the spell of the sensuous

(lots of good stuff in this book--thanks j. here's a piece.)

"...the current commodification of 'nature' by civilization tells us little or nothing of the perceptual shift that made possible this reduction of the animal (and the earth) to an object, little of the process whereby our senses first relinquished the power of the Other, the vision that for so long had motivated our most sacred rituals, our dances, and our prayers."


"but can we even hope to catch a glimpse of this process, which has given rise to so many of the habits and linguistic prejudices that now structure our very thinking?"


"certainly not if we gaze toward that origin from within the midst of the very civilization it engendered."


"but perhaps we may make our stand along the edge of the civilization, like a magician, or like a person who, having lived among another tribe, can no longer wholly return to his own.



"he lingers half within and half outside of his community, open as well, then, to the shifting voices and flapping forms that crawl and hover beyond the mirrored walls of the city."


"and even there, moving along those walls, he may hope to find the precise clues to the mystery of how those walls were erected, and how a simple boundary became a barrier, only if the moment is timely--only, that is, if the margin he frequents is a temporal as well as a spatial edge, and the temporal structure that it bounds is about to dissolve, or metamorphose, into something else."

repurposing my pen, my nosehairs, my skin

picture this: an eliot pokes its head out of a hole in the ground. the earth shakes a little (remniscent of a faraway quake in chicagoland near eliot's fellow creatures). at once, the eliot leaps out of the hole bearing a huge machete (all-purpose tool) and dirt flies everywhere, spattering blisters and waterfalls and guavas as it races into the bamboo trees. "i live in your dreams!" it screams with delight.

got through rio de janeiro safely, albeit a slight delay because we missed our bus...
now we're in rio pomba!
picked up from the bus station at 2a.m. by a man with a beau-ti-ful head of dreadlocks (you know wwoofing has turned out well when-) and a smaller man, both of them thin and tightly muscled. when you drive the 12km out to the farm, there are lots of monoculture fields of sugarcane, corn, coffee. and then once we arrived (the '86 volkswagen fixed with a pebble, the sky held up with a twig, the mountains eroding because there are no trees anymore to hold up the ground), we were met with something remniscent of a baohaus, rural-ized, in progress, partially roofed, made of cement blocks with ambitions of bioconstruction...the bath is a waterfall and the water, for once, is infinite.

cycles cycles which fit together as cleanly as wet adobe on a wall:
- humans eat fruit and vegetables, goats eat peels and compost, remains are perfect for plants; everyone is nourished.
- tree is cut for building, small pieces used for fire, dust and chips are used for compost toilet; forest thrives with increased light.
- cows eat grass, cow manure is sifted for soil to germinate delicate seeds, remains are used for plants; perhaps the cows are glad.
and in this light, everything begins to fit together: reverse or ignore the crumbling institutions which struggle to salvage ethical ways of living in this world and instead, instead, take a word from the permaculturists and anarchoprimitivists (ritual fits in to, comes easily in a place where the ground, i, and all inbetween are connected somehow).

the first day we were here, we mixed adobe and sand and dirt and grass and some sugar and made adobe, covered a wall of the house. since, az and i have continued to do work on the land (digging huge holes for banana circles, cutting bamboo forest and cleaning long stalks, sifting manure, cleaning found roof tiles) as well as having time-space to draw, paint, designar. my fingers are blistering and callusing but also rememememembering agility and i've been drawing yogic poses, psychedlic plants (oohhh! apparently mushies grow on cow pats here! pray for rain for me plzzz), designs, some rolling hills. artur asked if we could paint the side of the house, not sure i'm ready for that but working up to it.

saving saving saving my sexual energy, the one functionality of my body that, it seems, isn't in use these days.

this morning, i woke up and made a fire to make oatmeal
tonight, we go by bus back to the city
the cars, the smoke, the cops, the corruption and the favelas falling falling like shoeboxes from the top of your closet (or my glasses from my chicagobed)
i've harvested a few choice things from the forest for a carnaval costume...we'll see
i asked az if i should wear my strapon and she said "better not attract undue attention"
unlikely to become a guiding principle in my life, though it is something i am learning and navigating amidst my slowly slowly improving portuguese. (sometimes these moments of invisibility, along with the moments of sprawling distinct euphoria, make me long for the bao.)

oh also! i am sublimating my desire to pick scabs/bugbites into a habit of picking my nose (more). i think it's working!

love to all,
remember your dreams.

