Mycelial Visions is a work that I have been maturing for months and that deals with the wonders and mysteries that the Fungi Kingdom contains, a name that is used to designate a group of eukaryotic organisms where fungi or mushrooms, molds and yeasts are found. This kingdom is one of the 5 great ones that make up others, such as animalia, plantae, protista or monera, having very own characteristics that distinguish it from these others due to its taxonomy and complex life cycles.
Specifically, the so-called mushrooms of the Psilocybe family caught my attention and their role as sacred psychotropics (hallucinogenic or neurotropic) in vast cultures, with records of this use, from the Paleolithic (Siberia, Sahara and Spain) to the present day. The power that these have to expand the mind and open unsuspected portals is well known, and that it has a certain analogy with what Eliphas Levi explained, regarding the 3 states to know the secrets of the universe, such as the embryonic state, dreams and delirium.
Thus, since the dawn of animism, these mushrooms have revealed, with the guidance of healers and shamans, that which is invisible and also ineffable, since those who experience these trips cannot express or relate what they have experienced on these trips to what is supposedly the depth of being and soul. These mushrooms usually occur in the dung of animals and it is plausible that prehistoric nomads followed herds not only for their meat but also to collect these mushrooms that were found growing in the feces of the herds. Among these mushrooms are the Psilocybe Mairei in North Africa, Psilocybe Cyanescens, present in Europe, America and Oceania, or Psilocybe Zapotecorum in Mesoamerica, to name three of the most recognized.
They are heterotrophic organisms, that is, they acquire their nutrients from abroad. Their form of reproduction is by spores and they have specific anatomical structures for their production, such as asci (contain ascospores) and basidia (with basidiospores). In fungi, reproduction can be asexual (without formation of a fruiting body) as well as sexual. Like the other kingdoms, they have different shapes, colors and sizes. Its habitat and location varies according to species, being able to grow in treetops or at the foot of it, as well as on rocks or soil, preferably where there is humidity and shade.
written by Enrique de Santiago. The art works are acrylic and ink on 300 gm Conqueror paper. Each painting and poem is a door.
FULLNESS A secret freedom opens through a crack that you can barely see. Rumi The morning and its ancient mystery with his new cycle embracing my vertebral calm with dawn light steep in aerial stays of a non-Euclidean flight and its fertile messaging that awakens the annelids to caress my future memory.
CONCILIATION There are times when all the accumulated anxiety and effort they rest in the infinite indolence and repose of nature. Henry David Thoreau I have heard the incessant whisper of the maitenes and felt its impetuous root that sings its light music mounted on the invisible verticality of design that escapes geometrically by the high pendulum cusp where I found the voice of the origin so I became a body in the bark adding myself to the essential channel that pulsates in the hollow where the bird flies with his outburst of winged love that awakens the astral eyelid and light the new dawn.
DOWN From the labyrinth of white meats where the filaments fractionate the divine eye the wise thread emerges from the molten magma before time.
DREAMS in the belly of the stone the dragon’s breath is hidden and in every cosmic cycle stir your energy that moves the suns and their destinies. You’ll know when the word goes on in that object that radiates silent voices by a demiurge who lost love in a vortex in that surprising weather.
HUGGING THE BELLY Diverse waters nest in the hidden embryonic embraces where the blade of time pick up the promise made to the stem in that sacred way. And I saw a new way and their metals hugged tightly the sign of the night dropping urgent shadows as field dams one upright and down in his immobility.
LIGHT The universe came down to my domain Opening the lights before precarious those who entered In the bones of my soul. Light of the hidden.
SEEING EYE the flesh of god opened the sky and my inner eye saw the route of the serpents.
HEAVENLY LANDSCAPES In the surroundings of the uranic gem the voices of the magicians are raised that bear ancestral flowers to heal the wounds of oblivion.
REVELATION There was his high imponderable crown on the distinguished and lukewarm verticality of the mystery without leaving a shadow in the mirror of the high magistracy of the verb pouring her violet love towards his moist horizon and restlessly embracing your silhouette that I don’t know That’s how I saw you behind the meanders of destiny in the sudden revelation of the morning birds Will you be the trail to be followed in unknown times? perhaps I will drink of your honey under the sign of the equinox coming As soon as you feel your eyelids full of the light of your redemption and rest the incandescent pearl that comes down from the dew this will be the floral beginning of the silent explosion like the one that leaves the pollen in the aerial possibilities while I await your coming. Someday they’ll die out under the rust the gears that bind us to reality.
DIRECTIONS My constellations that guide me pushing my mild matter in this immense sum of fiery spheres and finite inside the womb of mystery with its unsuspected breath of flowers because as above so below since nebulae have their own pistils and here I am with my steps apprehended waved and sacramented right and wrong taking up the path dictated by the stars smiling under high serene clouds looking for other paths that will bring a new hand to dream.
