On Obscure Motion
we-compose holes - a version of whom first appeared in RIFFS journal
We wake up with Moon on our chest. Holding them, we hear their mad resonance
Under the squill of doorways we burn wood between sound and disease
Flocks of storks rising from silver of distant river cause figs to fall from our table
Pink and blue walls
Our old arteries sweat like wheat chaff and green olive, a feral joy as of wolves on muskspoor
Rattling freshly cut bay branches, we lie down to remember those whom we have not directly experienced, remedy rust, tree eats their young
We hear hole in sound, way up is way down, a sibylline weal in whom cures can reveal themselves with dreams, humid scurfs of silver solid air
A balding man–a winged wave dreaming themselves–nervously creeps along dry ground with gentle hands and ever-thinning shoulders. His head is split open from a fall. In death, he moves. A cave within his skull leads to root, revealing three pendulous Tanagra figures*
They speak so fast, his silent throat straining under weights of their motion, but the more we speak, the faster they go. Night after night of coruscated dreams, undulating in torn impermanence, as if these guide of soul were unable to die for having not yet died
No silence soothes a shade. A strange cracking, like salt in stars, emanates from his jaw, chiding arrogance of solid ground
Torch, key, scroll**, eating oily leaves of laurel
Cardea, Limentius, Forculus***, home beyond head, fumigated with barley meal. As one tries, other prevents, as one gets closer, other moves away
Barrier after barrier, threshold after threshold. Orphic voices in wolf light spin mixtures of vibrating air
Who was once entrance to ear, a slanting well who knew all sound, is now a tremulous clod belching out a fine dust. Their names are wind, with whom skin bellows wildly
Who can hear such epithelial howl except in dreams? Panicked tops of plane trees and old holes of fungal earth, a pulse inaudibly springs to return in memory’s bright wounds
Time is tension of lungwort, and light swings through absent mouth. Winded soul moves like horned ruminants of Cretan countryside, grazing on vibration, on dittany, on tragedy, on too much sound
Bones are their own environment in apprehension of humoral attachment, a sesame of loam in eel-dust of ear. Sesamoid, internal intelligence of organs, cancellous and combed
Wind voice of air moulded with dream mouth, obscure motions of a wound who heals. Between sonant bodies, a sphere. A reservoir is a stone and throws themselves in circles
Nard, wrapped round our toes for sleep, peels green carved rings of our eyes, murmuring incantations, harvesting medical plants in bestial glee
We must not burn the flowers
Juice of mint underfoot and thousand sounds of sage, crumbling between many hands. Eros’s arrow grows into a lyre on this night-sea, rolling wind below lytic symmetry of seven birds. Light bringer, green mountains reeking of bliss
We feel dreams in our stomach as indigestible books–science is merely our language–consuming little Aristotles of our soul with their digestive juices
We visited a temple last night, riddled with hellebore of ardent faith, with whom they are incubated, seeming to hold heated edges of their treatments, worshipping vapours of prescription
We have met people who under the name of Methe**** would have had all their bones removed, their sinews recast–revealing elemental hum whilst seeking inner silence of rainbow body–only to heal an old sickness with a new one. Not enough and too much
At night we’re spared politics of excavation, of performing in order... not to be seen, but that people might see us. In dreams we are they who have been removed
To call wind from ear is like taking an animal from their mother. We can’t just hear them howl in time to world splitting. A labyrinth of hidden anthills, pine resin and white leaf, speaks like air of ear before we are born
Yarrow, ripping themselves up from their roots, protect us, we will protect you
Down in these dreams is where no one changes at all. Slow fire, dizzying darkness of humoral disturbance
Yarrow licking mirror’s back
This morning we awoke with dust on our throat, flowing with patterns not unlike larkspur’s glaucous smile
Resinous scents of Aleppo fir and cypress, eyes closed become seed heads
Vernal hum inaudibly drifts inside glyphs who secrete from our wounds, wounds who do not exist solely on our body
We have dissected many brains but can’t find a person anywhere. Mirrors of air speak of tonal interiors in whom we see organs we are seeing with
Wind spirals out of our ear in order to speak with them
Skin tougher than bone. When we place our ear to our ear we hear no one
Boundary neighbour
To dream is to be alone with illness
Each concoction is a new organ, adumbral sheddings of spectral bone
Crushed in his fist we smell resonance of mandragora
Gnosis should be an experience of one’s own life, a day who speaks with birds, an encampment of stars, a plant who grows on our body, medicine of vegetable gods
Trees, putting death to death, are germ duration
Who we felt moments after we died, who we missed, who we overlooked in our body, who was drowned out by our words, words who are material for masks outliving every generation
We are told of shadows of day through oneiric sounds of body. What anise says to us silently we speak out loud, though our heart remains quiet
Arriving outside knowledge’s outline, whoever lies down like an animal
To dream is to work for the sake of our dead
Sixty holes of honeycomb placed in a hole
Sticks tap together above our heads in time with fluted fells of barbitos, incense clings to our abdomen, cells dancing like partridges with moths in their hair
Do we create a hell around us?
