Category Archives: nayra

https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=80952&page=1#.Tymk41wltKI
https://www.gallupsun.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=17065:letter-to-the-editor-honoring-larry-casuse&catid=185:letters-to-the-editor&Itemid=615

https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/fifty-years-later-casuse-an-ancestor-and-a-predecessor-in-indigenous-struggle/article_a0e706b8-b2ee-11ed-88c2-372450fae035.html

https://indypendent.org/2022/05/the-brief-brave-life-of-larry-casuse/

https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/download/22829/19320/58582

“I am certainly aware that negative emotions such as anger and resentment have the potential to manifest themselves in disempowering and violent ways, I am not advocating for Indigenous peoples to be angry or to harbor hatred for the colonial world; rather, I am advocating that we love ourselves. At the same time, I am exploring my own resentment (or ressentiment) and attempting to apply my own understanding of Hul’qumi’num’ practice as a starting point to express emotions other than love. Finally, I remain unconvinced that ressentiment is not defensible as a potentially transformative subjectivity or affective reaction to the practices of the Canadian state in the past and present. The Western tradition is particularly obsessed with time, inventing different times (Fabian, 1983), exploitation of time, transcending time, evolution through time and so on. This is true for their conception of resentment and harm, that “ressentiment nails us to the past, blocks the exit to the future, twists or disorders the time-sense of the person trapped in it” (Brudholm, 2006, p. 21). For Hul’qumi’num’qun’ nations, we are more concerned with place, but in our big house when a harm or transgression is committed, it is addressed before the ceremony or family can move forward, and nobody in attendance is allowed to leave until there is resolution witnessed and the place where the incident occurred is cleansed by the women.

In Hul’qumi’num’, teytiyuq translates to angry, whereas qul’sthaat translates as anger that involves the entire body. The root words of qul’sthaat are qul’ and qul’aan. Qul’ is our word for eye, and qul’aan means a terrible thing that happened (in the past) that can be fixed, which suggests that some things can not be fixed. For Hul’qumi’num’qun’, anger is an embodied experience that is localized in our eyes and in our vision, how we see the world and how we are seen. For Hul’qumi’num’qun’, there are different forms of anger. Individuals must engage in certain practices to ensure protection for themselves and others from that anger, but certainly no outsider can assess the validity of another’s anger. Depending on the form, we have different practices that function to cleanse those feelings so that they do not harm that person or others in their family and community. Traditionally, and especially during ceremony today, if we are sad or angry we are instructed to not look other people in the eye for fear of hurting them, we say that our eyes are sharp. These cleansing practices, however, do not banish that anger and ask the person to forget, they are concerned with protecting the people from that anger so that it is not directed inward. Given that the violent colonial history of domination and dispossession of Indigenous peoples continues to structure our daily lives and has profound affects on our health, colonial rage overtly and covertly shapes our relations with self and Others. Indigenous women’s voices including those of love and anger must prefigure the politics of resistance and approaches to solidarity.

…

In the city, in the classroom, or at a protest, there is always a settler seeking my recognition. She wants me to recognize that she is distanced from the others. She is innocent. Through her look, the Other wants me to see that she is a good settler, an ally. But my only thought is: Don’t smile at me. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (1967) demonstrates the futility of appealing to the Other for recognition and instead identifies the enemy, “since the Other was reluctant to recognize me, there was only one answer: to make myself known” (p. 92). Similarly, when Indigenous peoples deploy ‘settler’ it identifies the enemy, whereas, when deployed by settlers it is often depoliticized and neutralized rather than counter-performative in its function. When the colonized are not grateful or fail to recognize and commend the self-decolonizing of the settler, we are resented.

…

A settler political will should be willful, that is, willing to disobey a general will and always working toward an alternative future. Revolution is only possible when subjects violate the directives of commanding bodies, a willing willfulness to create the world anew by opposing the old orders (Foucault, 1982, p. 336). The will to change is simultaneously a negation and an affirmation. It is, as Foucault (1982) writes, “through the refusal of this kind of individuality that has been imposed on us” that new forms of subjectivity emerge (p. 336). The political will of decolonization refuses to reproduce the present and affirms alternative futures.”

