconds”—“There is a place that I myself know/in this world, no less,/we will never reach”—“But the place that I myself know,/in this world, no less,/sought pace with its opposites.”—“My eternity has died and I am waking it.”

*          *          *

Laura Riding’s truth (both near and far)

*          *          *

I am the snake

I wander

through the corn fields

of your mind