“The oil is our blood, our semen, our bone, our heritage from our ancestors…our life.”
Category Archives: nayra
“Can you imagine being able to visit the place where your people first emerged or landed? There is a pagan emergence place in Caesarea Philippi known as The Gates of the Netherworld, but Eden is lost to Christians. It’s “hidden,” but they couldn’t return there anyway because of the two angelic monsters guarding the entrance with their spinning swords of fire. Who are those guys? I like to think this image of a hidden garden and spinning gates of fire is a metaphor for the anaerobic bacteria now living in our guts—our cousins forced down into the muck by the fiery sword of the sun. Maybe, when oxygen began to fill the atmosphere, the ones who could “eat” and metabolize it were thrown out of “the garden,” destined to live above ground. Eden, our evolutionary birthplace, is now carried inside our bodies, as the ocean is carried inside of animal eggs.”
For the Empire
“The wild beasts that roam over Italy,” he would say, “have every one of them a cave or lair to lurk in; but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy the common air and light, indeed, but nothing else; houseless and homeless they wander about with their wives and children. And it is with lying lips that their imperators exhort the soldiers in their battles to defend sepulchres and shrines from the enemy; for not a man of them has an hereditary altar, not one of all these many Romans an ancestral tomb, but they fight and die to support others in wealth and luxury, and though they are styled masters of the world, they have not a single clod of earth that is their own.”
– Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus via Plutarchs Parallel Lives
We tread upon their graves without emotion. With unconcern we build our streets and erect our edifices upon their sacred enclosures…with sacrilegious hands we scatter to the winds alike the bones.
– Isaac Goodwin (1820), referring to the callousness these American hands exert on the land and the history and the peoples
The haze of nostalgia covers their days…making those days into something different than they were. That’s the way today changes history. All contemporaries do not inhabit the same time. The past is always changing, but few realize it.
– The Stolen Journals of Leto II
Language Event
Navajo
Hold a conversation in which everything refers to water.
If somebody comes in the room, say: “Someone’s floating in.”
If somebody sits down, say: “It looks like someone just stopped floating.”
Kite: Listening is not a practice, but the practice of the unattainable. In that possibility of making anything—like new knowledge, where the act of listening becomes endless—you can only hope to hear something during each repetition of whatever it is you’re listening to. You only find the repetition through prolonged listening—it’s like having an extended ear and waiting for the pattern to show itself. Learning something new, listening to Elders, experiencing horrible things and experiencing really good things are some examples.
All I can hope is that each time the repetitions happen, I’m able to listen and catch something important. It’s always good to have a community that reminds me to remember. We constantly go back to the source material, back to the people—you always have to go back and consult. That’s a cyclical thing, to be more than metaphorical, but maybe less than totally tangible. That’s what frequencies do: each sound oscillation is just a cyclical wave that comes and goes infinitely. Technically, if a sound goes out into the universe, it has the potential to go on forever. A light wave is the light cone.
https://canadianart.ca/interviews/practising-the-unattainable-bellow-kite/
https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/art-and-ideas/everything-i-say-is-true-poetic-bibliography/
https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/lewis-arista-pechawis-kite/release/1
…this chaos is generated out of a certain water that is not common, not out of Dew, nor Ayre condensed in the caverns of the Earth, or artificially in the Receiver; not out of water drawn out of the Sea, Fountains, Pitts, or Rivers, but out of a certain tortured water, that hath suffered some alteration, obvious it is to All, but known to very few. This water hath all in it that is necessarie to the perfection of the work, without any Extrinsecall Addition.
-Thomas Vaughan, Magica Adamica
“Early printing was long associated with devilry…
…One popular theory is linked to the fanciful belief among printers that a special demon, Titivillus (also referred to as “the original printer’s devil”), haunted every print shop, performing mischief such as inverting type, misspelling words, and removing entire lines of completed type. Titivillus was said to execute his pranks by influencing the young apprentices – or “printer’s devils” – as they set up type, or by causing errors to occur during the actual casting of metal type. High-profile printing errors “blamed” on Titivillus included the omission of the word not in the 1631 Authorized Version of the Bible, which resulted in Exodus 20:14 appearing as “Thou shalt commit adultery.”
Often depicted as a creature with claw-like feet and horns on his head, the origins of the Titivillus legend date back to the Middle Ages, when he was said to collect “fragments of words” that were dropped or misspoken by the clergy or laiety in a sack to deliver to Satan daily, and later, to record poorly recited prayers and gossip overheard in church with a pen on parchment, for use on Judgement Day.”