9 September 2019: what's inside the bones
9 September 2019
That itch, when you can’t find the book you’re looking for—the one that would solve everything—unbearable! But then rational realization that that one book is in the focal point of attention, imbuing it with an aura it doesn’t really deserve. Anything in the limelight is in the limelight.
But maybe the thing that feels important is that it is illuminated. I try to write in this blog when a manuscript feels illuminated to me. It feels important to write about something while it is glowing and I can see it. I realize that this privileges an ocular sensibility about which I am at best ambivalent.
What’s glowing now is Asja Bakić’s Mars, translated by Jennifer Zoble, and published by the Feminist Press at CUNY. I read it on the Peter Pan bus back to Northampton from a reading in NYC. But when I was at my friend Katie’s apartment talking about it, she thought I was loaning it to her, and I couldn’t bear to correct her, since I always feel excited about the prospect of someone reading the same book as me—the possibility that we could talk about it (and the world would feel that much less lonely)—so I lent it to her.
So instead I’m here, talking about a book, no less luminous, but which instead of reading in one go, I have meted out piece by piece. María Vásquez Valdez’s Kawsay: La Llama de la Selva / Kawsay: The Flame of the Jungle, translated by Margaret Randall, has been at my bedside the past few weeks. A standing item on my daily to do list (along with, if you’re interested morning pages, movement, meditation, and music) is to work on my Spanish. Facing-page translations like this one are great for study: I can start with the Spanish and slide my eyes to the right for help with unknown words and difficult constructions.
I bought Kawsay a while back, for at least two reasons: the aforementioned desire to practice my Spanish (I have big dreams about joining the ranks of the translators someday) and my interest in, and growing involvement with, the Operating System, which I understand as an applied utopian organization including a press.
Could it be that I’ve written all this without talking about the text yet? Bear with me just a little long in my long approach. I’m writing at a time when many fires are raging in the Amazon. “It's estimated that nearly 50,000 Amazon blazes have ignited this month alone, 89 per cent more than in August 2018 on a scale not seen since 2010.”[1] This is a threat on multiple levels: to the well-being of the planet, to the safety and livelihood of indigenous peoples living there, and to an irreplaceably biodiverse region’s flora and fauna. It stresses me out. I don’t know what to do about it other than raise awareness and money, but I’m also nervous because I know that NGOs can do more harm than good. I haven’t figured out how to take my own small actions but, in the meantime, of which there seems to be less and less, it has been interesting (that neutral mask of a word) to me to read Kawsay.
Kawsay is an account—no, that’s not right—better to say an expression of María Vásquez’s experience visiting a Shipibo shaman in the Peruvian Amazon. As if in anticipation of my squirminess, Margaret Randall in her “Translator’s Note” writes:
This is not the superficial ‘new age’ adventure of someone momentarily embracing whatever esoteric fad comes along, but the profound engagement of a woman who has traveled the world and is familiar with the ritualistic practices of diverse cultures. (107)
Randall goes on to frame the project of this book (both the process of its inspiration and composition and its manifestation as a book through the Operating System) as part of the broader range of strategies necessary to overcoming the neo-fascism that seems to loom over every aspect of contemporary life.
I want to talk around the book more, and maybe I will at some time, using it as a starting point to think through my early autodidact days, assembling a matrix of poetic knowledge by using anthologies as a shortcut. Encountering the Rothenberg and Joris “Poems for the Millennium” anthologies and the subsequent series of single author titles, like a selection of work by Gertrude Stein or María Sabina. Encountering Rothenberg’s earlier Shaking the Pumpkin anthology. Untangling the relationship of “New American Poetry” with indigenous writing and other cultural productions. But today is not that time!
