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scavenger’s daughter

—

It was a scar chart stacked into a skyline, it was shipwrecks of soot and shipwrecks of skin and shipwrecks of everything after. I called it a home, I called it the shadow of a scavenger’s daughter.

The entirety was risen to scale. A city of replaced components, perfect complements, a test of compressions to become.

If we knew each other at all, you knew it as a torture device too.

—

We crashed there in halves. Shallow-breathed and splinter-limbed and salvage remaining.

Underwater was what was left, most of us had sunk by then.

We tried to make an echo of who to remember or how.

Every face was a capsized float, swollen closed from the vocal cords on down. They followed as clouds of flesh, hungry ghosts, decomposing fish.

—

Today, the human food supply contains a plethora of fresh, farmed, cured and processed meats. But we’ve not always been the competent herdsman or capable hunter.

At dawn of the Pleistocene epoch, approximately 2.5 millions years ago, humans practiced confrontational scavenging, a from of kleptoparasitism in which one creature drives off or distracts another predator from its kill.

As humans developed a taste for the meat of fallen vertebrates, we also discovered the taste of our own flesh.

It is likely our ancestors turned to cannibalism due to lack of resources and competition at critical points in their ascension.

”My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind.”

– Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1st century AD.

—

Here is most of what I felt:

I was terrified. Completely.

Make a fraud of yourself long enough and the fault lines do what they want to you.

Often leaving you without an afterlife to fulfill.

—

The economy of cannibalism speaks for itself, which is why the practice is prevalent throughout the animal kingdom, including among human and non-human primates.

A widespread presence of genes protecting against prion disease suggest that human endocannibalism was common for thousands of years.

This practice may often take on supernatural and ritual dimensions.

—

They hid in small circles, with teeth behind teeth. True predators who knew the trauma well.

Born again by drowning wrong, they were becoming natives there.

Soon, you said, they would be hunting us on their own.

—

“A scavenger’s daughter does not age. A scavenger’s daughter survives by starving a corpse in its place.”

One crushed orbital bone. Or a couple overriding things to know.

You told me there was drowning and there was dissolving, stretching and compressing, the only difference was the distance to tell.

You told me even blind spots could be living things, and still, I wanted to believe you.

—

—

The towers of Scavenger’s Daughter were built of interlocking shipwrecks, which made the underwater city “earthquake-proof.“

Using reinforced skeletons, the hulls of hundred of vessels could be notched and stacked on top of each other to create structures of enormous height and complexity.

Together these structures form the city of Scavenger’s Daughter. A skyline of shipwrecks rising from the ocean floor.

—

There are times we all fail. We salvage ourselves just long enough to explore the wreckage of a warmer person. We dig out the hidden teeth in each other.

By the anniversary of our attack, I was back to six bones missing again. Two orbital, two nasal, and two made of hunger and need.

You told me there were ways to trust it would end, a scavenger may pray to surviving gods too.

Jillison, we should leave here. Now.

Jillison. We should leave here.

Now. Now. Now. Now.

Now.

—

The Scavenger’s Daughter worked by strapping the head of the victim to an A-frame shaped metal rack at the top point of A. The hands were then tied at the midpoint and the legs at the lower spread end of A.

The body was then compressed from both sides, pushing the knees up in a sitting position and the head in the opposite direction. This resulted in blood running from the nose and ears of the victim other than damage to muscles.

The Scavenger’s Daughter was among those torture devices that were rarely used and yet relatively easy to make.

—

Shipwrecker’s Paradox.

Whether a shipwreck which is restored by replacing each and every one of its wooden parts is still the same shipwreck?

And yes, I said yes. Pick your shipwreck, any shipwreck. Pick your carcass, any carcass. Pick your angles, pick your shape. Pick your predators, pick your prey.

I survived as a scavenger’s daughter, I could only keep circling yes.

leftover vein forest / hospital 3

—

For seven weeks, one by one, she cut her wrists into kites and string.

They decorated her remains with escape clauses and expiration dates, a row of arrows through the skin.

They asked for a warm body to replace a need elsewhere, a marker of muscle and a moistened gauze.

She gave me a reason. Leaves were parted to let the veins in.

—

I waited for her in a short cornered room, in between cabinets, crouching, listening. I was little more than a torso, with or without legs. At most an extra arm, shoulders and a patch of hair.