Excerpts from “What’s on the earth is in the stars; and what’s in the stars is on the earth”: Lakota Relationships with the Stars and American Relationships with the Apocalypse
by Suzanne Kite (https://www.c21uwm.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Kite_Whats-on-earth-is-in-the-stars_2021.pdf):

The same logic that allows for the consumption of Indigenous spiritual practices allows for the possession and destruction of the land and nonhumans. That same logic sees nonhuman extraterrestrials as simultaneously futuristic and evolved or reptilian and nefarious. In this many-headed imagining of the alien colonization of Earth, the Euro-American becomes “indigenous” through the act of being attacked, a distorted metaphor and a move to innocence for the invasions that are promised during American wars: the attack of the Japanese and Nazis, the attack of Communists, and the ongoing promised attacks on “freedom” by immigrants, Asian Americans, Latinx laborers, BLM activists, antifascists, Muslims, and whoever else is designated an enemy by the United States. Only through violence and war are settler futures imagined.

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In examining the geography of a haunted space, one can imagine the American map like Borges’s Unconscionable Map laid over the land itself. The new map that has been laid over the continent is haunted by the land just beneath the surface. An American mythological past is created through the blending of the paranormal with the landscape, an attempt to embed a settler past to create a settler future. Revealing the bias of settler sciences requires examining settler desires and beliefs, which ultimately form new myths and new gods. Over the relatively short history of the American identity, American mythologies have been developed through song, costume, literature, policy, and media. The phenomenon of Tumblr witches or the post-1970 desire to invent American Indian ancestors speaks to the desperation of the American to create their indigeneity.

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In the Euro-American context, ghosts are defined by both Christian teachings and Spiritualist understandings, even thought of as possible results of time travelers, “humanoids,” and other paranormal theories about hauntings. Looking toward cultural phenomena such as the stories of Washington Irving, the adoption of Hallowe’en, the explosion of spiritualism in 1848, and the satanic panic in the 1990s, it is clear that much of the American paranormal landscape is a direct manifestation of European conceptualizations of the afterlife and borrowed mythologies that have been laid over on top of the Americas, resulting in a pantheon of phenomena which persist today. In contemporary paranormal media, hauntings often start in the late 1800s, coinciding with the era of American Spiritualists. During the Spiritualist movement in particular, Euro-Americans living on “American” land were holding séances, while Indians living on Indian land were being starving to death and actively murdered as a part of the genocidal project. The idea of a haunting on Turtle Island, or any location, implies layers of beliefs, layers of living and the dead cohabitating: Americans, Canadians, white settlers implanting their own ghosts, layering their own stories over the top of the map, an attempt to retroactively own that location.

…

In a recent conversation, artist Scott Benesiinaabandan spoke about the popularity of paranormal media: “Most non-indigenous people’s interaction with the mystery is they want to provoke it. This is like talking ghost stories around a campfire, right? They want proof or they want the thrill. They want to put their finger in the dark well of the mystery, but they’re not really wanting to be in that whole lake of mystery.”

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In 1998, a group of Dene elders from Northwest Canada traveled to Hiroshima to meet with survivors and descendants of survivors of the atomic bomb dropped some fifty years earlier. Some of the uranium used to kill more than 200,000 people in Japan had been mined and transported by Dene men, many of whom died years later from radiation-related disease. The six Dene elders came from where the earth had been torn up to the place where earth and sky were ripped apart like never before. They came to Hiroshima to apologize and to recognize the shared radioactive reality between people touched by the detonation of the bomb and those who unwittingly touched the materials that would make such a weapon. Nobody from the Canadian government was present, none among those who had exploited the miner’s bodies and their homelands and willingly aided the construction of the atomic bomb ever made the journey.

…

Stones, taken from Indigenous lands using Indigenous bodies, and transformed into radioactive materials, is the material result of the American fear of the unknown enfolded with fear of nuclear radiation and executed as warfare and violence. This will be the materials of further colonization into space.

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Rieder proposes that “the way colonialism made space into time gave the globe a geography not just of climates and cultures, but of stages of human development that could confront and evaluate on another.” The colonial sense of progress is indelibly fixed to an unrelenting linear timeline towards a settler future, where Indigenous peoples are the uncivilized past, American white-superiority the present, and Mars colonization and extraterrestrials the future.

Excerpts from Postmodernism Is Not Permission by Kite (https://forgeproject.com/forging/postmodernism-is-not-permission#num-1):

Indigenous practices were acutely attacked by settler governments to specifically erode our ontological values. Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim Tallbear explains how “monogamy and marriage are also part of sustaining an animacy hierarchy in which some bodies are viewed as more animate, alive, and vibrant than others.”