Time for a poem:
Primer Ascenso:
Brillo en la Penumbra
Un murmullo vertido en sombras
parpadea en claves primigenias
para escarbar en la ausencia
He venido apagando días
de tiempo aprisionado
y aliento que alimenta
un engranaje sin sentido
Pero aquí todo tiene
una sabiduría absorta en la vida,
aquí no hay más
que la verdad envuelta en selva,
en la cancion interminable del río,
en el ciclo pautado por el sol,
que es brillo y es penumbra
Aquí todo tiene su lugar,
todo tiene su función
que se desliza
como pieza impostergable
He llegado aquí
buscando a esa maestra
que se esconde en lo recóndito,
a consultar su oráculo
de noche y de silencio,
de vida conectada
en sus principios,
ya sembrada entre mis huesos
He venido aquí
para atisbar al viento
Escondido entre mis venas
como a un brujo cauteloso
que en mi centro me sustenta
Y todo lo he encontrado
explotando en el viento,
semillas de sol cautivas
Todo lo he encontrado
en una ardiente plenitude
que es cuerpo y es conciencia
Porque en lo profundo todo se mueve,
todo se integra, se despierta,
en lo oscuro todo se enciende y se apaga,
se contiene y también se suelta
Al final el camino empieza,
abre surcus en sí mismo
para florecer respuestas
en tierra nueva
germinando. (42-43)
And now for Margaret Randall’s translation:
First Ascent:
Brilliance in the Shadows
A whisper scattered among shadows
blinks a primitive code
to excavate absence
I have been extinguishing days
imprisoned time
and breath that feeds
a meaningless assemblage
But here everything possesses
a wisdom absorbed with life,
here there is nothing more
than truth wrapped in jungle,
in the endless river song,
in the cycle marked by the sun,
both brilliance and shadow
Here everything is in its place,
everything has its purpose
going where it must
impossible to delay
I have come here
searching for that teacher
who hides in the remote place,
I want to consult her oracle
of silence and night,
of life connected
in its beginnings,
already planted between my bones
I have come here
to glimpse the wind
hiding in my veins
like a prudent healer
sustaining me from my center
And I have found everything
exploding in the wind,
the sun’s captive seeds
I have found everything
in the ardent plenty
that is body and conscience
Because everything moves in the depths,
everything integrates, awakens,
in the dark everything lights up and burns out,
contains itself and also moves free
The path begins at the end,
opens furrows in itself
so it may bloom answers
upon new ground
and take root. (42-43)
I’m a sympathetic reader of María Vásquez Valdez. I want to approach “una sabiduría absorta en la vida” (“a wisdom absorbed with life”) and I have come to this life:
buscando a esa maestra
que se esconde en lo recóndito,
a consultar su oráculo
de noche y de silencio,
de vida conectada
en sus principios,
ya sembrada entre mis huesos (41)
My progress into epic is happening along with a strong desire, rekindled but already present in me, to connect with a feeling of deity or at the very least to experience ecstasy.
I don’t mean like a personal god or whatever. I mean something like the way Venus and Mars are being used at the beginning of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura: as expressions of the inhalation and exhalation of the universe. Sacred materialism. Terrestrial sanctity.
Absence. Silence. Dark. Night. What’s inside the bones. Deity in the negative. Where do you look for a goddess like that—and it has to be a goddess, because what I’m attempting to get at in the book of bella is my pre-transition condition of being double: Zack to the world, and bella a seed, stirring. All of a sudden (though actually it happened over a long period of time), this condition of being was right at my fingertips. When I was no longer still in it, it could easily be summoned to mind; it was that close.
Having become estranged from these past selves, they become other to me. I must access them through a portal. In a way I think of Zack and bella as my ancestors, and so the project of accessing them/communicating with them/inviting them to communicate with me is a spiritual one, more suited to portals than doors.
But accessing my mentality from those days leads me back to my investment in the neopagan occult, leads me to contemplate the relationship between patriarchal oppression and the gender system it upholds, to the other systems it upholds, like a relationship of domination and extraction to the world. I think this must be why Silvia Federici writes about witches and at least some of why Vásquez felt called to interact with the jungle in this way.
