FROM “GAIA’s FLESH” TO “THE EARTH”
October 2014-March 2015
SOURCE TEXT: The collage text Gaia’s Flesh edited by Sarah Crewe and Dimitra Ioannou
CONTENTS
• The poem Gaia Is Gone by Louise Anne Buchler is linked to the words “Gaia.”
• The sound piece Gaia’s Flesh and an Untitled Poem by Alice Hui-Sheng Chang is linked to the words “flesh,” “history,” “geography.”
• The poem Becoming Gaia / a liturgy to accompangy transition by Markie Burnhope is linked to the words “toxins,” “genes,” “contortions,” “textures,” “holes.”
• The video Lijis by Misha de Ridder.
• The artwork Untitled (Landscape) by Lefteris Tapas is linked to the words “My holes, my parasites, my luminosity, my turbulences are oracles.”
• The visual poem Not Without Newsprint by John Morgan is linked to the words “membrans,” “geography,” “turbulences,” “dead.”
• The poem Ventricle by Steve Toase is linked to the words “goddesses,” “fallen,” “heart” from from the source text Gaia’s Flesh. | published March 14, 2015.
• The video Evanescent episodes: arrival and exodus by Caroline de Lannoy is linked to the words “MIraculous MOmentary SAtisfaction,” “We become Gaia” from the source text Gaia’s Flesh.
• The poem Estuary by Ann Matthews is linked to the words “dead,” “trees,” “dandelion fluff,” “turbulent,” “between sea and marsh.”
• The poem Terrible Goddess by Yoko Danno is linked to the words “yesterday,” “swallow,” “living,” “wind,” “pile,” “human,” “pear tree,” “earth.”
∞
Gaia‘s Flesh
My toxins, my temperatures, my hormones, my precipitations are climatic.
My genes, my blood cells, my organs, my wilderness are history.
My contortions, my breathing, my colors, my mutations are intelligence.
My textures, my membrans, my secretions, my definitions are geography.
My holes, my parasites, my luminosity, my turbulences are oracles.
D.I. (Dimitra Ioannou)
We live in Gaia’s flesh.
We celebrate the weeds, the incects, the gardens in motion (Gilles Clément), the MIraculous MOmentary SAtisfaction (Francis Ponge), the water goddesses, the season of hellebores (winter), the march of buds (Karel Capek), the speckled Italian salamander, the golden Greek jackal…
We become Gaia.
Gaia’s Flesh
Once, this planet had plenty of water
(But that was in the days when all those things
That now belong to a dead language – things such as dawn,
Looks, and smiles – were still portents of things to come)
Tada Chimako, After Half a Century, translated from the japanese by Jeffrey Angles. http://poetrykanto.com/issues/2007-issue/tada-chimako/tada-chimako-多田-智満子-Ⅲ
Yesterday I was reading about the reasons for the disappearance of song birds in Germany. The spread of scientific forestry, horticulture, agriculture, have cut them off from their nesting places and their foo
d supply. More and more, with modern methods, we are doing away with hollow trees, wastelands, brushwood, fallen leaves. I felt sore at heart. I was not thinking so much about the loss of pleasure for human beings, but I was much distressed by the idea of the stealthy and inexorable destruction of these defenceless little creatures that the tears came into my eyes.
Rosa Luxemburg: Letters From Prison Wronke, May 2nd, 1917.
Here at the sea’s edge
I have planted my dragon-toothed garden
to defend the porch,
steadfast warriors
against those who protest their impropriety
even to the end of the world.
A fathomless lethargy has swallowed me,
great waves of doubt broken me,
all my thoughts washed away.
