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Earth Rising:
Writings on the World
A time-lapse art video with a section of "Promethea Un/Bound," edited, spoken.
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And the dinosaur’s book is green fury.
Promethea's curls and flanks, her energy, combustible.
Promethea has been dancing on the 200 billion year old
dinosaur skull in the glass box that hangs on the wall
since the beginning. Petrescent, converting into stone,
from water. What isn't liquid suddenly flows.
Like lava. Boiling.
Ancient skull without skin, or legs, or beating organs.
Body without organs. The body whose. Stone. Whose
bones are petrified. In fine volcanic ash, for billions of
years. I can read pathways on your bones, a scored
map of the earth, embossed hieroglyphics. Your garrulous
breaking voice in the sparking dust of fireworks, like
millions of dancing fireflies, an exploding outwards.
Your carapace is prophecy, what bends time in on itself,
grounding. You are earth stilled to wisdom. Ancient,
shell of secret signs, messages from the eons.
Mesozoic creature. Who lived happily on the
banks of the stream that was blocked by volcanic mud
creating a 12 mile lake that lasted for another 80 million
years before volcanic eruptions buried it.
Where is your riverbank? Slow mulching of sweet
grasses, sipping freshest of fresh water, dear ancestor.
Another bit of corporeality in the drama that began billions
of years ago when we all, our possibility, came to be in
the expanding light and the fiery dust that settled
into our solar system, and into the earth, and into your
exoskeleton, with its oracular markings, star charts,
which is now rock, condensed history.
"I am writing it just behind the burning bush, by the light
of your blaze," says Hélène.1
And I see you, remembering the warm fertile lush land
of 200 million years ago, growing a body, organs beating,
a fury of blood, following Promethea across invisible
mountains, down hallucinated valleys, into the heart
of the volcano that continually explodes,
bursting you forth.
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A time-lapse art video with a section of "Promethea Un/Bound," edited, spoken.
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Small note: Hélène Cixous writes of an affair with a younger woman in this beautiful little book that embodies transgressions of boundaries -literary genres, sexualities- as it explores the purity of the self merging with a lover. Perhaps it was the conservatism of the downtown corporate office I was working in when I wrote "Promethea Un/Bound," but I didn't mention what The Book of Promethea is about. My recollection of Promethea is of witnessing a shower of shards of glass that are gleaming sunlit and that fall on your skin as water. And an attempt by the author not to pin that joy into words that may kill the spirit of her love/r. A short, intensely poetic high-spirited book. "As for Promethea, she is really the one who made the whole text already, the text from which I emerged just half an hour ago (my hair still clinging from the Atlantic and crystal flecks all over my body. Anyone who wants to know how this almost finished work tastes would only have to lick my shoulder)." (p.5) I like to pair Promethea with A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, by Roland Barthes on my shelf.
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