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.

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