The storms have blown salt tears,
burning my garden,
Gethsemane and Eden.
derek jarman’s garden, Thames & Hudson 1995.
who raised
these rocks of human mist
pyramidical survivors
in the cyclorama of space
In the
austere theatre of the Infinite
the ghosts of the stars
perform the "Presence"
The celestial conservatories
blooming with light
are all blown out
excerpt from Mina Loy’s, “The Starry Sky” OF WYNDHAM LEWIS, Lunar Baedeker, Poems 1921-1922.
in tenebris
walking the land between sea and marsh
in tenebris
floating the cows like funerary urns
in tenebris
glossing the mud as the jewelled head
in tenebris
the sea creatures near converse
in tenebris
stupid beings crouched
in tenebris
From In The Footsteps by Wendy Mulford.
Roanne, July 14, 1941
I don’t believe night so rancorous
As to have wished octopus on this occasion
To drain from its heart a flow of blue-black ink.
I don’t believe night so rancorous
that on retreating behind the horizon
it would have wished to drain the blue-black ink
from its octopus heart on this occasion
From Francis Ponge’s Mute Objects of Expression.
In the forest and around the house where I was living, I searched for broken spiderwebs which I repaired using red sewing thread.
The morning after the first patch job, I discovered a pile of red threads lying on the ground below the web. At first I assumed the wind had blown them out; on closer inspection it became clear that the spider had repaired the web to perfect condition using its own methods, throwing the threads out in the process. My repairs were always rejected by the spider and discarded, usually during the course of the night, even in webs which looked abandoned. The larger, more complicated patches where the threads were held together with glue often retained their form after being thrown out, although in a somewhat “wilted” condition without the rest of the web to suspend and stretch them.
Nina Katchadourian
http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/uninvitedcollaborations/spiderwebs.php
Since a pear tree beloved by the full moon is more of a pear tree than any other pear tree, then, below each leaf, there must be a pear like a light shining there ripening.
Eiichi Kasuya, Full Moon, translated from japanese by D.W.Wright, [Four] Factorial, 2005.
vapours, emanations, effusions
is tree
us trace
is jaw
us beak
is plain
us pearl
is tongue
us mist
is ones
us weave
is
From In the House of the Shaman by Maggie O’Sullivan. Extract from Book I: Another Weather System. https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/OSullivan/UB/OSullivan-Maggie_03_Another-Weather-Systm_Buffalo_10-27-93.mp3
Open it, that rock cave Amenouzume-san
Shake it, the heavens, Woman-Buried-in-the-Skies
Make it bloom, red cherry blossom, Forest-Sprouts-in-the-Skies
Crawl it, with the centipede, Worm-in-the-Rain
Cry, plodding on, Riverbank-Lost-in-the-Rain
Lick it, solemly, Drops-of-Candy
Give it, with a whip, Thousands-Monmes-of-Candy
Make it, a giant mirror, Eye-Drawing-on-the-Graph-Paper
Tie it, with bamboo leaves, Knit-by-Gentle-Princess-Hands
Gather round, multitudinous gods, Plentiful-Rice-in-the-Skies-Witch
From Takako Arai’s, For Amenouzoume-san, translated by Sawako Nakayasu, Four From Japan.
When underground water seeps into my wrists
I’ll cry out through the mists:
Come, look, I’ll not flash daffodil flesh at you,
I am older, I have two children now
my breasts are jugs of blood,
my hair black with silver running through
makes a pillow for my man, his thighs
cut from river mud, belly gold with longing.
From the poem Daffodils by Mina Alexander.
WE MAKE LOVE WITH THE EARTH. We are aquaphiles, teraphiles, pyrophiles and aerophiles. We shamelessly hug trees, massage the earth with our feet, and talk erotically to plants. We are skinny dippers, sun worshipers, and stargazers. We caress rocks, are pleasured by waterfalls, and admire the Earth’s curves often. We make love with the Earth through our senses.
We celebrate our E-spots. We are very dirty.
THE ECOSEX PLEDGE. I promise to love, honor and cherish you Earth, until death brings us closer together forever.
From the Ecosex Manifesto by Elisabeth M. Stephens and Annie M. Sprinkle http://sexecology.org/research-writing/ecosex-manifesto/
aglimpseof.net 