a late draft

hellow, fellow nomads, travelers, stationaries, lovers, dancers, etc.
my current existence is a little miraculous, as az and i got a ride back from the psytrance festival with some kids from brasilia on acid and we thought we would never make it (over huge roadcrevasses, music angst, stories about cows in half english and half portuguese)

but ahem, ahem,
i have been living on the farm miles from nowhere, watching highways of ants and huge termite skyscraperbuildings (the things you can build with dirt and spit!) and finally working here, trying through language and politeness and manners to communicate my enthusiasm to take on tasks too big for me. i fear being an overzealous weeder.
reading about permaculture (this book by david holmgren) and it's a funny meeting of
echoes of my mother (the worms are good, no really) and the force of anarcholove for self-reliance, resistance to organized subversion, metaphors of pods and ants and cells. it's a good book, and better lived.
also, let's see, i've been bonding with gustavo (marcos' three year old son), accepting his male pronouns and in turn flying him around like an airplane, creating songs of syllables, wiping his ass when he turns around and the body language is clear, dancing and dancing to the sounds of crickets and frogs (they compete nightly)...the lizards that live on the kitchen wall, the rat, the few frogs that venture into the house, join in quietly and i watch and wonder at their thoughts. z, you said you could get into the thinking of horses, maybe potentially understand cows....i am listening and learning and working to understand ants and bugs, termites and birds and trees most of all,

this is a vomit of sensations and things, a week spent in near-solitude with az. everyday i take some time to think of people i miss and all that i've learned from them.

-------------------------->
now i'm in brasilia at an internet cafe, this place is wrong wrong wrong (i do like the anarchists but not the air-water-smoke-sounds, where are the trees?). have you heard about clean city laws? that outlaw visual pollution? look it up yo, sao paulo is on top of it apparently.
love to you all, more later.

aflutter in maracuja-colored sweatseeds

a ritual of destrangifying strangers..."oi, tutu bem? tutu bom. (nod, smile, smile, nod, shake hands, hug, kiss on one or both cheeks, eye contact, nod, smile) tutu bem, tschau."

after i ate the little pile of black beans with onion and sausage and ooooh scraped up that liquidy proteiny black sauce, i told marcos and kathryn and azya who were sitting around me, "you know? this is the first time i've eaten anything with meat in it in the past 10 years."
time is circling, circling, closing, opening. it's 13:40 now in a little yellow LAN house-internet cafe (minus the cafe, that part always confuses people when i ask) in alto paraiso. in a few moments we may very well be sucked up by a UFO, who knows, this town is sitting on crystals under falling stars and all the signs point to something mystical. if not a UFO, a bomb to the head, a sip of ayuasca that is an unidentified pathway to objective flight...

on thursdayish we took the bus from brasilia to alto paraiso, then another bus to sao jorge, which is a tiny village, and then marcos picked us up and took us to grota funda, which is about 40 minutes outside of sao jorge on roads red like bricks but with huge crevasses left by the rain. the farm is beautiful and quiet-loud with insects and sunsets. there is another wwoofer there, kathryn, from buenos aires/rio/michigan and she speaks portuguese well and we've been singing and speaking of permaculture and cooking, collective living and spirituality, maracuja and the portuguese lilts...then our little farmfamilycrew of five came back to alto paraiso two days ago (sunday?) for a ayuasca ritual (visions of flight and sensations of growth and purging until i found some contentment amid hymns of universal connection and a forest of stars) and
smiling
smiling
place to place,
i'm getting tired of not speaking portuguese,
need some new songs,
forming and reforming my body from opaque skin to vessel, a kind of mediation, i've been thinking about this a lot since the ritual: body as vessel. voice as vessel. giving minimally mediated voice to that which can be eaten or drunk but cannot speak for itself.
also i've been listening to images and awe, encouraging my creativity,
today, missing the baohaus and its inhabitants and cohabitants and the common language of strangeness.

a draft, unposted, then established in quiet moderation

HONK bam PIEUW PÃO PÃO não? nãOOOO bing bang BEEP pheeeeeeew
a few short notes, since i'm still gathering my thoughts.
- i got a harmonica for christmas and it's been glued to my hand, mostly making up songs and "oh susanna" and "clam crab cockle cowrie" and some country, some classical sometimes, sometimes something like samba noises...
- i've gotten too good at saying "não falo portugues," people don't really believe me...
- i saw a great exhibit by sophie calle at the museum of modern art in rio.
- 18 hours in brasilia: anarchists, cerveja, and a testing of boundaries (subtitle: the impossibility of intimate straightness)
- the meeting of eyes, the exchanges of gaze, people giving directions, the enthusiasm of strangers, a number of friends and the usefulness of "oi"