IV (from To Cross This Distance)
by Jamie Saenz

The immense malaise cast by shadows, the melancholic visions surging from the night,
everything terrifying, everything cruel, that without reason, that without name,
one has to take it, who knows why.
If you have nothing to eat but garbage, don’t say a word.
If the garbage makes you sick, don’t say a word.
If they cut off your feet, if they boil your hands, if your tongue rots, if your spine splits in two, if your soul fines down to nothing, don’t say a word.
If they poison you, don’t say a word, even if your bowels slide from your mouth and your hair stands straight up; even if your eyes well with blood, don’t say a word.
If you feel good, don’t feel good. If you fall behind, don’t fall behind. If you die,
don’t die. If you’re sad, don’t be sad. Don’t say a word.
Living is hard; it’s hard work not to say a word.
Putting up with people without saying a word is tough.
It’s very hard—inasmuch as they expect to be understood without saying a word—
to understand people without saying a word.
It’s terribly difficult yet very easy to be a decent person;
the truly difficult thing is not to say a word.

Remember
by Joy Harjo

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.

Remember the moon, know who she is. I met her
in a bar once in Iowa City.

Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.

Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.

Remember your father. He is your life also.

Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.

Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe. I heard her singing Kiowa war
dance songs at the corner of Fourth and Central once.

Remember that you are all people and that all people are you.

Remember that you are this universe and that this universe is you.

Remember that all is in motion, is growing, is you.

Remember that language comes from this.

Remember the dance that language is, that life is.

Remember.

For Keeps
by Joy Harjo

Sun makes the day new.
Tiny green plants emerge from earth.
Birds are singing the sky into place.
There is nowhere else I want to be but here.
I lean into the rhythm of your heart to see where it will take us.
We gallop into a warm, southern wind.
I link my legs to yours and we ride together,
Toward the ancient encampment of our relatives.
Where have you been? they ask.
And what has taken you so long?
That night after eating, singing, and dancing
We lay together under the stars.
We know ourselves to be part of mystery.
It is unspeakable.
It is everlasting.
It is for keeps.

from/about The Nabataean Agriculture by Ibn Wahshiyya

At times, the stories conceal a hidden inner meaning, as in a text purporting that the eggplant will disappear for 3000 years. The author explains that this is a symbolic expression in which the 3000 years signify three months, during which eating eggplant would be unhealthy.

…

They say, for example, that a farmer woke up on a moonlit night and started singing, accompanying himself on the lute. Then a big watermelon spoke to him: “You there, you and other cultivators of watermelons strive for the watermelons to be big and sweet and you tire yourselves in all different ways, yet it would be enough for you to play wind instruments and drums and sing in our midst. We are gladdened by this and we become cheerful so that our taste becomes sweet and no diseases infect us.”

https://harpers.org/archive/2015/02/some-notes-on-song/

“I try to reason and I tell myself you’ll return.” / “It is not my job to win you over with a persuasive argument, but to impart to you a vibrational experience that is capable of awakening a desire for another world.” / “We have noted how a song borrows existent physical bodies in order to acquire, while it’s being sung, a body of its own. […] And the song shifts unpredictably from one borrowed body to another.” / “No sequence, only a being. No journey, only a dance.” / “What night endeavors must we embrace to enter that hidden frequency?”

https://doorgallery.neocities.org/articles/8-valyri-interviews-Octa-Octa-interviews-valyri

Friedrich Nieztsche’s statement that “God is dead” is often misinterpreted. Drastically at that. In Nietzsche’s time, there was a wide emergent awareness that institutions such as the Catholic Church, which attempt to stand in for God on Earth, are decadent and corrupt and have strayed too far to the status of robber barons. Where do you find the equal-to-all, endless love of God, the examples of His wonders, the perfection of His creations in His image? Nietzsche proposed that now God as a concept is “dead” due to its ambassadors no longer representing all that our Creator stands for, we have reached a spiritual crisis. The only solution to this spiritual crisis is the introduction of boundless beauty, he wrote. Art would be proof of God’s miracles. We must create and consume the things that prove that God created us in His image, and he gave us the power to imagine and empathize and to elicit strong emotions in our audience, to reach for something Holy and boundless, to create viscera adorned with His love and His omnipresence. “Fake Opulent” is what happens when beauty comes pouring out of the gutter. When all the extraordinary things contained in the mundane start, without coordination, pouring out as if a great flood. In this constant flow, inevitably, much like if given a typewriter and infinite time a monkey could produce the entire works of Shakespeare, order will emerge. Surrounded by hellish amounts of beauty, and Holy amounts of curiosity, our nature, in His image, will allow us to discover the true order of the universe, to tap into God’s Work amongst the entire spectrum of lights and metaphor encircling us. If Man were made by God to grasp His miracles, we would be able to take the fruits of our actions as His creation, the results of our being in His image, and use this ignored but spectacular detritus to come to fully appreciate the breadth of beautiful possibilities we were given by our Creator. “Fake Opulent” is the hypothetical music that emerges. With components unrelated across personal circumstances, time, place and genre, it comes together to create a Possible music, one that would not be made if all the unwitting collaborators in the process of its making were to meet and be put in the same studio and make decisions communally and what this music should come to be. “Fake Opulent” accepts the authority of God. If everything is beautiful, and everything is made in His image, this music made of the creative efforts of His sons and daughters, and all of his children, without anything but Luck assured by our Creator, this music should come even a step closer to imitating the Endlessness, the beauty of God’s love. A clock ticking constantly produces entropy. Chaos is the only constant. With every each motion, we contribute more and more disorder to existence as we know it. Our chaoses, our feeble attempts, will inevitably knock on the right door and out will come a version of music that we love and find beauty in, assembled with no contributions by the artists it imitates, a Bootleg crafted by the Hands of God. The job of a sound collagist is to mine the beauty and produce even a crude approximation of what God’s Version, with access to all the untapped vastness of human creativity and the deep, rich lives that come with it, would theoretically resemble.

-from Fake Opulent’s liner notes