Intimacy is political and centuries of colonial policies in North America have sought to destroy Indigenous political power. Citing Kahnawà:ke Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson, Leanne Simpson writes, “the murdering, disappearing, and erasing of Indigenous women is necessary for Canada to secure and legitimize its sovereignty because they house and reproduce Indigenous political orders. This isn’t true just for Indigenous women, but it is also true for queer bodies and children because these Indigenous bodies have always housed and acted out Indigenous power, political and otherwise.”

For Indigenous people intimacy and closeness of relationships with family and the spirit world are the core of political power. Simpson continues, “All of our political structures are plugged into the essence and real power of life that exists across time and space as worlds of nonhuman beings, some of which are spiritual beings and some of which are our Ancestors.” Destruction of kinship with kin—material and immaterial—is the destruction of the whole.

…

Artmaking and creation with Lakȟóta epistemologies is one way I approach the reorientation of my relationship with materials. Lakȟóta intimacies with the nonhuman allow for the potential manipulation of time and space into active cosmic vortexes, beyond the settler map. These Kapemni or twisting vortexes are created through ceremony that takes place with and through the nonhuman, in the deepest intertwinement and intra-actions, intimacies where we as mere humans cannot fabricate or ignore or manipulate the nonhuman agency necessary to make immense transformations of bodies and spirits and objects. “The distinction between natural and supernatural, so basic to European thought, was meaningless in Lakȟóta culture,” writes David C. Posthumus. “Humans are not superior” in Lakȟóta ontology, they are “pitiful and helpless” younger siblings of the animal world.

All pulled from “WRITING THE INVISIBLE: ARIANA REINES’S OCCULT POETICS” by David Ehmcke:

“Poetry’s not made of words”
—Ariana Reines, Mercury

“Something is saying itself through me”
—Ariana Reines

“That which is not of the body is not of the universe”
—Tantric maxim


When asked about A Sand Book, Reines explained, “Sand is the most obvious metaphor for time that we have—it’s so obvious that it’s invisible.…But it’s also a book about desertification and climate change and acquiring experiences of the divine through things we buy.”

…

“In my late teens and twenties I felt so brutalized by the ‘you’ of advertising and politics,” Reines said in an interview with SSENSE. She continues, “I am not the ‘you’ you think I am…I am not the ‘you’ you’re looking for.”

…

In “The Global Occult,” Niles Green writes, “The occult…emerged at the auspicious conjunction of colonialism, technology, consumerism, and globalization.” The entrance of religions designated occult— along with their practices, texts, and knowledges—into Western commerce and culture was “predicated on the movement and exchange of books and bodies, ideas and practices, all made possible by the steam travel, telegraphy, and world postal system that their impresarios would put to such effective use.”

…

As metaphors of sand recur in A Sand Book, it becomes clear that poetry allows Reines to make connections that exist constantly in the “background of everything,” connections that are otherwise occluded amid the “noise”…that overwhelms digital platforms of communication…It is then that the reader can realize that as they continue their passive consumption on new media platforms, they participate in a desertification of language while the literal desertification of Earth’s land mass progresses too.

Poetry, for Reines, offers the possibility for occluded metaphors, connections, and forces that otherwise exist constantly in the “background of everything” to suddenly come to the foreground by way of Reines’s poetic staging of them. Her staging of what is occluded then stands as a criticism to understandings of and attitudes toward the world that otherwise occupy the foreground of consciousness in non-poetic thought. The stagings and connections that emerge from Reines’s poetic practice provide for her what she has identified as an “ecstasy of meaning,” which re-imbues language and the world with the meaning she had previously found ground to “sediment.”

…

“I think so-called progressives and innovators need to think carefully about how their ideologies of experimentation, innovation, newness, progress, and improvement remap or offer support to these ideologies of capitalist, corporate, historical, patrilinear time.” It is important to consider in both McSweeney’s and Reines’s work how atemporality or cross-historicity figure as responses to linear “capitalist” time.

…

Devin Johnston writes in Precipitations, “[O]ccultism can assist poetry in defamiliarizing the modern world and thus critiquing its pretensions to rational systemization.”