Kawsay has an epilogue:
La Soga de los Muertos
I
Vengo de entre muertos
que caminan
con pies vendados de amnesia,
transitando vidas
de concreto interminable
Muertos que no se encuentran
porque ya se fueron,
o quizá nunca llegaron,
atrapados en una urbe
de espejismos
Pero entre esos muertos la he visto,
con un fulgor de formas incandescentes
y la geométrica estructura de la vida
más allá de la tempestad
La he sentido abrasándome por dentro,
fuego que se extiende
con la sencillez do lo imprescindible
Con sabiduría perfecta
dio vida a mi muerte,
para huir de una dentellada sin sentido
Me hizo refulgir desde lo más hondo
curando mi gangrene,
respirando sobre mi asfixia,
devolviendo miembros amputados
Me ha levantado de la fosa común
donde yacen todos los miedos
aferrados a una noche descompuesta
Me contó los secretitos
de la tierra y del agua
Me contó los secretitos
del fuego y de los vientos
Transfusión de vida
que se esparce en sudor
electrizante,
la soga de los muertos
me ha despojado de todo,
como a un diamante
que estuviera cubierto de carbon
y en el olvido.
II.
Un capullo se disolvió desde su núcleo
Sachamam Amoru
gran Serpiente
despojada de pieles,
renaciendo,
una noche eclipse mis atavismos,
y quedé desnuda
de mí
conmigo
El camino se llenó
de flores incendiadas,
de aguas pulcras
sumadas a mi boca,
picos blancos
altos como un suspiro,
lunas cruzadas
de lianas bendecidas
en la selva,
rostros nuevos
como orquídeas desconocidas,
luces que gravitan
a mi paso
con el pulso de guardians,
y al ritmo de icaros
y silencios.
III
Un largo camino he andado
hasta llegar a ella,
en la oscuridad,
he percibido su latido,
tras caídas y tropiezas,
cicatrices que ya son humo
El camino me encontró a mi
y me dio a elegir
entre vivir con un trozo de mi cuerpo
—de mi vida—
a rastras
o comenzar desde un principio
y sin reservas
Porque dando tumbos había tocado,
dando tumbos, rasguñando,
había mirado,
dando tumbos y sin paladear
había comido
Un amor desconocido
pulsa en las orillas,
reverencia honda,
frente que toca la tierra,
labios que besan la distancia
Neonata perlada de líquido amniótico,
luciérnaga que descubrió su luz
y su alimento
Hoy amaneció.
And now the translation:
The Rope of the Dead
I
I come from among the dead
who walk
their feet bound by amnesia,
traveling lives
of endless concrete
Dead who cannot find themselves
because they’re already gone,
or perhaps haven’t yet arrived,
trapped in a metropolis
of mirages
But among those dead I have seen her,
with the brilliance of incandescence
and geometrical structure of life
beyond the storm
I have felt her embracing me from within,
a fire that spreads
with the simplicity of that which is needed
With perfect wisdom
she gave life to my death,
to escape needless greed
She made me shine in the depths
cured my gangrene,
breathed life into my suffocation,
returned amputated limbs
She raised me from the common grave
where all fears reside
clinging to unsettled night
She told me the little secrets
of earth and of water
She told me the little secrets
of the fire and the winds
Transfusion of life
scattering
in electrifying sweat,
the rope of the dead
has dispossessed me of everything,
like a diamond
forgotten
and covered in coal.
II
My cocoon dissolves from its nucleus out
Sachamama Amoru,
great Serpent
dispossessed of skins,
being delivered again,
a single night eclipsed old habits,
and I was naked
alone
with myself
The path filled
with brilliant flowers,
pure water
for my mouth,
white peaks
tall as a sigh,
moons crossed
by sacred vines
in the jungle,
new faces
like undiscovered orchids,
lights rotating
as I pass
with the pulse of guardians,
the rhythm of the chants
and silences.
III
I have walked long distances
to get to her,
in the darkness
I have felt her heartbeat,
tripping and falling,
scabs that are smoke now
The road found me
and let me choose
between living with a piece of my body
—of my life—
dragging behind
or starting afresh
and without reserve
Because stumbling I had touched,
stumbling, clawing,
I had seen,
stumbling and without tasting
I had eaten
An unknown love
beat along the shores,
a deep reverence,
forehead pressed to earth,
lips kissing the distance
Pearly newborn of amniotic liquid,
firefly who discovered her light
and sustenance
Dawned today. (92-97)
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/amazon-fires-rainforest-brazil-jair-bolsonaro-deforestation-dry-season-a9083636.html