When the nose has dyslexia, the conventions of clean and dirty mutate amuck-
Nightmares of being dunked in vats of perfume become the norm-
Social status disintegrates and intimacy with a skunk brings joy-
The man burrows into remote dung heaps further and further away from the tyrannies of soap-
When the nose has dyslexia, predictable roles and behavior are scrambled anew-
Musk entrenched supermen get stampeded by berserk fawns in heat-
Germ-Phobics fondle dung beetles whom with freshly molested vigor, do hind leg roll ups of squeeky clean solid citizens-
A prudish school marm finds a hidden rabid snapping turtle in her soul after being bitten by rotten apples given jaws by the teacher’s pet gone astray-
When the nose has dyslexia, rampant desire surpasses grandiose expectation.
A wart on a baboon’s ass blossoms into a more fragrant-than-thou perfume garden berry infecting a bestial psychopath who then penetrates with valor the furious posteriors of mandrills shimmying with profane delight
Eager vines of algae growing up from centuries of neglected teeth, climb greedily towards the fortune of a fresh breath heiress-
Gooey-Pollyannas wash their mouths out with soap before reciting mantras of bland nicety to contrite career criminals gnawing on clean conscience bunions jutting from angel’s feet-
19 of ClubsTrio of Femme SirensAuf Die SchaukelPhosphorescent Clown SquigglesLucky LimulusBrunette March
When the nose has dyslexia, sacred values of societal dust are sculpted into new poisons by the playful rogue nostril metastasizing-
The Outhouse-Leper becomes a vengeful king, skinning the pillars of communities, turning the hides into outhouse doormats-
Blind Peeping Toms suddenly regain their sight munching on outhouse-doormat brittle–thus seeing and tasting time honored models of proper conduct-
Yeast Infected Vaginas curtsy with hypnotic finesse, flirting with clownish tumescent yam jam giraffes, spurting forth voyeurs turning into martyrs, turning into manic surgeons whittling skunky joy toys in a sleepless scalpel trance-
When the nose has dyslexia, the lightning of childhood memory strikes unlikely victims–oceans of crystallized feelings awaken from deep sleeps re-inventing the heart-
A hardened Loan Shark gets entangled, softened and diced up by the frail sadnesses evoked by the rubbery wet scent of his baby sister’s favorite dolly lost in a distant rainstorm-
A loud mouthed schoolyard bully becomes a mute wise old sage, transcending all utterance, ruminating inwardly, building shrines of cookie crumb folly from the remnants of desserts the bully once coerced from the trembling hands of weaklings entombed in the bowels of forgotten grammar school lunch rooms-
The cold stares of ultra strict baby sitters, soberly stretch a whiny little brat’s dirty diapers into an almighty circus tent tundra sheltering cleaner than clean orphans sired by soap bubbles popping-
Formative Foodchain
When the nose has dyslexia, embarrassment lurks in excess.
The man narrowly escapes the lewd clutches of Germ-Phobics hiding in lairs of undigested corn kernels waiting to leap out and fondle him.
He burrows inexorably deeper into remote dung heaps further and further away from the tyrannies of soap, eventually reaching paradise, where fragrant nirvana is sweetest, and stench lost its voice to the carrion bird who sings dirty in reverse.
The man enters The-Nose-Has-Dyslexia restaurant, ordering a Skunky-Joy-Toy kiss smothered in freshly molested dung beetle sauce.
As frail diced up cubes of sensitive Loan Shark say grace, crowds of manic surgeons saddened by lost wet dollies, serve the meal in a sleepless scalpel trance-
The man tastes paradise, blessed by the voice of stench stolen by the carrion bird who sings dirty in reverse.
Suddenly The-Outhouse-Leper-Turned-Vengeful-King appears, interrupting the man eating, pedantically assailing him with correct table manner etiquette, forcing a squeeky clean knife and fork into his dungy hands…
Richard Gessner’s fiction has been published in Air Fish: an anthology of speculative work, Rampike, Ice River, Coe Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Happy, The Act, Sein und Werden, Skidrow Penthouse, The Pannus Index, Fiction International and many other magazines. A collection, Excerpts from the Diary of a Neanderthal Dilettante & The Man in the Couch was published by Bomb Shelter Props. Gessner’s drawings and paintings have appeared in Raw Vision, Courier News, Asbury Park Press, Rampike, Skidrow Penthouse, and exhibited at Pleiades Gallery, Hamilton Street Gallery, Cry Baby Gallery, The Court Gallery and the Donald B. Palmer Museum. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
“The Amazing Richard Gessner, Wizard of the word, and Alchemist of the image” -Vincent Czyz May 24, 2022
THIS WRITING IS AN AUTHORIZED DUPLICATION WITH PERMISSION AND EXPRESSED CONSENT
our birthright is to know our brain and to become aware of the impact of meteorites on our language.
but first
guard the self that believes in you. the best hallucination is a healthy belief. a belief in self without vanity is sincere and free magic. magic without title, property or theft.
which older you are we anyway?
everything about the overactive amygdala is the source of insular cortex phantoms, wrathful deities averting ourselves from sapience. it keeps us from enjoying our temporal lobes, ruled by self-rejection in the temple of the body.
autoscopy, is the real spirituality with particles and waves. this tide will lead to a more balanced clonal pluralization of selves. to be one with everything, one is everything.