I caught them staring at a capillary and calling it a certain ripple, I saw a still life disappearing on the inner corner of each hand.

—

Six hours of slash and burn, six clinics, one back canopy, no one said your name. Jillison, not even once.

They put her on a saline drip and said she was starting to improve, stopped vomitting, started drinking water and milk. She showed a normal spinal curve for once.

Her waiting room was windowless, walls nearly invisible, as close as we could come to a non-zero recovery again.

They never say exactly what shame takes away from you, the landscape of anatomy that gets subtracted entirely.

—

A faceful of blowout fractures. A cavity in each cornea, irises resized by lack of light, same blank injuries for anyone to see.

She told them the clouds were broken ornaments without a box, they weren’t even close.

She said the sky was replaced by means of riot control, they threw it in a back room, probably burned it.

She said you can’t replace a black hole, when all you have is a body full of black holes.

Silver lining of a sudden vein. Just had to cut it cleanly, let it find it’s type.

—

They told me it was over, and I watched her.

Woke up to an empty waiting room, a blanket kite corpses covering the bed. I told myself not to forget and then I left a note for her instead

Jillison, the ripples on the mirror show up as shadows below your skin. I always thought if you left me and of course I hoped it would be then.

our holographic winter

—

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
why hold onto all that?
and I said,
where do I put it down?”

― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God, 1995.

—

A tale of two entropies.

“All human beings have bodies. All bodies are mortal. Yours, too, is one of these bodies.”

According to Thomas Browne, the physician and author of Religio Medici, “The long habit of living indisposeth us to dying.”

—

A failed supernova is an astronomical event in which a star suddenly brightens as in the early stage of a supernova, but then does not increase to the massive flux of a supernova.

They could be counted as a subcategory of supernova imposters, sometimes misleadingly been called unnovae.

—

Initially, the rope broke when the Russian revolutionary Bestoujeff was hanged; “Nothing succeeds with me,” he said. “Even here I meet with disappointment.”

—

Iceblink is a white light seen near the horizon, especially on the underside of low clouds,, resulting from reflection of light off an ice field immediately beyond.

The fear of returning to one`s childhood home is nostophobia (the opposite state of nostalgia) combined with its comorbidity ecophobia: fear of the house.

Moral conversion is a relatively rare event in a person’s normal development.

—

Adam Rainer, the only person known to have both dwarfism and gigantism.

At 19 years old he was 4 feet 8 inches tall, by the time he was in his 30’s he was 7 feet tall.

—

Looking at a lamp that flared at his bedside, Voltaire said, “The flames already?”

—

Castration—believed to extend the life span a few years—was popular in the Middle Ages. Eunuchs do live longer than uncastrated men. A sterilized dog or cat, male or female, will live, on average, two years longer than unsterilized dogs and cats.

Emerson said, “After thirty, a man wakes up sad every morning, excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death.”

—

A rare first-person account of Cotard’s delusion – the belief that you’re dead – is by writer Esmé Weijun Wang who describes her own episode of psychosis and how she came to believe, and later unbelieve, that she was dead.

“Somatic details figure heavily in these recollections: what I wore, what I looked like. I told myself, through mirrors and dressing-up and Polaroids and weighing myself, You have a body. The body is alive.

But the more that I tried to remind myself of the various ways in which I did, in fact, seem to have a body that was moving, with a heart that pumped blood, the more agitated I became.

Being dead butted up against the so-called evidence of being alive, and so I grew to avoid that evidence because proof was not a comfort; instead, it pointed to my insanity.”

—

James Baldwin explained why black people don’t have midlife crises. Why? Because they do not buy into the myths of America. Black people know that the system in America is rigged. Black people know this when they are children.

By comparison, white people buy into these illusions of meritocracy and individualism and American exceptionalism and similar beliefs.

That is why the highest rates of suicide right now are among middle-aged white men, because they are finally starting to realize that the system does not care about them.

—

Everybody inside the afterlife is packed together. All at one point.

The 16th-century Utopians, Thomas More and Antonio de Guevara, allowed no decrepit old people in their fictional lands.

“Old people are miserly; they do not acknowledge disinterested friendship; only seeking for what can satisfy their selfish needs.”

