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Betwixt: The Soul and the Void When I was seventeen, perhaps sixteen (it’s all a blur now), I listened to Poison Girls and their prophetic and eerily paranoid song “Person’s Unknown.” I can still hear their words, ringing with the knives of their guitar, “flesh and blood are who we are, flesh and blood are what we are.” It was a moment that re-opened my world beyond my small bubble of youth, a world that they described through lucid, sharp, and agonizing descriptions of horror as it concerned the “flesh and blood” of people whose lives confronted the authoritarian gaze of an ominous figure—this figure unearthing their marginalized, hidden life of underground silence, reminding all that they aren’t safe from fascist scrutiny, from the gaze. Poison Girls’ diagnosis was that this would be the death of us all—our silence…their voice enunciating that we must not hide, as we can no longer hide anymore. Such ruptures are a reminder of the witch-hunt perpetuated by the State, or perhaps your neighbor, your aunt, your partner—potential informants that make us paranoid. We are haunted by this reminder that any one of us can be a suspect, part of the witch-hunt, or running to escape the ominous gaze. We become “persons unknown.” We become inflected in a world where we don’t know that we are being seen, watched, desired—the “surveillance capitalism” of Shoshana Zuboff. As they end the song: “Our cover is blown...” Released in 1981, it’s hard to imagine that we aren’t still hiding. That our existence is managed by a force we can neither see nor fully capture with an image. Gilles Deleuze and Félix called this “the body-without-organs” and it feels like a ghost or void…a moving “force” that can gaze and see (an abyss?). Capital, too, like Marx suggested a century ago, has its mystical qualities, its phantasmagoria of eerie elements, such is the commodity. Is our “cover” (human freedom) being “blown” an unveiling and re-orientation to the hauntings? * * * Journal entry: February 15th, 2021 On suffering. How and why do all things, vital and decomposing—inorganic and withering—suffer in (Earthbound) and outside (the Unknown) our cosmos? What is to be done when our inquiry starts here? What are we taking account of in our exploration of these questions? How does a Human methodology, in its limited capacity and agency, intervene in these questions? Why suffering? How does suffering account for anything that is outside the Human? Outside the homo sapiens? How does violence re-configure itself at the core of these questions? Why does violence exercise itself through power? What then, is our point of departure? How do we re-channel death? What is at stake in this line of inquiry? [author’s post-notes on this entry: it was some questions without answers. perhaps it is less in search for an answer, but a problem. perhaps it was dwelling too much in the anxieties of human existence, of a nihilist view and the eternal problematic of suffering. perhaps…or maybe it is a blip in my human cognition, or my own limit to think the unthinkable—ineffable violence.] * * * “For only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed. And for images, words, stories to have this transformative power, they must arise from the human body—flesh and bone—and from the Earth’s body—stone, sky, liquid, soil. This work, these images, piercing tongue or ear lobes with cactus needle, are my offerings, are my Aztecan blood sacrifices.” —Gloria E. Anzaldúa, “Tlilli, Tlapalli/The Path of the Red and Black Ink,” Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) I have been thinking about the void—a weird and eerie idea found in many traditions of Western/Eastern thought, philosophy, and physics, as I am sure emerge from Indigenous cosmovision and cosmogonies as well. It is a concept to understand nothing or nothingness, or emptiness. In existentialism, by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, it is this void that generates being, that generates the agential subject with freedom. Yet, what propels my thinking of the void is my cosmological desire to understand the cosmic—and this has always led me to what I am naming the mystical desires of the human condition. What propels me to attempt to think the unthought of nothingness is a relation to the soul, as Anzaldúa describes in the above quote. It is the relationship to the body, the “pulling of flesh,” that our “human soul” can be transformed. What does this mean for the void? Like any concept through the language of human reality, we are always at a threshold of the unknown. I understand Anzaldúa’s material philosophy, or an Anzaldúan materialism, to be one with a metaphysics that starts with an ethics: we are generated into a relation of bodies, between our human flesh/bone and the flesh of the Earth—it is an image we develop to understand ourselves. To narrate from the void—the sacrifice—is to produce a transformative power to transform soul. Yet, we stand at the anthropocentric threshold. We are now limited—or so we think in a Eurocentric manner. The “human” is “nature” is the body of the Earth, too. The reciprocity of the soul is twofold: the soul of the Earth, the vibrant particles that oppose the emptiness of the void, generate us as living matter with a soul. What is the soul if not the secularized “energies” that propel us to think ourselves as a narrating species? I think perhaps this question might be understood in the “betwixt” condition that unfolds the Real. Perhaps, and this is just me, we must re-read Anzaldúa with this reading of the void, of the human condition that generates the soul, and the ways Anzaldúa was, in many ways, attempting to reach another kind of “body-without-organs” in her work. * * * In my more erratic modes of writing, I never know what I will create. I was caught between music, studying, and feeling the imperative to put words to paper. I challenge the reader to stitch these thoughts as not a cohesive formulation that speaks to my arbitrary title, but to find the mosaic, the patterns of Xican@ heresy. I find myself anxious, edging closer to the void, that cosmic non-place of nothingness to think about the cosmos. I find beauty in it—I have no idea why. I find consolation perhaps in that I will return—back to the body of the Earth and to the void. From the California central coast, Territories called Anisq’oyo, Chumash lands. White Mountain Rabbit
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November 2022
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