Fish In the Afternoon

Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds. 

(John Milton, Paradise Lost)

When I wake up, I want to see you. Everyday, I want my hands to be in yours, feeling-presence slowing time, piano chords motioning as our fingers play in the gaps of space. I want to curve myself in the depths of you and hear the morning say let’s stay here awhile.

Honey dews the April-drop evening; fireflies purple the sky. Time is the dance of being-with-another, where you reveal you to me and I reveal me to you. Consciousness is conscious-of, and time is consciousness-in-motion. Absence becomes presence when it is in the presence of. I tie my hair in a pinksilk ribbon and nuzzle your soul happyday. Let’s spend some time together. Sipping seconds slow as caramel, dip the little-spoon in chamomile. The world we make is all there is, yawning-intertwining as we greet the dawn.

I awake and I asleep and I awake again. I want to spend every day with you. Tending soil, we garden futures; strawberry sonnets the soul. Being-magic is being-with-you; seeing what matters to you. You are what matters to me. Let’s take some cloth from our wedding bed and mend the pasts we spent apart. Reborn in your arms every morning, orange dappling the ballet slipper sunrise, we rise. We fable, us fables. Foxhunt dreams cascade gold wheat into holy commitment. I do, I do, I do.

Aloft the castle walls, I smell the poppy seed thunder. Across the horizon, Odysseus arrives, as I weave and unweave my shroud of awaiting. Do you know how much I love you? I want to build you a home. Come back from the torrid sea and slip into the safety of you-and-me. I pluck the harpstrings of quality to sing still the changing winds. Drift into my waiting arms, O long lost sailor, my love my love. I love you. Feel the warmth of our world, Sunshine, the hearth that we heat with our heart.

I can’t wait to be home with you.

The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration. 

(William Wordsworth, It is a Beauteous Evening)

Image: Forest Sunrise by Albert Bierstadt (n.d.)

Born in the garret, in the kitchen bred. 

(Lord Byron, A Sketch)

For my grandmothers. For my grandchildren.

1. All there is is a single tree.
2. This tree is the world-soul.
3. Every branch of the world-soul is itself a soul.
4. A soul is a lived life.
5. A lived life is irreplaceable, just as it is.
6. Living life begets a soul.
7. Each soul is a branch.
8. The branch is always here, has been, and coulda woulda shoulda.
9. Every branch connects together, every soul making more in every step.
10. The world-soul feels and thinks and acts and is in every life.
11. Living your life is loving wisdom; in all wisdom is the world-soul.
12. In every choice we make, she makes a choice with us.
13. Every choice we make is a grandmother to another and another.
14. The world-soul mothers all, generating generations generating everything.
15. Each and every one of us has a soul, lives our life, and mothers somethin’ or other.
16. We could and should be a gift to all the world, make a home in her leaves, and become a granny to the whole of time.
17. Magic is knowing somebody’s true name; I yam that I yam, being being itself.
18. We make a world by being-magic.
19. Being is always being-magic, worlding the worlds of souls ensouling the world-soul, granny-magic.
20. Shuck peas and pick pecans.

These are the so-called “power doctors,” backwoods specialists, each claiming to be endowed with supernatural power to cure certain specific ailments. They seldom attempt any general practice, and most of them take no money for their services, although they may accept and even demand valuable presents on occasion. Some of these people, usually old women, can cool fevers merely by the laying on of hands ;others draw out the fire from burns by spitting or blowing upon the inflamed areas, while still others claim to heal more serious lesions by some similar hocus-pocus. One old lady who specializes in burns says that she always mutters a few words which she “l’arnt out’n the Book” -the Bible,that is- but refuses to tell me what particular text is used.

Vance Randolph, Ozark Magic & Folklore

Image: Magnolias on a Wooden Table by Martin Johnson Heade (n.d.)

The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first and last, and midst, and without end.  

(William Wordsworth, "The Simplon Pass")

Being-trans is neither essence nor accident. It is neither modern nor ancient. Being-trans is an expression of melodic variations in gender-being across world-time, the unveiling of a form-of-life. Transition is revelation. Being-trans is apocalyptic. 

So they say: trans-ness is eternal, permanent, and inescapable. True, there is no a priori gender-being much less a primordial dyad; trans-like gender-beings echo through time; and being-trans emerges from our bio-ecology. However, being-trans remains a rupture in history, a prophetic calling-back-and-forth across world-time. There can now be trans ancestors because we have the grammar of transition, an event that occurs in the margins of Leviathan. 

Being-trans reveals itself in the eclipse of modernity, the twilight of the Lutheran world, which tried to naturalize and discipline those outside of the Adam-Eve dyad. History transitions from one mode to another, and being-trans calls attention to a transition in our gender-being, a revealing of gender-being as such. This is not to say that we are New Beings, the 'New (Wo)men' born from capital's cataclysm. We are a dance of apocalyptic agency.

The regime terrorizes being and uses gender as monster to subdue it. The soul becomes an instrument in the smog of quantity, obscuring trans-being in the libidinal machinery of capital's technological expansion, the grinding of variable into absolute capital. As the gendered body of trans-being is made pathos and pathology, the transsexual cogito remains disciplined by surgeon, pharmacist, and therapist, priests of clock-time barely concealing quantity's demiurgic haunting. (Clock-time: Einstein's physical time quantized; the opposite of Bergson's human time; measured, regimented being-in-time; dividing the existent). 