States Aristotle’s Ethics.

—

Three unique markers of frailty have been proposed:

(a) loss of any notion of invincibility
(b) loss of ability to do things essential to one’s care
(c) loss of possibility for a subsequent life stage.

The Greek philosopher Anaxarchus, pounded to death with pestles in the fourth century B.C., said, “Pound, pound the pouch containing Anaxarchus. You pound not Anaxarchus.”

—

The moon is 1/400th the size of the sun but also 1/400th the distance from earth which results in the moon and the sun being the same size in the sky, a coincidence not shared by any other known planet-moon combination

—

Cross-entropy method. The pineal gland is your internal clock.

The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy.

States Wittgenstein.

—

Babies born prematurely—who often have falsely mature faces—are imagined to be difficult and irritable, and people are less willing to volunteer to take care of them.

So, too, a study of abused children under court protection in California and Massachusetts found that a disproportionate number of them were “unattractive.”

—

Classical notions about the status of humanity may be inferred by the etymology of ancient words for man.

Latin homo means “of the earth, earthling”, probably in opposition to “celestial” beings.

Greek anthropos means “low-eyed”, again probably contrasting with a divine perspective.

An Indian Proverb states, “The eyeless ant asked God: Give me eye-lashes.”

—

Continue reading “our holographic winter” →

dark swan astronomy / hospital 6

—

We slept back to back, with sixteen windows along each spine.

Jillison understood the curvature of carrying nothing, back starting to bleed, another accuracy of the dark.

The present often meaning a single event being considered, infinity is not that which has nothing beyond itself, but that which always has something beyond itself.

Time becomes ambush and ambush becomes time.

murder the wren days / letters

—

Castle / 16 November to 15 December

Dear Jillison,

When I was little, still in the nowhere farmhouse, I used to press my palms of my hands against my closed eyes as hard as I could.

I pressed and pressed until the discolored splotches and fractals showed up on the inside of my eyelids.

I asked my parents if that’s what dreaming was. Now I know the phenomena is called “prisoner’s cinema.”

Somehow I’m not surprised.

—

The myth most commonly told to explain the festival is as follows; God wished to know who was the king of all birds so he set a challenge. The bird who flew highest and furthest would win.

The birds all began together but they dropped out one by one until none were left but the great eagle. The eagle eventually grew tired and began to drop lower in the sky.

At this point, the treacherous wren emerged from beneath the eagle’s wing to soar higher and further than all the others.

—

Prime / 16 March to 14 April

Dear Jillison,

You told me a few times, storms provide anonymity. Provide distraction.

I never liked it when you would talk like that.

It was the day to commemorate the first killing of the winter king by the orphan children. Capture’s Day. Hollow Born Day. First Martyr’s Day.

We wore scars around our necks and short robes and women’s clothes, just trying to keep the wind from breaking us.

—

—

Mutatis mutandis is a Medieval Latin phrase meaning “the necessary changes having been made” or “once the necessary changes have been made.“

It is used in many countries to acknowledge that a comparison being made requires certain obvious alterations, which are left unstated.

—

The tradition may also have been influenced by Scandinavian settlers during the Viking invasions of the 8th to 10th century.

Various associated legends exist, such as a wren being responsible for betraying soldiers who fought the Viking invaders by beating its wings on their shields, in the late 1st and early 2nd millennia, and for betraying the Christian martyr Saint Stephen, after whom the day is named.

This mythological association with treachery is a possible reason the bird was hunted by wrenboys on St. Stephen’s Day, or why a pagan sacrificial tradition was continued into Christian times.

victory disease

—

“If you find this work wearisome or difficult to follow, please take pity on me for I have repeated these calculations some seventy times.”

― Johannes Kepler, The Harmony of the World, 1619.

—

“I don’t know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I’ll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.”

― Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989.

—

1. By dawn, my stepfather had introduced us to a mythology of his own. He built a tower hide, attached wing tags, cast his nets over clouds and sky.

Back then, we lived under a three tiered sky of cartilage, hollow limb and common bone.

There were birds as big as bathtubs and birds with bellows in their throats. The wind was thick with them, twenty four to every eye, fits and flocks of them.

Birds of now and birds of then, he said. Both would be blacked out at the Halowell.

