“Selves are signs. Lives are thoughts. Semiotics is alive.
And the world is thereby animate.
‘We’ are not the only kind of ‘we’.”
—Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human
dear Animate:
We were talking about the difference between “kin” and “kindred” —
blood relation vs. connection not strictly defined by family. Kin can
narrow to claustrophobic ritual and feuds, while kinship intermingles
and crosses blood lines. How large is “family” or “kinship”?
Can kin include those outside our family, our species?
Who includes us, who do we include? trees with their oxygen
out-breath? bees? those who remain stateless, undocumented or illegal?
the “inanimate” — rocks and rivers? What happens to a culture
that narrows and nuclears its sense of family?
Cecelia Vicuña says “in her performance Theresa Cha would give
the audience white cards that read ‘distant relative’.
Rocks, water, fire are also our relatives.”
dear distant. dear relative
we are the shadows of
our animals
Do animals dream?
yes, science confirms animals dream
but do animals confirm science
does science dream
do I dream animals
am I their science
who dreamt my vestigial wings
my amphibian lungs
is evolution a dream
is phylogeny a dream
is God science
is my digital Telos
swift enough for ocelots
am I two Reverdy deer
on fevered freeway edge
is my mouth a moth in lamplight
—
is my mind a swarm of termites colliding with the beaks of blue jays
and my soul the mind of termites the sky between
—
wearing trees our brains shrouded with hawks buses roar
our caves fill with missiles our ears long to open
stroke the fur of our plant bodies
—
the tongue a meadow florescing
—
the animal is weary, the anima
packed into shipping containers
—
the soul is tired of people
saying who is not allowed
into heaven
the pitiable the poor
the unloved
the unwashed
the unshriven
undocumented
ancestors
all animals
anteaters
moths, microbes
even radiant
Medusa jellyfish
the soul
is tired of this paradise
of downloading
and upgrading
and forwarding
the soul’s GIF
is tired of waving
its Sisyphus arms
—
lie down soul and rest on the cool riverbed
water lapping the mud of minnows
—
the life of a word dark to itself
at the non-carceral edge of dreams
the tundra of a word, its unslaked thirst
—
if the soul
is this foreigner
hidden in me
if the soul is
innermost wind-
blown crowds
of leaves
if the soul
is placenta
a seed a cloud
in collusion with matter
if the soul is panic-stricken
if the soul is unfenced land
then spillways and forests
their velocities, their philosophies
our nervous system burning like a codex-sun
before and after the mysteries
—
black island of letters unvoiced black statues of wild birds
untraceable black iris of black sight black Iset of crowning night
black wash of stars gone into the lens of leaving
gone into black fields receiving
The brightness of the animal
“embedded in the visible that hides them”
—Jean-Christophe Bailly
there was the flaring
of bodies in sun’s path the brightness
of an awkward and prehistoric body
with wide-sieved mouth, wider than Jerusalem
pelican folded like a dark arrow plunges
without hesitation into the abode of water
60,000 pelicans once sheltered in Gulf rookeries
now thousands of dead birds
the young emaciated and abandoned
to spreading sheen of oil
dense with dispersants
water silver-black as feldspar
waves like rapid eye movements
in waters fat and rancid
oil slick unfurls like silk
born pre-erased
blind crabs born
scrambled genetic
the young with
wings pressed back, useless
our industry, our tourists
sores on their skin
mouths wide open
bright words bright day
bright orchard bright water
bright boat bright cloud
—
do you swim with full intelligence
gleaned in intricacies of water
are you more or are you less sentient than whales
do you hear them laid out and skinned against the bow of oblivion
hunted and plundered then rendered
yet still curious about us
—
in search of the sublime
many suburbanites
across time zones
all the tidepools
hexagonal shapes like beehive cells
tarry sprawl
the awe spread and spread our fault line
where you left me in cold fathomless
—
When rivers are granted personhood
do corporations dream in clear calm morning
threaded by contrails
—
if a corporation is a person but not a migrant
does the corporation have a soul but not
the chicken I eat nor the river downstream
from the person of the corporation
if a corporation is a person does it wake up
in dread sometimes like a person does
and cannot get up out of its chair unassisted
when its legs no longer work so well its eyes no longer see
the corporation falls down goes to its first day of class
trembling with excitement and terror it gets depressed
gets a pink slip a tumor it is sad is it is compassionate
it lies on the ground ecstatic seeing a young pine tree
and one day it lies down on the ground and gives
its body back to the vast, undocumented microbial ferment
breaking down into particles of lyric
—
the sentence, a sentence — a sentience
—
when rivers are granted personhood
we are mortal like glaciers
—
the body of the female corporation wears his red dress
pelt of remembrance to counter weaponized light
—
if trees
have no soul
then neither
do we
NOTES