P.D. Newman is an independent researcher located in the southern US, specializing in the history of the use of entheogenic substances in religious rituals and initiatory rites. He is the author of the books, Alchemically Stoned: The Psychedelic Secret of Freemasonry, Angels in Vermilion: The Philosophers’ Stone from Dee to DMT, and the forthcoming title, Day Trips and Night Flights: Anabasis, Katabasis, and Entheogenic Ekstasis in Myth and Rite. The Secret Teachings of All Ages (TV Series documentary) 2023
“Relativity makes distance meaningless, but the situation is even worse when quantum mechanics intervenes, since it questions the idea of place.” Paul Davis.
Of the clouds contained for centuries of the air that winds the violet knot of meaning And of every dark shape that embraces the sound of the world the lit line of the labyrinth emerges contemplating ourselves immersed in this myriad of fluids that embrace us from the beginning and from before in its reverse reality to end up drowned in the crack of fate and never know what the essential source of the moon holds nor the celestial song of the plumage found in the boreal bosom this is how the air is thrown into being Without measure no understanding while diligently it oxidizes and hastens its decline.
WINGED PHOTOTROPISM
nothing ends, just a keep going around in a spiral, at the command of vector dreams, that rest on the moon that raises the stamens, Like the names I’ve forgotten my own, and the name of my destiny, while I move hugging the clouds with my numbers on the side of my brain and my breath laughing again.
The astral root, acrylic on canvas 118 x 85cm
MANDRAGORA, ASTRAL ROOT
telluric resonance with its harsh echo that stuns reason magmatic word that arises from the refusal of the verb black poetry on its sharp path the one that hurts the one who goes into its mystery with the blessed dagger of the fallen angels that are arranged on the sidewalk of dawn illuminated by the forgotten star between rivers of multitude of bones council opening submerging volcanic fire where the salamander dances at the right time and hour when the word that unleashes the lightning is released with its fractal memory that renews the solanaceous plant what is the mandrake of the damned and of the saved.
Under the Luciferian influence, acrylic and ink on Conqueror 300 gm paper
PERPETUAL FLORA
From foliage ancient and forgotten, when time was captive in the womb of time even before the language of birds appeared, that lost and extinct star arose, loved from her nebula and awaited by the early cicadas, it was so that she sang her scrolls and she danced the mystery of the nymphs, hidden in the mystery of her and in the first number of her name because this is found in the sum of the rings of a forest, and her dress is the transmutation of the nymph something like that, like a thousand and eighty times the face of the moon.
Winged Past, acrylic on 300 gm Canson paper, 30 x 39 cm
THE PAST OF THE FOREST
I love your origin from the unknown with that particular elliptical aroma like an elk that descended from a learned galaxy there between the sources of light and condensed matter close sister of the unchanging logos the one you robbed by surprise On the oblique ship that was hidden with their inverted masts on the sleepwalking skins begin to awaken from amazement of so many days of your destiny without knowing why ?? away from the inanimate pavement that carries with your long steps in the certain uncertainty in the sacred place that goes off and it bares to oblivion.
Astral Watcher, acrylic on Canson 300 gm paper. 40x30cm
THE RELENTLESS OUROBOROS
beyond the wind in a northern region of the universe an uncertain number of names dissolved by the golden flame of oblivion They descend from the crevice of a nebula while the bird as watchman of the secret sing their celestial nomenclatures to revive them in their new sap.
Altered distance, acrylic and ink on 200 gm Canson paper. 21x28cm
DISTANCE
The lightness of your poetry taught me to look beyond in that place where we don’t understand each other a room of emptiness and fullness where there is enough space to brush your hair.
The implacable oracle, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 70 cm
NGC 6753
When a star collapses, does part of your destiny end? Do you know the emptiness that will come in the litany of the dream of the demiurge? Each sphere engraves its own ellipse so as not to perpetuate it because the grass kisses the constellations until it loses sight of its splendor and the turn announces its sunset like love dissolved in nothing where the word is not perpetuated And these verses will disappear when the screens turn off so too the leaves yellow following the dust Of expired stars in forgotten hells parked in some empty universe waiting to speak from the past and the future.
Prehistory of the present. acrylic on canvas, 70 x 70 cm
CYCLES IN COSMIC WETLANDS
rising winds without becoming storms They spring from the soul until they inhabit the shadow that takes the lonely measure of the one who forgets the kiss when long ago life rocked its cocoon unaware of his hypocrisy looking for the fierce copper mascada while we smell that inexorable time that snatches the lights rapidly in the twilight where every month is the same for everyone and between the mist and the pit the same efforts start the same young people with their ideals who see their elders leave clinging to clothes like the smell of tobacco and the humidity of the asphalt every year is the same for those who do not see the clouds but in the long run it’s the same music fashions are fashions and your makeup is the same and when you cry a black line tears your face similar to the one that tears your soul love that sucks life and releases it leaving us exhausted for months Until I return for another rest of life like a pleasant and hostile embrace and there is no way to draw life to know how to color it it only comes around every corner sneaky and silent distinguishing itself in a fissure of time when it’s too late to decide or repent Well, it installs, without further ado… with his elastic suit that loses his memory in that last station when everyone wants to change their habit nothing more like life that first puff of cigarette strange, pleasant and bitter slight time that will end in ashes hopelessly.
