Bumping Cosmologies

Journal Gleanings: Verbfest etc.

Wendell Berry: “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

Primum vegetari deinde radicare: First be animated, then grow roots.

Daily Drawing: Wasp vs. Spider ~2-4-2020 ~ Ink and brush

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One-word caption on a photo of a Wellington streetscape half in shadow. Chilling, it says, and I peer into the gloom to see what awful thing it conceals before I realise the person means he is chilling. Chilling out, not blood-run-cold horror. Not Israeli settlers on Tiktok dressing up as Palestinians, waving dolls as their ‘dead babies’; not that kind of chill.

Fighting Monkey / Rootless Root, says the algorithm, showing me a video of barefoot people rolling slowly on the floor, each holding three little blocks of wood in a dolmen form, trying to keep the capstone from toppling. How can it know I was writing about roots this morning? I was writing in a book, with a fountain pen, grass-blades of green ink. This song was playing. There’s a blackbird in my garden.

The Post reports that homemade A4 posters showing the new Prime Minister as “a penis” and his two deputies as “the testicles” are being taken down by Council staff. The article doesn’t include a photo, but it doesn’t need to. The graffiti has already appeared on the mind’s wall.

I dreamed Isis took over, made us put on cartoon bear suits and dance.

Ben Ehrenreich: “What if time as we understand it— this infinitely segmentable line stretching from unseeable past to unforeseeable future— is not an arrow but a scar?… Could all the divisions to which we subject it— those measurable as minutes and seconds, and the vaguer and more intimate fragments that we call moments— echo an original mutilation that was not metaphorical at all? Could time itself be haunted?”

In the sun outside Little Beer Quarter.
Emma, with silver niho mango¹ at her ears: “He’s my.”
Others: “He’s your! Your what. What is he?”
Companion: “I’m a carpenter.”
Like Jesus, I said, or at least thought. A time-honoured profession. Black-bearded, broad-chested in his check shirt. Green-eyed? Green or blue. (Did I believe him? I can’t remember. Why was I looking at his hands, then?)
Emma: “LOL. He’s not a carpenter, he’s an orthopaedic surgeon.”
His little joke. The joke is that orthopaedics is the carpentry of surgery.

Later at the pub I check with Andy. “It’s true.” says Andy. “When I phone a friend for help, I’m looking for advice on possible solutions. But when an orthopaedic surgeon asks for help, they literally want help-to-hit-things-even-harder.”
He tells me a story about one he knows who set up a tent around the table; blood and bone on the ceiling.

The carpenter tells us about his Mother’s shawls in the mountains of Kashmir. How what they call Cashmere here is not Kashmiri. The true goat’s-wool shawls that can be drawn through a wedding ring.

Ange Mlinko in the London Review of Books: “It is estimated that transcribing the Iliad’s more than fifteen thousand lines would have required the skins of 86 average-sized goats.”

Is there a goat, that hasn’t been milked, wandering on the craggy rocks? A white goat, white, white, white.

Achaemenid rhyton, lapis lazuli and gold, 6th - 5th century BCE.

Tony: “See, in the real world, we have these things called drawers, and if you open them they’re full of fifteen pairs of clean socks.”
Kev: “No, in the real world, it’s all countryside, and it’s full of animals, and you can eat them.”

Listening to Sasha, Behrouz and Abdul. Dried fruit, snow, kerosene lantern, Father reading the Quran before dawn. Behrouz: “In Iran, as in Afghanistan, the Winter is very long.” Grandmother’s stories, to while away the dark.
Abdul says that in oral culture, stories are passed chest to chest. He starts talking about Rumi and Hafiz, a waterfall of praise. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Behrouz says Woman — Life — Freedom is a Kurdish slogan. As he says the word reborn, the lights flicker off and on again.

Messaging with Ruby about how people can’t handle artists who change midstream.
Ruby: “Nobody says to an ex-plumber, Aww, but you were such an amazing plumber!”

Radical = Rooted. The most Australian photo: two snakes rooting while a dingo eats a shark in the background. First the seed is activated, then it cranks out a taproot. But in human rooting, the root comes before the seed, except in cases of premature ejaculation.

I dreamed I was peeling back the skin from a narwhal horn to show the clean ivory. This one is from a female.

When I’m on Zoom and the window-light hits my face from the side, I see the new shapes at the edge of my mouth.

I tell Kev he looks good in his black shirt.
Kev: “You like it because it’s the colour of your country’s flag.”
He tells me how when he tried to sell the wool from his black sheep the man said “I’ll give you a dollar a kilo for it, for mattress stuffing.”
Kev realised then, he says, that the New Zealand cult of the black singlet, All Blacks, etc., came about in the days when white wool was the more valuable commodity for export.

The Sunday Star-Times reports that Sam Bankman-Fried, a vegan, is living on peanut butter sandwiches in jail and trading ‘macks’ (the jail currency: pouches of mackerel) for a haircut.

Flipping cards in the last minute of the Zoom, a fun footnote.
I pulled the Tower.
Elise pulled the Moon.
Anna pulled the Hermit.
Trish pulled the Fool.
Laura pulled Death.

THIS is not THAT. They might be alike but they’re not the same. The perils of evolving into a moth’s antenna. Those feathery vanes covering one’s entire body can’t be folded away. Bruce’s metaphor for the experience of ECT:² a snail’s horn snipped off with scissors.

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and [woman] is at last compelled to face with sober senses [her] real conditions of life, and [her] relations with [her] kind.”
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. by Samuel Moore.

We clink glasses.
The toast: “Not today.”

I dreamed I was tenderly cradling your shaved head.

1. Shark teeth

2. Electroconvulsive therapy AKA shock treatment