“Birds, by their quickness and intelligence and alertness in acting upon every thought, are a ready instrument of God, who can prompt their movements, their cries and songs, their pauses and wind-like flights, thus bidding some men check, and others pursue to the end, their course of action or ambitions.”

― Plutarch, 1st century AD.

—

2. When the cloud cover was clear, we watched him turn the anesthesia machine back on. The sound of opposing currents came through over motorized, brackish, cold. Wind fell off course.

As if I didn’t notice, a nowhere was growing inside of me.

—

3. Cells stop making new rejuvenated cells. Maintenance gets scaled back or rolled out in illogical ways.

Early human explanations: Our bodies over time, get worn out. Our tools get worn out over time, artifacts etc. Shouldn’t our bodies be the same?

Evolutionary function of aging. It has such a cost, why does it exist. What pays for it biologically?

—

—

4. Seven weeks we waited in our pop-up trailer. Jillison was a ghost born again. We played duck and shutter, pane and palm print, draw card and rook exchange.

We practiced disassociation strategies until we were waking strangers, until we were too young to guess what was coming again.

Hours began appearing briefly or repeatedly, as if each duplicate was undercutting into something lesser.

—

5. I watched my stepfather outside again, filling sacks with fallen leaves, covering echoes in rain, confirming the failed results.

I could read the swears worsening on his lips. I listened for the recoil of commas and halts of breaths, more or less single tones, pauses before the rest.

I wondered how a face could end up looking like that. Jowls and bone and eyes bulging, barely any shapes at all.

Caught me red handed, caught me empty handed, the inevitable was never far from where I stopped following along.

“To oppose something is to maintain it… To be sure, if you turn your back on [something] and walk away from it, you are still on the [same] road…You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”

― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969.

—

6. No mental imagery. Purely conceptual. A computer that stores information but you do not have a screen attached to the computer. You can’t view it. But you can still access it.

1 out of 50 people don’t create pictures inside their mind like other people do. Instead they experience blindness of the mind’s eye. Aphantasia.

Why does it take so long for anyone to tell? A lot of conversations go unnoticed or missing in the back seat, individuals find a way to function despite it.

—

7. It wasn’t denial at first of course, just another way to exist further and further from myself.

Jillison wrote a reminder and left it for me. He called me the upcoming hopeless and I tried to laugh about it as long as I could.

—

8. My stepfather watched us with one infected orbital. He recited another fever vision under his breath. He went back in to check on the anesthesia machine. His eyes were controlled by corners of light.

Jillison was right when she said critical parts were missing. Blood-soaked, empty veined, a sky made from shadows of flesh.

She was right when she said, if the afterlife ever started, it was starting then.

“Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge…”

― Paul Gauguin, 1903.

—

9. Rank in level of detail.

A close friend, a partner, a family member. How well in your mind’s eye can you the contours of their face? Just how vivid are these mental images?

There tends to be a spectrum, from none to extreme lucidity.

“Consider incompleteness as a verb.”

― Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, 1995.

—

10. He used both hours, like there nothing was wrong with it. Like he shouldn’t have to even worry about getting caught.

I could feel his anesthesia machine overheating, sweating heavily.

Aphantasia. Disassociation.

Synaptic ripple and retreat.

—

Left my eyelids there, left my pulse there, left my body as an echo chamber. My throat was numb from vomit and spit swallowed back and spit up and swallowed back.

Jillison told me it didn’t matter now. She made it simple: Hide the knives under our pillow. Wait until he comes the right night.

Kill the bastard already.

—

—

“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”

― Simone de Beauvoir, in a letter to Nelson Algren

a constellation of knives / afterlife 2

—

And medical knives in Midheaven too, even if Jillison said it was all still preventable.

It only had to be a reminder some form of surgery coming. An equivalent guilt. They told us possible risks, radiation therapy, more possible risks and a third of the horoscope alone.

They said accidental catastrophe, including carcinoma, faster than average speed.

Another puncture passed through the undercurrent of your face. A pain exhibit. Like a constellation killed in slow motion. Almost even carelessly.

—

You said you would use whatever your had left. Lost comets, lines of advantage, sympathetic or contagious magic.

The discussion was over before it began. Just another reminder of all the things I never learned how to talk about with you.