A YouTube astrologer quotes Heraclitus through my screen: The soul is explored forever to a depth beyond report.
Let’s say pneuma, breath — other than the entry and exit point of your tether to all that is — is the collection of things you, we, I dedicate our lives to. Not a path, not a-to-z, but the endless wheel of commitments here on earth. No end, no report.
If so:
ánima is politics?
is love?
for earth and elders and children of all species?
Permanent revolution as a means to not fall into the corruption of self and all the above.
eye of the storm
I moved back home to Puerto Rico after having a migratory second life as hostage and servant to the USA’s serum-glossy and ageless advertising campaign of ew, god, can you believe those places —
chaos of storms, chaos of collapse, chaos of living and dying — by choice, by force — an unruly life outside the all-seeing bounds of market conditions.
While we flew, Hurricane Beryl (a superstorm unlike any recorded) had moved just south of the archipelago, much, much ahead of schedule (it was July after all, hardly the peak of wind season) and our pilot said the descent would be bumpy.
Haze all around as we clapped on landing, as Boricuas always do (a glorious tradition). Haze pushed west by winds out of Africa. Actual Saharan sand in the air. A hideous mess that nonetheless marvels. Immediately our lungs were aflame, me and my kid gasping for air like little fishes. One thing about Los polvos del Sahara, other than being an ancestral pile-up of DNA that lives inside my actual body, no big deal, is that it actually helps prevent hurricanes. It creates such a density of matter in the air that pressure can’t build and form into a swirl that catches all.
My partner mentioned this one day to a lady waiting in line at El Mesón and she said, “Yeah but that’s exactly how it was right before Maria.” As anyone who has played Final Fantasy games knows, no protection spell lasts forever.
And when I say ancestral pile-up of DNA, I really do mean it and not just human bits but microscopic food for plankton and other small brethren on this earth. Without this yearly feed the oceans wouldn’t be as lively as they manage to remain even as they become PlayPlace ball-pit pools of plastic.
We settled into the house of artist Sofía Gallisá Muriente, who had traded coasts with me and graciously let us stay at hers; my mother’s recent illness made her too sensitive to the mess we brought — germs, sound, stuff. Hato Rey is a valley in the outer reaches of San Juan turned sugar cane plantation and township in the fifteenth century and subsequently a ranch land turned cement maze that holds about ten degrees more heat than any surrounding area. Brutal in a heatwave, with sand above as below. The FBI now conducts its island operations from there, as does the pro-statehood party. The FBI killed pro-independence activist Filiberto Ojeda Rios in his home in Hormigueros in 2005. If you were raised in the USA you likely won’t believe me but it’s true, it happened. He was seventy-two.
By the seaside I read only one thing, the poems of Marigloria Palma — who, like me, seems to live half and half in a world of agony (the one born of expectation) and a fantasia of seeing the liberated archipelago this could be as an overlay, a double exposure over the ruins of Viejo San Juan.[1]
From Hato Rey we moved to an apartment in Condado, where the USA occupational forces conduct their incursions dressed as tourists that, as Sofia’s mother Lourdes says, treat our place like a beach not a country. From there we moved to where we are now, La Muda (“the shift” or “the change”), an area between the rich suburb of Guaynabo; the industrialized behemoth of hidden charm, Bayamón; and where we will ultimately settle down to live in a house the size of a two-hundred-square-foot room, Caguas, named so for the Taíno cacique, Caguax. There, high on a hill in Barrio San Salvador, we dig up muddy trenches and conduct other serious and sometimes tedious negotiations with the earth itself so that we may be granted safe passage through the years we hope to spend growing pacholí y zacate and ourselves.
In La Muda we live with Rock, Roca (roosters), MamiGirl, Yineida, Pico Roto, Slicky, Guineo, Osiris/Labo, and Persefone (chickens; the latter two came back from the dead w seven chicks in tow). The chicks we named: Mago, Hoja, Pancho, Reepacheep, Telo, Wakiwu, Boligrafo/Bolita, Bone Line Chicken, Ronus, Walkman, and Quesito.
I have loved living with chickens. I’m embarrassed to say I thought they were“bird-brained” before and now I chase the chicks that get lost on the way to roosting and get outsizedly sad when one of the hens dies. Probably I should go vegan, only — lechón season is upon us.
Market level is the densest part of the strata of strain in our globalized world. Here, both Cubans and Puerto Ricans are out of good food — for very different reasons, but all the reasons point back to USA intervention. Jones Act on one hand, a pale arm of anti-communist intervention joined to the other. Musty old embargoes both. Choke.Weed. It will take many machete swings to cut it down so that the passion fruit can grow.
Pana when it hits the ground is already too mature to boil; it can be made into batter, but most likely it is so ripe it will explode when it strikes earth, creating a frozen teardrop with its fibrous flesh. Over the days to come the pulp will ferment, emitting a yogurt-like smell that travels especially well over the wet airwaves of humidity, sickly sweet. I am inhaling probiotics. The chickens will not eat it but if I boil unripe pana and throw them cooked bits with salt and olive oil they feast. Same with my dad’s guineos manzanos and papaya, which he picks between intense shifts of managing my mother’s meds and helping her walk.
The growing of these things here is not just for feed but part of a politics, an affront to the cruel law of colony, Jones.Cabotaje which among many things forces us to import goods we can grow here from neighboring islands only to have them stop in the USA first to pay USA import and export taxes. Food sovereignty is the overworked term used for plátano y papaya en el patio, the work I long to do, the work that called me back.
I am tired to my marrow of having to explain myself, my ongoing colonial pressure points, to anyone in the empire. Whether as preamble to my work or preamble to my buying fruit at the store: a nauseating swell through my insides. This degradation led me to realize that while I have always known the profound sorrow and anger we whose people have only ever been wronged walk with, I have to animate it in new ways if I am to be a good parent and soldier and get to the depths of no report.
How do we combat the abysmal imperial lake in additive ways? My work as an artist lends me an observation deck, a set of binoculars, but it cannot light the cauldron atop the volcano…
to flow down and through, one pours one’s sorrow into the sea of salt-kin sorrow surge, sand, squall, tsunami, hurricane
[Roca crowing at dawn in a dream long ago]
I tack back against the trade winds, los vientos alisios, to go home, to learn from others how to feed the land so that we may stop feeding the coffers of those who hold a rifle to our temple.
The temple in our heads, yes, and the one that is an island.
[1]Palma writes from the capital most of all; her book Viento salado among other things chronicles her rebuilding a colonial house in the seventies and is a perfect portrait of a San Juan existing in all points of its five-hundred-year history.
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