Excerpts from Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko (which I cannot recommend enough):
Perhaps the earth was spinning faster than before; rumors like this had circulated among tribal people since the First World War. Calabazas had heard the arguments the traditional believers had had among themselves- each accusing the other of being tainted by Mormonism or Methodism or the Catholic Church. But he had also heard them discuss the increased spin of the earth; others disagreed and had asserted it was instead the universe running downhill from a great peak and the increased speed was only temporary, before it reached the plain to slow gradually and regain a measure of stability.
Calabazas himself had no proof about the speed of the earth or about time. He did not think time was absolute or universal; rather each location, each place, was a living organism with time running inside it like blood, time that was unique to that place alone.
…
That week the Barefoot Hopi had talked about desecration. Earth was their mother, but her land and water could never be desecrated; blasted open and polluted by man, but never desecrated. Man only desecrated himself in such acts; puny humans could not affect the integrity of Earth. Earth always was and would ever be sacred. Mother Earth might be ravaged by the Destroyers, but she still loved the people.
Nabk
Somewhere by the tree at the extremity of thought,
it’s November and I’m still hunting shadows.
You told me that most natural
action tends to follow an arched trajectory.
You told me about
the dots that stretch and squeal.
You told me to be always
at the ready to embrace the mystery.
And now, I’m helping employers with their needs.
I’m exploring the financial viability of empathy.
Everyday I’m learning extinction.
Everyday I pray to awaken
as a holy knight of the commercial city.
I see mirrored vistas and voluptuous sniper rifles,
desert sands and metals sifting through flesh.
Plastics oozing into blood oozing into cum
slides down the dried out river beds
like phlegm in my throat.
It’s December and I’m still hunting shadows,
probably will be every month of the rest of my life.
I am a monocrop. I am a dry soil. I am a “roadkill”
or as a man once said to me, “fog’s morning bounty”.
My heart is becoming slick, like the sweat which still stalks my skin.
And the sweat, over years, like a river.
And the river, over years, like my veins.
Through this broken circle I
shape the body round the vowels of
mixtal choruses one over from blowing corpses.
We should all pursue becoming slime.
Where lie I? Behind your ridges was always why.
Your language-scape, I traverse like a sunny day.
ooooooooo\\\\\
and all dat
Your skinshape and the hope between two you’s.
The sucking and the squelching,
the mewing and the leching,
and the light that cuts through all things.
I love the way the hours caress you.
Like silt in the river bend, you leave small threads
of yourself
cross the land.
Like turtle tracks, I stalked the path.
Like grass, the fur of the rabbit.
Like home, the rock ledges down to the river
sang like wooden stove.
The water draining down the streets is always grey.
The Cathars were a 12th to 14th century Gnostic Christian movement
who regarded all water as unclean, as they said it had been corrupted by the earth.
My knees crumble like dirt. My hands like that clay I was born on –
just under the berm, you had to dig to reach material or form.
I built mounds like I build my accretion of data
flights like I fly around this dark earth looking for you.
I want to wrap you in a cocoon of my information
like your head between my thighs
while you tower over me in dusk light.
I need you like the clouds need the sky –
backdrop my affections, silhouette my afflictions.
Like I watched you pirouette in 9am snow.
Like I watched your tears through a zoom window.
How you inched away from violence
while I was moving in miles.
How you drew away like I drew a sword.
Where the blade pierced, my skin was left sore.
How do I know information wants to be free?
I always worry I am losing the ability to correctly distinguish.
You watched me gradually populate the rare failure region.
My wishful thinking. My exaggeration. My reversal. My escape. My distortion.
You were preventing complications, minimizing impairments, and maximizing function.
I was trying to cut out the empty space between reiterations.
You were honing your latent commercial energy.
I was trying to learn to trust my instincts.
I’m trying to explain something to you here in this rendering of glyphs.
If my phrasing is somewhat bent, it is only to try
to form a mold of a space that can’t be contained:
1). The logic with conjunction and disjunction (spiral and anti-spiral)
2). (dark I) and ‘u’ combination and its long form yield what shapes?
‘For me, understanding and reading 17th and 18th century colonial documents through Wabanaki political and cultural frameworks is part of a process of ôjmowôgan, the Abenaki word for history. The language tells us that “history” is a collective process of telling and re-telling, an ongoing activity in which we are all engaged.’
– Lisa Brooks, from https://www.mainememory.net/sitebuilder/site/2976/page/4665/print
“You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can’t reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can’t be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt, species die, and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even hearing it first.”
– from Blindsight by Peter Watts
The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived. The physical experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through which it is known, sustains a particular view of the society. There is a continual exchange of meaning between the two kinds of bodily experience so that each reinforces the categories of the other. As a result of this interaction, the body itself is a highly restricted medium of expression… To be useful, the structural analysis of symbols has somehow to be related to a hypothesis about role structure. From here, the argument will go in two stages. First, the drive to achieve consonance in all levels of experience produces concordance among other means of expression, so that the use of the body is co-ordinated with other media. Second, controls exerted from the social system place limits on the use of the body as medium.
– Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols
Silko explains that the Laguna view on the passage of time is responsible for this condition, stating, “The Pueblo people and the indigenous people of the Americas see time as round, not as a long linear string. If time is round, if time is an ocean, then something that happened 500 years ago may be quite immediate and real, whereas something inconsequential that happened an hour ago could be far away.”