Humuskind
originally published by MAP Magazine
As I dream within sanctuary’s den folds life vibrates their selves inside obols of coral as eidolon, rind and ray of body, spools slowly.
First being I encounter as I walk toward Asclepios’s sanctuary is a man with a fart-red face.
He’s hunched over, repeatedly slapping his leg whilst chanting, ‘who are they, are they tree of our hands’.
Ground, upon whom lay myrtle and sacrificial cakes, seems to emerge with him.
Temple pillars situated on town borders among goats and wet herbs stand in quincuncial regularity of orchard trees.
Among them, shaped by tessellating pediment and flaxen-yellowed silence, is Asclepios’s staff, snake in hand, dog by his side.
As I cross thresholds I see an initiate leaving round house, no doubt having left a little statue of who had been healed, a foot perhaps, or an arm.
Imagination reveals where healing will come from, turtle-creep of continents, double-headed pinecone, petrified vertical wave form.
As I arrive at my bed, ground squealed red underfoot, priests are picturing sounds of Hygieia’s pentagram dimension ear.
Bright awareness rises between lair and lunacy, inconstancy of wandering moons. Planets are seeds in earth a kind of echo–making me refractory.
Eidolon frequencies glean organs as they bend like undulating sap, resistant static tills silver, green and white.
I feel impossible avoiding and attaining stillness in order that I might arrive at stillness whose tendrils curl and countercurl.
Dream is awake in sleep and body does not come apart, does not expand or contract.
Body spins with interstellar hum who is skin hearing, skeletal transparency, force and resistance in calves, weight of hair.
Matter rises then barley, farrago, sheds and sloughs. Tailings and dross merge and reality emerges a slow constellation bringing lament’s amber.
Priest hum issues from fire-spraying stars, heart and throat above, poppy and mint inside.
Body noise is called out in a wash of branch and slime, giving shade and sustenance to priest hissing breath.
Sound-like roots seeking water-sun move through liminal dendrons flowing into and out of eidolon embracing wet–warm holes of katabatic mud.
Humuskind lives in spiralling respirations of planets, birth from death, eyes neither open nor closed, end of life and Aion whole.
As I dream crowds of initiates are a piping syrinx suspended animation of eidola, conduits for their miasma who become star channels.
As I dream crowds of initiates are a piping syrinx suspended animation of eidola, conduits for their miasma who become star channels.
They exude bodies like a grass who does not wish to grow from ground, hoping to know deepest darkness before they die.
Eidola are held in repetition of endless form invisible viscosity of spectra. Processions travel along sacred road-roots extending upward.
Their chant is their waste, Thalassal excretions who correspond to pipes sun descending.
Though chanting Hierophants wet throat dry soul addresses fires warming their teeth. World breathes for us, a maw of red cow shallows.
I’m unable to hear sounds who emerges from wind–wide mouths as if stretched by invisible fingers mimicking triglyphs and metopes.
Sheaves of wheat and replica skulls of bulls roll among sprouts and green ears and poppy orbs, laid out along a road of armless boys as a sky of solid rose.
Inaudible becomes a quartz ear of grain in gut, a flower sermon staring into sun at night.
Fungus, barley, Cyprian honey, mint, and water vow under mane of silence as a closed hole of seed existence with two faces because partridge dances.
Skin above shimmers eyes pulled to light like lips to wine. Galls of smut hold body in aroma opopanax on a mirror.
I could be imprisoned for this telling, perhaps put to death, but vertical ponds of night gongs transmute consciousness like leeches in fire.
Moon returns to a world of life, to Venus glass of green vertigo. Silver results from this forest fire grown from heads of forest consciousness.
Raging, charring and decimating, plant souls as humans meet in votive contemplation, in bones wrapped in birchbark.
Lunar ferments in brain dew as they digest planet elements merge in a cosmos curved by sun.
Air is as dark as water and initiates red coral makes visible every thought they will ever have, turning moisture to stone as they grows through air.
Oxygen is this weight of mind resonance throat cracks so that breath might be heard.
I wake up to a dream in which feet are covered in bone, a life who is separate from separation.
Ghosts coming down from stars talk with crowd voices with silver’s wild wrack of waves.
My heart beats and keeps me awake in death, that I might take care of illusions, that they do not become real.
Postscript
Experiences writing this short text can be constellated any number of ways. Here are just a few of them. Words draw in part from ‘Return to Eleusis’, last chapter of Roberto Calasso’s book, The Celestial Hunter, focussing on ancient and highly secretive religious rites and beatific visions of Eleusis, ‘culminating experience of a lifetime’, according to classicist Carl A.P. Ruck.
The Celestial Hunter drifts among spaces between one life and another, in fine effluence, or mundus imaginalis, of Henry Corbin’s celestial earth, ground our heads touch.
I first encountered ancient oneiric healing practices of incubation (who in Humuskind takes place in Epidaurus) in Michel Serres’s work, notably his Five Senses. But, as is so often the case, I didn’t realise this was who I was reading until much later, Serres being, for me, a consummately alchemical writer, veiled in simile, in sticks both hidden and loved by snakes.
Pulling these effluvium into close orbit is my interest in photosynthesis as inaudible excretions. Whilst preparing to introduce a talk by Nisha Ramayya, I discovered this was once called photosyntax, a way of light falling together as they silver psyche.
This began to square circle, as in another book by Calasso, Ka, he discusses sampads, correspondences (they who fall together) of ancient Hindu texts known as Vedas, asking… how, if beings never stop pitching about, are we to perceive equivalences?
A constellation, like processes of writing, can be miasmatic, not so much a definition as an observation of motion. In a chapter, called ‘King Soma’, of Calasso’s book, Ardor, he connects humans with invisible through development of symbols, or bandhu, with creatures etching their name on ground as all moves, incandescent clarity existing everywhere at once.
Soma is a juice or sap pressed out of fibres of a plant also called Soma. The were written about extensively in Vedas, Rig Veda has been described as a collection of nearly 120 hymns to Soma. It’s no coincidence I feel, that Calasso chose to end The Celestial Hunter and Ardor with Eleusis and Soma. Going beyond world’s blazing walls, their Natures correspond, as Charles Baudelaire says in another book by Calasso, like spectral hieroglyphs in an obscurity of beings.
‘King Soma’ echoes mycologist Gordon Wasson who famously believed such juice to be a psychotropic mushroom, an emergent plant soul. This was a belief brought to bear in his book, The Road to Eleusis (written with Ruck and chemist Albert Hoffman, published in 1978), wherein an adumbral dawn of Western Civilisation was proposed to hinge upon psychedelic experience as silent pitch who takes place among Virgo’s constellation, or who Ruck calls hallucinatory natures of dancing universe.