The bodies remained weightless next to each other faced with the cosmic dilemma and to the protocol of the farewell, he perceived the aroma of the bones while she expired her step at night with a certain harshness the one that evaporates with the days slow and silent like that subordinate hatefulness of truncated desire
The music of the spheres, acrylic on Canson paper, 250 gms. 25 x 32.5 cm
GRAVITATIONAL CONDITION
On the edge of my lithic archetypes sweet new grass grows that with its solemn verticality wants to hug the moon in serene times like your memories before forging the tides and unleash the liquid of his beloved burning oblivion and shadow permian knots skeletons going down the river of oblivion everlastingly in its exact ritual.
Early Invisible, acrylic on canvas, 65 x 81 cms
ANIMA WORLD
Mother Earth exhaled the perfume of redemption while the useless man and dismembered course listened to the night without name or shadow, in order to gain oxidizable objects, at the midpoint of his fecal abyss, with the emptiness left by fear and so he names himself among the speechless faces that day when chemical weddings were prepared without finding for your optic cells when the leaves of the forest fall slowly and to my ears comes the roar of the terrestrial kiss which is a sound to be ocher dust in solar memory in the end of time With its circular principle in the appointed mystery, while third world children are murdered to make toys that were not for them. Before knowing the sky and the gods she appears from the beginning taming the chords of silence she, well, she knows the key to love in a sleeping place and she licks the perpendicular voices of the waters like rivers that arise from the carboniferous she well she knows how to offer the womb to spawn the world.
Astral fissure, oil on prepared cardboard, 60 x 45 cm
blank slate
“My soul is from another place, I am sure of it, and I intend to end up there.” Rumi
Reset the inconsequential To restart with the fruitful
How would you describe your painting process and your associative relationship between concepts, events, or mental states of the subconscious? Is there a link between self-hypnosis and inspiration?
Artists, writers, and poets such as Garcia Lorca, Roberto Matta, Henri Michaux, and even Anais Nin have inspired me to paint. Language, for me, comes first, but the visual can support the verbal. I paint as if I’m composing poetry.
Automatism or improvisation is the starting point – bebop – but I’ve realized that the contours of a, often dismembered and re-stitched, female body appears repetitively in my mind’s eye: think Mary Shelly. This flickering of fragmented body parts leaves deposits on the canvas/my mind. There’s something about the human body that truly fascinates me. This fascination isn’t deliberate, and it’s also strange because I’m more cerebral than a physical person: in my view, the body exists only in the mind. This also solves, at least for me, the century-old dualism: the body-mind split. Or, as William Blake said: “the body is a portion of the soul.”
Man is a machine, and a woman is a sublime machine. If you compare the human and the animal body, the human body is clearly synthetic and artificial. It blurs the boundaries between what’s considered natural and what’s considered artificial. I find that thrilling. There’s nothing natural about us humans. We aren’t becoming robots or cyborgs, we already are. We can’t rely on our instincts anymore as non-synthetic creatures can. There are vehicles in the making that’ll be able to reproduce themselves with whatever material they can find on Mars.
How’s that different from us? You could say that humans think and feel, but do we really? Aren’t we just parroting the words, stories, and belief systems that we’ve been fed? When was the last time you heard a new idea? Something you hadn’t heard before, something that stimulated an innovative thought. We’re the protein by-product of language. Perhaps when there’s trance, a moment of silence, or jazz, an intelligent intuition can unfold in the nerve domain. Painting or poetry can help it develop, transmit and circulate. Possibly it can be fertilized by critical reading or meditation.
Is painting a technique that represents a body disconnected from words? a sort of ‘transmuting neurology’
Transmuting neurology, I love this phrasing. Probably our neurology is in constant a state of desire for perpetual transmutation, but the culture must allow for it. Studying the history of painting, I was excited to learn that the Impressionists had “discovered” different shades in snow, something that nobody had “seen” before them. Isn’t that intriguing? I guess they contributed to an alteration of the general perception and experience of what’s “white.” They are also depicted as the very first in the history of Western painting of social situations such as people dancing or swimming. Nobody had done that before them. That’s why the establishment was so scandalized.
Of course, it didn’t help that the women they painted often were what today we’d call sex workers. Can you imagine that in the second part of the 19th century? Later with expressionism and surrealism, painters gave expression to the ebb and flow of what’s inside the mind’s eye. An interesting artist is Francis Bacon. He claimed that he depicted people as they “really” are. Perhaps some of us are polished yet monstrous or disfigured? Or even, maybe the human condition is one of perpetual disfigurement? Whether we can see without words is something I keep on mulling over. I feel tempted to believe that as humans we need some sort of narrative or linguistic frame of intelligibility to see things. Perhaps we can only perceive objects contextually. Painters should be called pioneers or even anarchists of perception.
Can you elaborate on how language shapes us by a Languaged body, cultured intuition by sound, and language as a living intelligence?
I’d like to emphasize that I constantly toy with intuitions and ideas, not with truths. The truth for me often is a reductionist and particularly violent concept. Think of all the wars that have been fought over some sort of revelatory divine truth, or in later centuries, the so-called scientific truth. The Nazis had their ideology backed up by scientists’ assertion that theirs was the most evolved race (so-called Social Darwinism), and that certain other races were particularly parasitic and had to be exterminated the same way as rats or cockroaches. So, circling back to the central ideas informing my practices such as the “languaged body” which is a neologism, and the idea that language is a living intelligence, I don’t consider them to be truths. These are frames of intelligibility that have grown under my skin over the years of study, reflection, practice, and meditation. I have no problem admitting that these concepts are nothing more than my obsessions. I’m not a missionary.
