Friday, July 2, 2021

"Still Between Worlds": poem cycle written december 29, 2020

 
Painting by Thibault Delferiere

 
 
still between worlds
  י
 
having become human
passing through the animal
as these words do
through your eyes
plant prism mineral,
seeking enlightenment (without bother)
I go and I stay
shifting from plane to plane...
nothing about us absolute
everything wild and tame, fearless
I don't really want to write anything.
just first become human,
then seek enlightenment
causes of firstness preceding
times and history
accumulate in the landscape
and inside the body.
I am layered, time crystal
brittle, soft, hard, smooth
my breasts stand out
rough in some regions
what more have you been holding back?
not writing to be final
just trying to live here
my failure for you is success
in another dimension
collapse is order in the making
 
+
 
ectoplasm on the run
ejectamenta of the sun
the hope you carried forth with that gleam in your smile
where ever it follows you forever without body
this volume borrowed, returned to nature's library, unread,
unfinished, waiting, filed, lunar
the envelope doesn't have any name on it
we have to teach you who you are
but we can't keep you tied to that
endless wave, endless summer,
endless winter, deeper
repopulation where I see you wander
and like the mallards
timing their exodus
through the uprights of the great oak & the gingko
shiva's horns, the Y, timed release
their simple airport pond
destiny: the next black-hole
where we will meet again
 
+
 
dropping out is what we do (best)
every once in a blue asteroid
the book is only something to display the quality of a mind
datafications, info-materia, algorithms
implant fibulation, theophanic mobbing
they will manufacture new immunology
we will grow apart, flung
bones reconfigured, new bouquets, crowns
rippling from under permafrost
our fadeless particles
our perfect water
 
+
 
the way the world sounds be like
"I don't like myself very much
so I can't relate to you directly"
(writing in the dark, scratch piano)
there is a miniscule daub of angel
scurrying light, dolphin sylph
pollywog wiggling through these words
like a stuttering yod replicant
carries the grain-bug of the truth
that bothers me honestly
until the light goes out
and the dark comes on
 
the tree inside the moon
sending tentacles
  or down the particle chain
electrical
 
+
the flowers somewhere and their buddy system
spring eternal, maybe not for me
but what does it depend on?
hare kare quite contrary
getting a beyond for this techno-crapitalist mindset
the king of things hung up like a sail
(mapped traditions, lore, decoded)
the mother of all wounds
(eating means to be eaten)
furbish the tree, praise
regard and upload fecundity
don't worry about form
happy endings are bad
bad endings are good beginnings
leave it incomplete
 
the world's weather
tethered together, not
it's knot a not
left the untangling
giving way

 

Writng & Literacy may not be the Measure of All Things: Africa Writes Back: The Libyc-Numidian Script

 

Africa writes back

European ideas of African illiteracy are persistent, prejudiced and, as the story of Libyc script shows, entirely wrong

 https://aeon.co/essays/africas-ancient-scripts-counter-european-ideas-of-literacy?fbclid=IwAR067SQYJv_HRWPWTFY3fuC8qJT1B1-HG1UAILPlCHnA9maVjvtDtyq9ezs

 "But Bourdieu’s observational mistake – the idea that the Kabyle weren’t literate – is actually not his most consequential misapprehension. That would be the idea that literacy is a supreme cognitive and cultural achievement. It’s one of the means by which universities shore up the value of their intellectual work – they police grammar, philology, literacy – in short, they define and champion rigour and ‘standards’. For those of us brought up within that system – even brought up, as I was, in a former colony (Kenya) – those standards might appear to be value-neutral. But they’re value-neutral only because they annihilate even the possibility of other values, of other modes of thinking or being. When Bourdieu went from the elite École Normale Supérieure to a Kabyle settlement, he saw, ultimately, the absence of what made the university, and his own mind, what it was. That supposed absence is the product of intellectual arrogance, yes, but it’s also part of a European cultural heritage"