…

Weber asserts that the organizing principle of rationalism is the belief that “there are no mysterious incalculable forces…one can, in principle, master all things by calculation.” He concludes, “This means that the world is disenchanted.”…Later in “Science as a Vocation,” Weber asks, “Who…still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world?”

…

“Another trick that can be found in every religious tradition—it’s a trick, but it’s a good trick: every single thing that happens to you, that befalls you, is a treasure. A jewel in your hand.”

…

Reines, too, has been critical of the disembodying effects of new media. She suggests, “I think the Internet as we now experience it very much reflects the people who built it, their concerns, their ideas about what the person is. Even if you go back to some of the founders of the Internet…these men were very exhilarated by the idea of getting rid of the body.” Indeed, one of these very founders, John Perry Barlow, wrote in “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” “Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.”

Some excerpts from Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land by N. Scott Momaday:

“We humans must revere the earth, for it is our well-being. Always the earth grants us what we need. If we treat the earth with kindness, it will treat us kindly. If we give our belief to the earth, it will believe in us. There is no better blessing than to be believed in. There are those who believe that the earth is dead. They are deceived. The earth is alive, and it is possessed of spirit. Consider the holy tree. It can be allowed to thirst. It can be cut down. Worst of all, it can be denied our faith in it, our belief. But if we speak to it, if we pray, it will thrive.

…

I stand where Dragonfly stood and prayed; Daw-kee, give light and life to your people. Give us one more day, and one more, and at last one more. I lift my old arms in bold entreaty. There the house and arbor are falling into ruin. Those who have inherited the homestead have not cared for it. Inside the arbor, once a place of happy activity and joyful talk and laughter, I place my bare feet on the red earthen floor and breathe the summer-scented breezes that enter there, I bless this place which is sacred to me, and I ponder the omen of the dead white owl that I found in the gutted house. Even in death the snowy creature is a keeper of the earth.

…

When the great herds of buffalo drifted like a vast tide of rainwater over the green plains, it was a wonderful thing to see. But there came a day when the land was strewn with the flayed and rotting remains of those innumerable animals, slain for sport or for nothing but their hides. The Kiowas grieved and went hungry, and it was the human spirit that hungered most. It was a time of profound shame, and the worst thing of all was that the killers knew no shame. They moved on, careless, having left a deep wound on the earth. We were ashamed, but the earth does not want shame. It wants love.

…

When I was a boy my father took me to a place where relatives once lived. Nothing was left of the house but traces of a foundation. The place was far out on the plain, so far that mountains were in sight. My father, when he was a boy, visited the people there. At night, he said, we could hear the howls of prairie wolves. They are gone now. I would like to have seen them. Your grandfather told me that they were handsome, with long legs and beautiful yellow eyes, wild and searching. I try to see the wolves in my mind’s eye, but I can only imagine them. I wish I could describe them to you. My father’s voice had trailed off. Will I tell my grandchildren, I wonder, of animals they will never see?

…

On one side of time there are herds of buffalo and antelope. Redbud trees and chokecherries splash color on the plain. The waters are clear, and there is a glitter on the early morning grass. You breathe in the fresh fragrances of rain and wind on which are borne silence and serenity. It is good to be alive in this world. But on the immediate side there is the exhaust of countless machines, toxic and unavoidable. The planet is warming, and the northern ice is melting. Fires and floods wreak irresistible havoc. The forests are diminished and waste piles upon us. Thousands of species have been destroyed. Our own is at imminent risk. The earth and its inhabitants are in crisis, and at the center it is a moral crisis. Man stands to repudiate his humanity.

…

Those who deny the spirit of the earth, who do not see that the earth is alive and sacred, who poison the earth and inflict wounds upon it have no shame and are without the basic virtues of humanity. And they bring ridicule upon themselves.

I am ashamed before the earth
I am ashamed before the heavens
I am ashamed before the dawn
I am ashamed before the evening light
I am ashamed before the sky
I am ashamed before the sun

This pronouncement from the Navajo has increasing relevance in our time. Daw-kee, let me not be ashamed before the earth.”

Some excerpts from Girls Against God by Jenny Hval

“I’m watching these black metal clips because I want to write a film. I don’t know what the film is going to be about yet, but I like the early black metal aesthetic, so near to my own childhood. Strangely, it gives me hope, hope that it’s possible to make art primitively, in a way that isn’t steeped in professionalism and compromise. Art that still hates. I remember how much hope there is in hatred.