I see language as something external to human beings, possibly an organism. In the process of language learning, humans are inserted into this external thing we frivolously call language. There are linguists in Switzerland who’ve developed a theory in which language is a symbiont. So not necessarily a virus as William S Burroughs famously claimed, or that it can turn parasitic in case of psychosis as French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan suggested. I see our brain + nervous system as a receptor-like radio, tv, or computer, capable of receiving signals and building narrative. In some way, it’s a form of telepathy. By producing sounds, we invoke a whole shared world that has been forged across thousands of generations. Also, we invest our lifeworld, including our bodies, with words, with a story. If our bodies weren’t invested with language, we’d constantly experience ourselves and others as walking talking meat, protein bags, or water bags on legs. When we buy meat at the butcher’s or supermarket, we don’t think of that red stuff as chopped-up dead animal cadavers. We say it’s a New York strip or whatever. Something similar is going on with our bodies. We have names.
This name is somehow “written” on our skin, on our face. I’ve never met anyone without a name, though I’m curious how that’d be. When we feel attracted to someone, we don’t think “that’s a tasty animal.” Some of us might, however. A whole story about someone is activated within us when we fall in love, a concept of what a human being is, of what beauty is, etc. while we all know that a few millimeters under the skin there’s blood and a skull. But who, except a cannibal or a serial killer, thinks about that? The way language has contextualized humans prevents us from seeing the meatiness of a person. But this experience isn’t fixed. There are cultures in which not everyone has human status. Think of the Dalits in India. In Central Africa the so-called pygmy is being hunted and eaten, most probably because their appearance doesn’t conform to the hunter’s concept of what constitutes a human. It’s also interesting to read the private diaries of people who worked in concentration camps, and how they thought about the people they helped butcher or exterminate. Some agreed that Jews, homosexuals, communists, etc. had to be put to death, but they felt it should happen in a kinder way, pretty much how some activists think about animal rights in our era.
Language protects us by feeding us optical illusions. As humans, we’re trapped in a theater of distorted thoughts. It’s as if we need to drive on a busy freeway wearing glasses deforming everything coming our way. All this is extremely disorienting and frightening. I think maybe that’s why there’re so many ideologies and why religion is such a sensitive matter. These “grand narratives” offer the illusion of certainty and direction: how one should lead one’s life, where one should be headed, and where to invest one’s life force. The artist, I think, has been for whatever reason cast out of the Eden of ideology or religion, and is forced to constantly mold and remold her internalized worldviews, knowing often very well that this is a futile endeavor that must be repeated endlessly. But, at least, there’s some motion within. The alternative would be catatonia.
Artists, writers, and poets who helped contribute and inform your process?
I sound like a broken record when I keep on mentioning Will Alexander. But there’s no denying that his oeuvre provided me with the missing link in my thinking. I have always had an interest in ritual, animism, and shamanism, but with the latter term, we need to be extremely careful. I adhere to academic concepts of shamanism, such as Mircea Eliade’s. When younger I participated extensively in groups believing that they were engaged in shamanic practices. Perhaps some of those did. I don’t want to claim that I have the capacity to say what’s authentic and what isn’t. What I inherited from these experiences is the sensation of trance. Will’s work transfuses both language and animism/shamanism, especially in his The Combustion Cycle.
Without trance, there’s no writing nor painting for me. Writing prose is different. Poetry and painting for me fall in the same domain as glossolalia, speaking in tongues or trance-speaking. Freudian associating on the couch. Will’s concept of language as a living, possibly alchemical intelligence, makes a lot of sense to me. It connects my interest in shamanism and animism with my obsession with language in a no-nonsense way. WA’s poetics is a conscious journey into the imagination. To truly feel this, you need to understand that the imagination isn’t just “fugazi” or fantasy. The Jungians know very well that the imaginal world is a tangible environment, in which one can move around and travel in. There are beings dwelling there. You can develop a bond with these inorganic characters. Jungian practitioners are aware of this possibility.
I think I can say that Occidental culture at this point in history is in a state of coma or autophagy: it’s eating itself up. The criteria for personhood are so one-sided and reductionist that it is extremely easy to descend into a state of being a non-person. Maybe the only option when that happens for some people is to die and, in the process, drag along as many corpses as possible. Ours is a high-risk society. Having said that, I’ve lived in India for three years the comfortable life of an adult literature student. Life in India is no bargain either. Perhaps I have taken shelter in the written word and painted images because I’ve experienced that it isn’t possible to change your own culture with another. Every culture has its own cruelties, sacrifices, and gains, but they aren’t commodities. The difference, maybe, between Western cultures and the rest of the planet is that, as French novelist Michel Houellebecq suggests, the West has sacrificed almost everything for the sake of rationalism and technocracy.