Our legs are open like those of a frog
A ring of heads, tame and wild. We seek lustration, shit is fertiliser in whom horses trample their own limbs
Wind divined as templa in limpid fold of his skull, taken with wild herbs and blind swallows
Pollution is a source of fertility, simple magic
A sneeze, an oracle, a crossroads of woven coils and oak leaves. A sound is a bird, listen louder, parallel and contrary
What difference, between physician and disease?
Wind sweeps over grass and grass is sure to bend
Augurs are those who turn and face their own longing without interfering
Root cutters and rolling earth, both nurture and guide their words around love and repulsion
Longing turns us inside out until we find sun and moon and stars inside
To love our own pollution
If we would understand variability, we would watch dove’s neck. Let augurs devour one another
We record monsters of our body through slumbering vegetation, turn in treeless air
With waxing moon, mix cassia, white pepper and nutmeg, store in a perfume phial to third degree and collapse into a low moan
A perfect sphere emerges from a stream, their skin wide in bloom
We, living, so-called, are not in charge of our lives as we think
Held fast in dead’s flowing grip, what each of us does in every moment with each thought and every breath is to stay with this mystery
Ecstatic pig people on guard against motion
Rotting flutes of fat-earth and night-smell of lime trees
Planets take delight in us, each gifts us a share of their own nature
Mashed beans under the white flowers of hawthorn
Annihilating, to inaugurate
We would like to write a book about planets who live in blood
Who can write except in dreams outside of dreams?
Aquarius will set our blood on fire
Dead’s supine gate is an incantation, bilious oak sun, a dimension of time in body. This little figurine, this wind, whomsoever they may be, lives and ruts in ear, and we guard them with trefoil
To witness his transmigration is to push through heart, to undo body already undone. Every time torch strikes sun, umbo, new life dies as old life emerges
We have to find our own dead
Is this lucid air?
Holding this Virgil by night, among vibrating globes of honey
Tangible zodiac, breath control is coming to know sweating heart’s pomegranate, inner disappearance, hissing bark
Contraction and rest are small muscles, as if universe ceased to change shape
If sparrow’s mad strife has penetrated into our subconscious, into firs of a nerve, it could be that one day this will all make us weep
Carving ourselves into living sound of stone, dim-eyed spot of light, words write themselves until only stone is left
Meander pattern of sickness in remedy
Even in death he could move his inner ear muscles in such a way that we were able to hear wind
Wound moves with space and can return bearing gifts
Perhaps no vibration is ever entirely lost
A sound we heard forty years ago could be forming a dream ten years from now
White poppy-seeds, grains of wheat and barley, peas, vetches, okra seeds, lentils, beans, rice-wheat, oats, fruit, honey, oil, wine, and unwashed wool
Beams of light emanate from these old wasps of bacteria
The second we stop being in charge, magic happens
Separation of body from themselves, cutting flesh from bone, cooking ourselves, pierced with arrows, we leak, our eyes left in trees, able to see our mutilation, over and over again. Cleaned, polished, counted
We speak with old bones, we do not interpret, which is to conduct
Part of a cure is descent, listen, two rocks, grey as twilight between tumps of iron, loam ribbed flint, burrs, fir, spruce
Birds are visualisations of wind
Thistle, tupelo, summersweet, horsetail, bulrush. Opening mouth so as to not hear heart
Wind makes holes, traverses love and concord of body, weaves with brown fenneled silence of obscure motion
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* Terracotta figures whose poses corresponded to deceased lives
** These symbols are kin of Vanth, benevolent guide of Etruscan underworld
*** Three deities who preside over doorways, associated with rituals of making boundaries and sacred space
**** Spirit and personification of drunkenness
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Post
Galen was born CE 129. He was a physician, but not in the way that many of us have come to understand such a profession, which has lost layers of resonance through use*. Physician was often applied to doctors when they started taking an interest in worlds beyond those of medicine
This could be felt as alteration of consciousness, sloughing off every theory and opinion they knew, not finding anyone to replace them for years on end
More works of Galen have been passed down than any other person of antiquity, and a great many remain untranslated. He was thought to have written a text, subsequently lost, concerning ossicles of middle ear. This seemed to me a perfect opportunity to work with wild fabulations of vibration, inventing a fragmented night-book, as it were, wherein energy is a paradigm of interaction, distance, and propinquity
As evidenced in the polysemous nature of ‘physician’, Galen’s life was not divided into separate phases of work, and as such, this brief text explores particulars of myriad worlds of ancient medicine, through such things as audition, astrology, augury, incubation, and herbalism
* Ancient Greek medicine was an holistic practise, there could be no true cure without understanding a person’s history, so physicians were also psychiatrists, mythographers, clinicians, among other roles. Medicine was, in essence, a petri dish of all other sciences in antiquity