“The end of the battle is the time of female ritual.”
originally posted to substack — Aug 01, 2023
featured image above // TWBT – Katy Mongeau (Video Poem)
This toxin of alchemy, seduction and mercurial immixtures is reddened by the chromatic pigment haemoglobin. Composed of four polypeptide chains, and four nonprotein pigments, this concoction of iron and oxygen is seen surfacing. Red blood is metal.
The body is the breeding ground of anorganic life. With no interior closed off to the environment it behaves as an electrical conductor drawing energies from the earth’s ferric core. The body has always been the metallic assemblage of posthuman life. She is bleeding metal, the iron of the earth. Her frequencies are tuned to the electromagnetics of a lunar rhythm, to geological foldings, to tides and the floodgates. Her blood will rise and fall.
—Amphibious Maidens, Suzanne Livingstone, Luciana Parisi, Anna Greenspan
i gave myself license to depart the other city and it felt trite, unconvincing. threw the vase i hid the sigils in after their working into the water to sink them to end the contract i’d made months prior and it just bobbed back up to the surface, headed back to shore. i felt stunned, and not unlike the fool — zeroed-out. maybe that’s permission enough to start over. like when the universe laughs at you — is that how you know magic is working? proof maybe at least that someone is listening
regardless, i walked back down the pier and started the drive three hours south
leaving everything behind / not sure of ever having had anything in the first place — or was it just like living like a ghost: worry becomes a constant unreality but really it’s about not recognizing your own power in the moment, only later… so you just run. instead of waiting for it to catch up to you, to sync
— I wanted to belong only to symbols, like a saint
a simple equation of myself
like how perfectly crude I am, always pointing at god
It is, as such, a semiotic practice of cosmogony: these elements (symbols) refer back to one (or several) unrepresentable and unknowable universal transcendence(s); univocal connections link these transcendences to the units evoking them; the symbol does not ‘resemble’ the object it symbolises; the two spaces (symbolised-symboliser) are separate and do not communicate.
The Bounded Text, Julia Kristeva
my major malady is a piss-poor conception of time, amongst small doses of others as homeopathy, i think —
mental illness, drug abuse, poverty, isolation/neglect
against ordinary happiness, but
i can’t make it make sense – how do you want just a person, and not life. there’s always this compulsion to settle, as though it were just a side-effect of living
— and it is. so you just die very very slowly, knowing you were right all along and still didn’t win
like how many mental breakdowns can one have in north portland, make it make sense
— my dad did a lot of drugs here before i was born
— i saw that mountain explode and don’t even remember it
like i could stop time by going / coming back to where i’m from, or make it deeper
i like how violent the earth is under me — here volcanic, subducted, colliding up into the sky. why would you acquiesce to horizontality. what’s the need to be drawn up the need to be pulled down if only for tension, a bow — SYMBOLIC / NON-SYMBOLIC is a body and
— i’m aware of the slow walk of stone that makes the bedrock here and how there was once a bloodfield like fire that anchors it under us. it feels like a weird thing to know and i have to assume no one else cares. maybe it’s phones. i try to think of mine as metal, thought into mineral, how/where it came from —
and look at it less, but still like the weight of it in my bloody hand
.
.
.
.
gravity: matter is attracted to matter. and science a more direct way to describe, but not to experience it. or how an emotion differs from a mood — metaphysically twice-removed (the body’s knowledge is dark there)
— maybe geology can never be a metaphor b/c we’re standing on it, moving with it, ever only as it is / happening, a practice
and when i say my heart is like stone
maybe it’s just that now
i feel the rust
— enough iron to sink my blood 🩸
and it’s like a meditation: “the earth will eventually remodel everything according to its own preferences, either gradually or catastrophically”