There are also other artists and poets besides WA that have influenced me. I’m thinking of the “Grand Jeu” poets such as Rene Daumal and Gilbert-LeComte but also Antonin Artaud, Joyce Mansour, and Roberto Matta. Regarding US artists and poets, there’s, of course, Philip Lamantia, whose thinking and work is like a direct mind-injection into my mind: picture a metaphysical phone call without ever hanging up. Other important people would be Bob Kaufman, John Hoffman, Laurence Weisberg, but also someone like Mina Loy, and some beats, in particular William S Burroughs. I feel a deep affection for a lot of artists and writers: William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Thom Burns, Rik Lina, Byron Baker, Emily Dickenson, Edgar Allan Poe, William Blake, Lautreamont, Guiliaume Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Gerard de Nerval, Grace Hartigan, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Juanita Guccione, and many more.
Bill de Kooning deserves special mention, on the one hand, because nobody speaks about him anymore and because of ongoing the “de Kooning-bashing. But also because my paintings are a prolegomenon (not a counter-narrative) to his disfigured depictions of Marilyn Monroe-type of women, in particular the teeth: Where else in the world is the business of smiling taken so seriously as in the USA? My series of chopped-up disfigured ladies, “Mutilated Madonnas,” are homage and homologous to his.
This is intense work. It’s incandescent. It’ll catch your eyes on fire. Burn your brain down. Giorgia Pavlidou has managed to make anguish appear beautiful. And sexy. Artaud is the tutelary spirit of this work. The anguish is real and the words have the taste and smell of the netherworld in its black gown of sibilant pupa. This is language with a biology; it writhes, hisses, and propagates by glossolalic impregnation. Reading these poems is an immersive experience. Here we find madness, anguish, erotica and Rabelaisian humor welded and wed to a language full of “lexical tentacles” and “fire dressed in fire.” It gets under your skin, this speech. These strangely intelligent & autonomous words, manic as wasps in a vessel of glass.
—John Olson
A pyrotechnics of lingual essence, Giorgia Pavlidou’s “inside the black hornet’s mind-tunnel” yields feeling through the language of the heart creating darkened constellations that rivet the inner eye all the while whirling as an estranged yet organic imaginal terrain.
—Will Alexander
Giorgia Pavlidou
Giorgia Pavlidou is an American writer and painter intermittently living in Greece and the US. Her work recently appeared or is forthcoming in Caesura, Maintenant Dada Journal, Puerto del Sol, Clockwise Cat, Ocotillo Review, Strukterriss Magazine, Entropy and Sun & Moon Magazine. She’s an editor of SULΦUR. Additionally, Trainwreck Press launched her chapbook ‘inside the black hornet’s mind-tunnel’ in 2021, and Anvil Tongue Books her full length book of poems and paintings, ‘Haunted by the Living – Fed by the Dead’ in May 2022
Poem read and written by Ceci Nahuelpangui Tiltil, June 2022 read at Rene Fernando Ortega Villarroel Mental LabyrinthsOpening with dancer Giannina Canessa/Poema leído y escrito por Ceci Nahuelpan, Junio 2022 leído en René Fernando Ortega Villarroel Apertura de Laberintos Mentales con la bailarina Giannina Canessa
Everything tells us that we are in seed times… The seed that dies in the dark under the nourishing moisture of our Ñuke Mapu, Mother Earth… She surrenders and strips herself of what she is to live fully towards that imminent transformation. The seed knows what its destiny may be, it was born for this long-awaited process and relies on the help of the cosmos to make it happen sooner or later. The help for this wonderful change is in all of creation… In the birds, the wind, the Moon and the Sun…
So, if we have that understanding and ancestral knowledge, we understand that this is how it is throughout this magical womb of the Ñuke Mapu. It doesn’t matter what seed we are, what matters is that we are and that germination will exist, but not without first experiencing this important and necessary darkness. The eclipses, Lai Kuyen the death of the Moon and Lai Antü, the death of the Sun are one more confirmation of our process. Darkness and death is also part of Life and it also has a beauty that we will discover if we are aware of living it. Welcome to this wonderful transformation… Inchiñ fün… We are seed.
Giannina Canessa
Todo nos indica que estamos en tiempos de semilla… La semilla que muere en la oscuridad bajo la humedad nutriente de nuestra Ñuke Mapu, Madre Tierra… Se entrega y se despoja de lo que es para vivir en plenitud hacía esa transformación inminente. La semilla sabe cual puede ser su destino, nació para este esperado proceso y confía en la ayuda del cosmos para que ocurra tarde o temprano. La ayuda para este cambio maravilloso está en toda la creación… En las aves, el viento, la Luna y el Sol…
Entonces, si tenemos ese entendimiento y conocimiento ancestral comprendemos que así es en todo este mágico vientre de la Ñuke Mapu. No importa que semilla somos, lo que importa es que lo somos y existirá esa germinación pero no sin antes vivir esta importante y necesaria oscuridad. Los eclipses, Lai Kuyen la muerte de la Luna y Lai Antü, la muerte del Sol son una confirmación más de nuestro proceso. Oscuridad y muerte también es parte de la Vida y también tiene una belleza que descubriremos si somos consciente al vivirla. Bienvenidos a esta maravillosa transformación… Inchiñ fün… Somos semilla.