Trapped in the medicine cabinet of biopoliticians, bodily transformation rebels and becomes alchemy. The regime bows to Yaldabaoth, the putrefied son of Sophia who garbles wisdom into information, building temples of lithium to hide the revelation of the Unique. Being-trans prophesies in whispers: our sensed-self is the energeia that proceeds in us- and world-creation, an ever-begetting incarnation of past-present-futures. Being-trans myths again being-human by making magic the always-unfolding logos of gender-being. The eclipse of one onto-mode is the eclipse of a regime; base and superstructure form one cohesive net that frays at the edges before collapsing and re-webbing. Being-trans ruptures the onto-mode of quantity that snakes through modernity, echoing the Unique as wizard of being. 

The Behemoth crawls from the wounds of Leviathan and speaks the Dragon. The fasces returns as the insignia of Empire, the Caesaric collapse of the republic that heralds the New Babylon. Each apocalypse is proleptic of the next and myths the Last Judgment, telling-again of two foes: the Beast & St. George the Dragon's Death. Each revealing has its call to reveal, and every call calls from the Millennium. Holy holy holy seraphim swallow the dawn, hark the herald angels sing: glory to the River of Life. Harrow hell, O history, the Holy Saturday of being-here. Being is never One, but cosmos: anew anew it rays the coming night, flicker good morning the new ontology. 

Being magics being.

17 Then I saw an angel standing in the sun, and he called out with a loud voice and said to all the birds flying high overhead, “Come and gather for God’s great supper. 18 Come and eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of generals, the flesh of the powerful, and the flesh of horses and their riders. Come and eat the flesh of all, both free and slave, both small and great.” 19 Then I saw that the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies had gathered to make war against the rider on the horse and his army. 20 But the beast was seized, along with the false prophet who had done signs in the beast’s presence. (He had used the signs to deceive people into receiving the beast’s mark and into worshipping the beast’s image.) The two of them were thrown alive into the fiery lake that burns with sulfur. 21 The rest were killed by the sword that comes from the mouth of the rider on the horse, and all the birds ate their fill of their flesh.

(The Apocalypse of St. John 19.17-21 CEB)

Image: Apocalypse du printemps by Jean Messagier (n.d.)

The flow of time is always cruel. – Zelda, Ocarina of Time

If I were an ocean, I’d part. Time arts the many, seawaves tending to fall (and no one hears it). Grief parches, babblebrain topics again-and-again the one-who-when — if I stay frozen, maybe the earth will still. Gristlesift hot cast iron, what enchants and what entails (thingking to herself). I barelybarely, what semantics do I? To say the unspeakable.

Silence — rememberfirst the guardian-angels, infinite cycles of time planting-and-reaping histories plural. Soil waters the sky, sky breathes the soil; signs myth signs as myths. Death is permanent. (I don’t know how to speak about funerals). What happens — anamnesis holymumbling emanations, memories mattering the one. The one who matters. The two who matter. The three.

Somatic terrorwave engulfs the peninsula of good mourning. I barely hymn (the ghost will always him). I am your granddaughter. Gold twilights the honeydew evening lightninbugs mimicking the sun. To who the ground belongs to, to belonging that grounds. I can never talk to my Nana again. I’ll talk to the magnolia.

All streams flow to the sea,
    but the sea is never full;
    to the place where the rivers flow,
    there they continue to flow. - Ecclesiastes 1.7 (CEB)

Image: The Mulberry Tree by Henry Herbert La Thangue (n.d.)

Happens is never once. – William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!

I grieve the daughters of the valley.

Stormy skies spell silence overhead. Bodyblood golds while the reaper repents. Memories deepwater the trench of my heart, the bonegallows’ child who tempers thou art. I do not haunt says the moth to the caterpillar. I cry. Starlight signals billions moment-to-moment webbed across the sky. Time suspends in fire, space drenched in gasoline. Poembreath hymns remembrance as presence, alltime and everyhistory illuminating meaning.

I starswan I swansay, the gasgiant feathered one looms solar over metacosmic universes. Come together and break apart. Poltergeisting past-and-future, gleamdeep my spirit walks. Frogspell my weeping frame, the river beforeandagain draws nearer the mezzanine. Or so she says, we will see. The mattermother wombs grotesqueries in twistingshaking hallowhollow of honeycorpse. Screedcurse the nytemare, we demon into earthtongues that thirst animation. Ontological afterbirth refusing eternity for the senses.

Creation begins from entangled grief, oceanearth mossfleshing ha-Adam from Adama. The tree of knowledge grows chalkdark in the winterwhite soil and waits patiently for the Dragon. The Cherubim guard close the Lamb. Yamsweet the tenderrooted holy one, Eve traces evilgood into the boneheart of humanity and breaks it across her knee. She melts into Swan and escapes the Known for the Unknown, jeweled gates of maybetime marbling-aloft the atmosphere. At the nape of Venus, she sings out for tomorrow. Towhere towhen, towhom the Arkansaw.

Am I a daughter of the valley?

History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers, — nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other, — her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit, — that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever, — not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All, — rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in Common. – Thomas Pynchon, Mason and Dixon

Image: Field Hospital by Eastman Johnson (1867)