The next clip I watch is a black metal gig that looks as if it took place in an assembly hall in an early nineties secondary school. I note: ‘Wholesome Norwegian youths talk amongst themselves and walk in and out of the room while the band plays on, completely unaffected. Black metal crawls unnoticed through adolescence, mine too. It doesn’t burrow down completely, but for as long as it’s there it lives and crawls. One of those youths could have been me. If I’d been a few years older, or if the clip had been from 1997 and not 1991. If I hadn’t been a girl and excluded from the black screen. It could have been me: we could have hated, all of us, together. Instead I had to hate alone. Provincial hatred.

…

Now I’m tired, tired of representing myself. I’m so tired of starting every sentence with ‘I …’ Actually, I’m tired of representing anything at all, alone, and of feeling that I’m competing on my own against everyone else. It’s as if all the travelling and all the art meant nothing. Despite everything I’ve brought with me from the South this idea that I’m a sinner, and even though I don’t think about God or Christians anymore, I’ve gone further in that idea than any of them. Sin is still inside me; everything is my fault and my responsibility, because I’m doomed to be alone, locked inside this subjectivity. I am so tired of chasing after it, this subjectivity, looking for something that’s all mine, that doesn’t have any context, surroundings or background. It’s so lonely. It’s so limited. It’s so heavy. The subject is reflected negatively, the subject is so alone, so threatened, so scared, so dying, so guilty…I think about how I want to swap some of these negatives in myself for something else, something shared. I want to take part in a chaos of collective energy. I want to be in a band.

…

Magic is far away, because it’s a place where God can’t see you, I think; that’s how we can find each other there.

…

Where is God?

God is in the knitted hats of the humble billionaires, the
heirs’ sailboats, and the shareholders’ velvet-lined inside pockets. God is in the pillboxes and the protein powder at the gym. God watches over the reality TV producers and the media corporations’ financial advisers. God surfaces in the threshing machines separating bad art from good art. God’s hand rests protectively over the hand that slaps your arse at school, at the rock club, at the university and on the underground. Because God is always in the system, in the sewers, in the trash, in the garbage. With the whores and the poor, like they teach us in school. In the 1990s the word whore is used frequently in the South; it’s apparently biblical enough to be used in public. Society’s trash. God looks after them, though. That’s why it’s good to be poor and exploited. You’re closer to God that way; you know better than others what it’s like to live. You’re a straight-talker. And God’s a straight-talker, too, Let there be light, he says, and there was light, and now the sun rises over the hills and the rooftops and the car parks and tints the hoods of cars and the pedestrian’s intestines.

…

We try to summon a different kind of song, one that doesn’t have God in the mouth or in the content either. All noises from our bodies are helpless and awkward, but through microphones and the strained sound system we don’t sound real anyway. Our voices are coming from a synthetic body, from wires and metal threads and magnet capsules, but also from our bodies which have understood how veins can be wires that tear loose and rewire, bodies where the sound’s new connections have already happened.

…

Between us and outside us, outside of cells and muscles and skin and everything we’ve been taught is our own form, is the room, or the beginning of it. The room begins at the point where we no longer recognise our own matter, where we begin to doubt ourselves. The room begins where only voices and menstrual blood and icy breath stretch out of us, and just where they stretch out of us and sort of look back at us, we start to doubt if we can actually claim that we are all the matter that exists within what we’ve been taught is our own form. Then the sweat follows; it, too, stretches out of us and into the room, and perhaps we sneeze, perhaps we cry, as more and more of our own bodily matter transforms itself from subject to world-tissue. We stretch out of our own shapes and become space, with the breath, with the blood and the voice. Now we’re in our own atmospheres, in our own cosmos, in the smallest big spaces, our own metaphysical matter.

…

Have you thought about how similar those words are: HATE and HOPE? Four letters, a voiced h, a quick, full vowel between two consonants. Maybe both words depend on those consonants to contain the energy, the rebellion, the reckoning, the infinity. Have you thought about how good it feels to say that you hate? That deep a-sound: in Norwegian it’s the mouth’s most open vowel, the one that’s pronounced entirely by a slack jaw, the tone the doctor asks for before instruments are stuck down your throat, or the last tone from the dying and the dead. The A emerges from the underground and the downfall.