non-fungible token sunthemata with numbers I am a verb on a switchboard, placement wrong side of town or a substandard decimal point magic watchwords golden square chains a lien against every me in the space colony remember Chevrolet is Apache. Chevrolet is Cheyenne. Dodge is Dakota. Ford is Thunderbird. Jeep is Cherokee. Jeep is Comanche. Jeep is Grand Cherokee. Mazda is Navajo. the trillionaire owns is owns equal signs and property rights
Every time I ordered my papers I found these poems that correspond to my years of militancy in the communist youth under the period of the dictatorship, which in my personal case took place between 1979 and 1989
Already a couple of years ago, around 1977, my concern for writing verses had been awakened, and I still have those first poetic stammers. Those sheets speak of those attempts to provide something different to the word, since when adding two, these would give a different meaning and significance, more subtle, in short, that it had a broader meaning.
I had finished high school, and shortly after I met a landscape painter and an art student, who showed me the secrets of easel painting, it was then that I was already clear that my destiny was the visual arts. Parallel to the instruction, I received from these two friends, others close to the cultural circle that was forming in the neighborhood, they enlightened me about the dark passages that happened daily in our country. There was the coup d’état, the intervention of the United States, the disappeared detainees, the torture, the prison and the political persecution, which were some among many the prison, and the political persecution, which were some of the many atrocities that devastated our people.
poetry was still present, and names like Nicolas Guillen, Ernesto Cardenal, or Roque Dalton had been added to my library. I wrote in my spare time, and much of that poetry served the cause of the offended and their fight for liberation for the construction of a new, fairer life. It was then, during a sunny winter afternoon that one of my friends invited me to join the Communist Youth.
I accepted and from that moment my new name was Freddy. The following year he entered the Faculty of Arts of the University of Chile, where the student agitation had restarted after complex years where the repression was brutally violent. Now there were more of us and all the universities were setting up Student Centers ready to fight for student and human rights. They were two hard years, of strikes, street actions, propaganda, and confrontation with the repressive forces-Carabineros de Chile, which at that point was a militarized police force trained for repression-Between art classes, paintings, and struggle, of from time to time some of these poems that I have rescued arose. Others were lost among notebooks or were forgotten on a table in my school.
The months went by one after another; meeting, bells, protests, repression, hiding and reappearing, that’s how the years went by, with a lot of political activity, little appearance, and some verses that are being accommodated in these sheets.
At the beginning of 88, love came with force, since one day in January I met Valezka, who would be the mother of my three beloved daughters. That year, party activity would turn to the campaign for the October plebiscite and find a way to insert myself into the workplace, since by December there would be three of us in the family. It was a tough year for both of us, but we went to all the big marches where we joined the people who had said enough to so many people of darkness and opprobrium. The triumph of the “No” option brought hope for the daughter to come and the verses changed color, approaching a less arid and somber texture. 1989 I arrive with a stable job, my party life is focused on the union. That year Patricio Aylwin was elected, he would be the President “as far as possible”, or put another way: what was impossible for the people, while everything possible was given to the de facto groups and the oligarchy. Those were the years of asking for permission from the dictators and fascists who held key positions in the Armed Forces, Parliament, and the production and communication media. Large state companies continued to be privatized and neoliberalism deepened. From the 90s onwards, were the years of shame, of a protected democracy, and of the deepening of the model
Enrique of Santiago, December 2021
The Smoke Base (1979)
the base of the smoke it is base without eye for the bell a lock vibrates ten times, and the bewildered sight writes How many broken ideas are there in the mirror? for the bell the ear is deaf with pain of 10,000 years the crazy race has an end everywhere lips are pursed, the exit is praised, spitting black earth and the black earth spits us to the sky burning the pupils since the base of the smoke has no eye The base of the smoke has no eye and the ash drowns a siren and they crash by the thousands Well, it’s the autumn of man the bell screams in fright and the eardrum tells him to shut up.. but the cry is crying dog crying, of worms of mice human crying shoes melt and the frost boils in its hour pine is charcoal and the race burns and burns The base of the smoke has no eye but the beginning yes, but underlies its lock
Carnival and duel (1980)
Dreams have been trampled in the mud and the moans are silenced with screens and neon fun to lead the century on the trembling of absent birds but one day the crystal clear rain will come and after the sun with your new water kissed by the moon while the rebellious ligaments they give off longings on the gray asphalt under waiting stars the smooth flight of lepidoptera
The Pedaling (1981)
On a colorless bike pedal to a sleeping atoll in that corner of the skin of a rosy vision under the dark green chair so that the sole kisses the yellow sands the contemporary chip already inside my starry pants I think it is appropriate to say with a red voice: Long live this surreal expression! I then say: Your violet rifle jumps from the dark tides Stepping on the shapes that you don’t have yet and you were submerged in your numerical sea where they surprised you between mastabas and whips and embraced the heavy centuries under the belly of the galleys to cross the maps of the centuries chasing the useless and ephemeral
Night (1983)
Have you felt that the bats They come to your room one day agitated? They laugh and denote expired fangs while the music falls, abandoning each note, and I look for an onomatopoeia to simulate my brain hitting the floor, so as not to perceive how it is extinguished the spent life of those who do not have feathers I just want my fingers intact to pull a certain trigger and make my way through the gray tangle of his name
Observations (1984)
They are cloudy days vermin crawl and abound the palace beasts the city wears its best corruption suit and in each office a crime is perpetrated but there are still your kisses and your moisture in a brief but broad sincerity in that street that corrects my face and faith
Reading in Heaven (1985)
The fly refrained from ascending and stopped at folded hopes perceiving a usual odor had drilled all the diameters known and unknown of the present medieval apathy Repelled by bullets the nonconformity wears black tile and resume the flight causing the last ulcers to existing weight Tomorrow the cage is undressed before the soup gets cold
Painting (1986)
Alone, in front of the support clinging to thousands of flaming voices and be one and all following the thread of Ariadna in that challenging labyrinth where she is shipwrecked and pales her life, next to the truth and hers custodian loves be both and call what principle Without us realizing that we always carry with the fear of what ends
Dream (1987)
In the courtyard of my memory I did not pave stone *pastelones and on the most humid and fertile land grow a red flower burdensome and geometric without the language of capitulation and got up watered with the brief bravery that drives almost irrationally to the martyrs from every barricade in this city charnel house
Demystifying (1987)
The feather vortex perishes before the litigation of stillness and from so much looking for potions on nights covered with the moon shell I then went to the annals of oblivion while the image of the eroded sky appears under the uncertainty of its dim flashes going through the rubble of your memory My withered pupil arrived there to forget you
September Notes (1989)
They will hide my lean meat, under the cover of earth and parallel, where the traces left by my dreams will not be visible in those coordinates where the dragonflies nested In the softest parts of a solstice insistent the consecrated spells will be hidden for future generations while I drink from a larval porphyria since each wing contains the history of time, what takes my breath to set your levels without further limits that the one that extends in the red slope of a fallen where each segment of the man fulfills with the fragility of his own destiny In vain many look at their savings account on the gray sidewalk, when in reality life goes by insignificant before your eyes Now do you understand why? of the sound of crafty sabers in spring
Enrique de Santiago, Born in Santiago, Chile (1961). Visual artist, poet, researcher, essayist, curator and cultural manager. He studied a Bachelor of Art at the University of Chile and at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Chile). Since 1984, he has exhibited in individual and group exhibitions, counting to his credit around more than 100 exhibitions. He has edited five books: Fragile Transits Under the Spirals in 2012, with La Polla Literaria; Elegía a las Magas and the book essay: El Regreso de las Magas, both with Editorial Varonas. In 2018 he edited La Cúspide Uránica with editorial Xaleshem and Dharma Comunicaciones, and Travel Bitácora with Editorial Opalina Cartonera. He has participated in various poetry anthologies, both in Chile and abroad. He has collaborated in the newspaper La Nación with articles on new media art, and in magazines such as Derrame, Escaner Cultural and Labios Menores in Chile, Brumes Blondes in Holland, Adamar from Spain, Punto Seguido from Colombia, Sonámbula from Mexico, Agulha de Brazil, Incomunidade de Portugal, Styxus de Rep. Czech, Canibaal de Valencia, Spain, Materika de Costa Rica and other printed and digital publications.
And from beyond the intellect comes beautiful love trailing her skirts, with a glass of wine in her hand. Rumi From above with his selenite love descends the brief nomenclature of desire in her diamond lust kissing in purple intervals the waves that announce your steps with your coming laugh to testify about the rain and in the nyctalope depths in its germinal dance the final hour of your name.
Patriarchal Decadence
(or Brute A attacks Brute B) Do you think that money will stop being fascinating? and if one day it disappears Do you think power will lose its appeal? possessing is more addictive than loving your missiles and two more the poker of life a “quijadaso”, ‘jaw bone’ well given in the skull for Abel (although that fact marks the end of grazing and the beginning of agriculture) that happens for misreading the allegories and also wrongly see the universe added to a dark and patriarchal church I light candles for Ishtar instead and I hear the voice of the earth but… Will there be anything left to restore the feminine? End of statement, I’m going to the shelter.
Enrique de Santiago, Born in Santiago, Chile (1961). Visual artist, poet, researcher, essayist, curator and cultural manager. He studied a Bachelor of Art at the University of Chile and at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Chile). Since 1984, he has exhibited in individual and group exhibitions, counting to his credit around more than 100 exhibitions. He has edited five books: Fragile Transits Under the Spirals in 2012, with La Polla Literaria; Elegía a las Magas and the book essay: El Regreso de las Magas, both with Editorial Varonas. In 2018 he edited La Cúspide Uránica with editorial Xaleshem and Dharma Comunicaciones, and Travel Bitácora with Editorial Opalina Cartonera. He has participated in various poetry anthologies, both in Chile and abroad. He has collaborated in the newspaper La Nación with articles on new media art, and in magazines such as Derrame, Escaner Cultural and Labios Menores in Chile, Brumes Blondes in Holland, Adamar from Spain, Punto Seguido from Colombia, Sonámbula from Mexico, Agulha de Brazil, Incomunidade de Portugal, Styxus de Rep. Czech, Canibaal de Valencia, Spain, Materika de Costa Rica and other printed and digital publications.
Mitchell Pluto 