…

The book repeatedly describes how the inability of devils and witches to reproduce has been verified, and that they instead collect men’s sperm to create perverted demon children. Those who might threaten the balance of power in society are often described as sperm collectors. Europeans were referred to as such when they began to infiltrate the portside brothels of Nagasaki and other Japanese cities. When Europeans appear in shunga, Japanese erotic art, they are frequently, and strikingly, shown collecting sexual juices in cups and other containers. Witches’ brew.

…

As I type in I write a satanic pact between you and me … in the email application, the word I is corrected to AI by the automatic spell check. Representation and subject are switched. In the future there are no boundaries. YOU could be UUE, or maybe that O could stretch a little further, into the magical DOC or DOCX of the text. ME could be MPEG or MP4

…

At the start of these aimless searches, this scrolling movement seems the closest any of us can get to magic on the internet. The scrolling is a pull that emerges and exists only in movement. I feel as though, if I move my fingers fast enough, I can overtake the present and step into the future. And if the search words I type in are dark enough, I’ll be able to continue down the different layers of the atmosphere and then the earth. In the end, I’ll be able to scroll myself all the way to hell.

…

And maybe I’m looking for something on the network, too, when a few years later I begin to surf the internet and chat on mIRC, first one night per week in a classroom and later at home. It always disappoints me that the ones I’m chatting to are real people from Ås, or San Diego or Johannesburg. Between the chat shifts, I dream up better conversations than the ones that exist in the real logs, and I continue to write to the computer, to invisible partners deeper in the mechanical systems. The feeling in my fingers as they rest on the warm keyboard reminds me of spiritualism. It’s the closest I get to communing with the spiritual realm. The electricity, the network, the connection. The internet is all I need to connect to another world, to disappear into another world, get away, or just feel close to something mystical and impossible. I fantasise about finding my own doppelgänger on the internet, or that I will suddenly be chatting to a version of myself from the future, or chatting to my grandma through the machines. A few years later I will be googling myself to sleep at night in imaginary search engines.

In the witches’ den, with Terese and Venke, I type into the search bar the internet as a spiritual force. I delete it and instead type How the spiritual world is like the internet. I delete this too and write Find God on the internet. I don’t press Search, but I am searching.

Dear God, who art online.

…

I’m the one who fantasises about being an HTML code and being held in the arms of the brackets.

…

Look me deep in the algorithms. It’s as if the internet’s entire underground potential has vanished into their archives. The pull the internet has on me lies dormant, reduced to something unconscious and functional, memorised grips on metal frames and finger constellations on the phone case. I shape my body gently around the machines, hand resting like a soft pillow under my phone as I text. Even now, as I write this to you, my upper body hangs over the laptop like a cradling breast, or am I the one that’s held by it? Maybe we’re both suckling each other at the same time. All this time I’ve participated in a ritual where I extend myself into the machine, without thinking about it as an extension of me.

…

The cosmic internet communicates through noise, we note in our dialogue. It creates confusion, poor connections, pixelated images and digital one-way streets.

…

We agree that in the long run, when it trusts us, the web will evolve into a fleshy peer-to-peer network, where a small part of your flesh is always seeding.

…

The desert air up here in the highlands is thinner and clearer, the sky wider, the ground, the earth less significant. New Mexico is 80 per cent sky and 20 per cent scorched red mountains, cacti and tufts of grass. My feet only barely hold on to the ground, my fingers barely reach down to the keyboard. No wonder the people around me wear thick boots and stiff, heavy hats. They’ve got to keep themselves grounded.

…

Trinity Site, scene of the first atom bomb test explosion, 16 July 1945, postponed for three days because of bad weather. The Trinity bomb was based on the fission process: atoms, once regarded as indivisible, exploded or were torn apart. Trinity’s power came from splitting atoms in two. It rose through the atmosphere, a glowing, mushroom- shaped erection fantasy, with the aid of Oppenheimer’s technology, the United States’ immense defence budget and the modern establishment’s unwavering faith in the logical binary division of the universe.

The biblical creation process is a story about fission, too, or at least a version of it. The first man, Adam, originally contained both masculine and feminine forces, united by the inevitable seam of cosmic threads. Adam was in this way completely androgynous, but then, according to the myth, they were unhappy with their own bisexuality, and as preparation for the universe, they cast out their feminine parts to become purely masculine. Only then could divine power shine from his eyes – from those reformed, straight eyes.

For scientists and philosophers, the atom bomb had the potential to become something more than a total meltdown of atoms and a catastrophe for mankind. Trinity and its successors could be conclusive evidence of a divine power, impelled by the pure masculine symbolism of a process that split its own components, casting off the waste to create the most powerful force of energy humanity had ever seen. Perhaps that’s why the research programme behind Trinity, Little Boy and Fat Man was named the Manhattan project. Casting off the feminine parts made it possible to rise, surging with inhumane power up toward the sky, like a skyscraper, with an architecture that united Christianity, capitalism and patriarchy in a holy trinity, horny for God.

I identify with the feminine parts, those left scattered around Adam’s body, the trash left behind by mankind’s fusion with God. The atomic waste is invisible; it has long since been dumped and buried underground, beneath towns and neighbourhoods populated by minorities and poor people. But out here in the desert, another kind of masculine waste glitters in the dry sunlight. The area is populated by oil field and military workers, and they’ve scattered their empty beer cans, used condoms, junk food containers and petrol cans across the landscape. It’s a modern version of the ram heads in Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings. In front of her never-ending New Mexico landscape, she displays the universe’s sacred waste: the skeletons float in the air, in front of mountains, sand and sky. They glisten; they are made of the salt of the earth and the sugar of witchcraft.

What a disappointment it must have been for God’s scientific apprentices when they discovered the even more powerful fusion technology. In 1952 Operation Ivy detonated the fusion bomb Ivy Mike, equivalent to ten megatons of TNT, and even at that point the men of the establishment had begun to pull out of the American nuclear project.

These bombs are a dead end, they thought; the potential destruction is too great. They hadn’t said that about Little Boy or Fat Man. But the fusion bomb really could blow the world as we know it to pieces. This process fuses atoms instead of splitting them; it brings isolated parts together into new forms that previously couldn’t exist. I imagine the fusion bomb as a recording of Adam’s gender-splitting process, the whole of genesis, in reverse, a restoring of the masculine and feminine into one condition, an impossible dimension, a join-the-dots feast. A perfect blasphemous construction built in the name of piety. Ivy is both a boy’s and a girl’s name. Has someone made a superhero figure of Ivy?

…

The next day, at the National Museum of Nuclear Science in Albuquerque, I see bits of the glass that the desert sand was melted into during the bomb detonation. The matter is called trinitite, green like kryptonite, inside a dusty display case. A Geiger counter is exhibited above it as a demonstration. It crackles as it registers the atom’s processes. The sound of radio-activity. Trinitite is still too fresh to touch, too pure and masculine. Or is it we who are too frail, and allow ourselves to be radiated, are we too feminine, and ?

…

Genitals are already sea creatures. Wet and soft, from birth till death. We can only ever partly understand and grasp this. Like the sound of our voices and the blood that streams from our body, they are human osmosis, just as much connected to the world as to us. They represent something infinite and only partly real to our realist eyes. They are sluggish semi-fungi, partly submerged in water, moist, smooth, slick, perforated, born eyeless. They are half human matter and half imaginary creature.

…

I’m so sick of being a soul that can be converted or improved or healed, or that’s dangerous and needs to be stopped from contaminating others. Give me a salvation break, I’m exhausted. I want to be in a place where I don’t have anything to hate; I want to be that place, a place that can’t be manipulated, conversed or converted. I want to be a thing, a series of things, things without religious potential. I want to be out of God’s reach.

In school I’m never allowed to be that place. I imagine it’s because I enjoy hating too much. I’m too fond of transgression. But now, twenty years after college, when I turn the screen toward Venke and Terese and we watch the black metal bonus material together, we sink into the undergrowth, and we choose the camera over the trees, or we choose the black and white trees over the real and green ones. We look past and into the patterns. We don’t stop the movement, but let it continue, like an eternal scroll down the black whirling branches. We choose the pixels.

Listen to the MP3 buzz from the fan in the computer. It whispers a heathen psalm.

…

Sound is faster than comprehension, faster than what they call heart and soul and sin.

…

The most important thing about magic is obviously that it
never ends. What’s most important about magic is to create meeting places, so that later, others can stretch further into this artistic space. The desire to go there never ceases. This need to change, translate, transgress, transcend, smudge, it’s never satisfied. We never stop hating. Hatred and hope don’t change. Hatred and hope will continue to chime together and curse the world.”