Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Muoz 2
Table of Contents
Introduction
pg
Early
Period
.pg
Middle
Period
pg
Late
Period
.pg
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Introduction
Well-known, master-class, academic, prophet: these are all terms
which can usually be applied to a productive author during the course of her life.
These words fill in spaces within many books of criticism with a power that is
educated, pathetic. It is these categories which our author not only inhabits, but
explodes. But, if some authors have been considered dynamite, then it is only
proper to call our author a supernova. For him explosion is just a way to make
I came across the work of Jesus Moncholi while rummaging through the
book with ridged edges, coffee stains, and the usual wear and tear of those
books long forgotten. I read the title, Meditations on Mexica, and proceeded to
skim through the first pages. It was a collection of poetry, and from the first
lines, If Man is reified disease, the Mexican is deified defecation/ Man dies with
death, the Mexican with drought, I could not help but feel that a profoundly
relevant voice was speaking to me, bridging the gap of time in a moment of
authentic connection. I continued to read, until only after a few pages I realized
Muoz 5
that there were detailed notes written on the margins, noting errata and
addenda. This was not only a book which belongs to Jesus Moncholi as an author,
I discovered that Mr. Moncholi had taught there for 20 years. Moncholi was born
in Brownsville, Texas in 1940, to a large migrant family. His father died when he
was young, and he was mostly taken care of by his brothers and sisters (of which
he had 12). During his professorship he wrote many theoretical and creative
texts which were never published. The following is a collection of some of those
the poetic death throes of impassioned youth to the rigid and controlled
Brownsville, Texas, ensured Moncholi was never too far or too close from the
revolution. While the Communist Ideal was being compromised by Maoism and
Stalinism, the South was quiet and tranquil. However, this tranquility was
and nature. Moncholis early period roughly corresponds to the time during which
he began his philosophical and literary studies, ending at the time when he was
on a small local library affiliated with the Catholic Church, Moncholis early
characterized the vast amount of Chicano laborers in the South. At the age of 18
his mother and other members of his family were converted to the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It was his conversion that allowed Moncholi to
Muoz 6
tension in his life between the conservative orthodoxy of his church, and the
the University of Texas Pan-American. During this period the Communist Ideal
was losing its sway, as Capitalism became more and more complex, e.g. multi-
national capital. South Texas was largely unaffected by such advancements, but
Moncholis stress is evident. If the Revolution can only come when the symptoms
of Capital have become too much to bear, the system has been deadly efficient
in creating a false-consciousness for the masses. Much of the work of this period
of momentum in the labor movement. South Texas quickly became ever more
new modality of late Capital. During this period he returned to the roots of
Moncholi died abruptly at the age of 40. Most of his work remains
unknown, as he was an avid letter writer. This critical text is from a folio of his
collected papers given to me by his daughter. I am indebted to her for help and
[] poetry must not forget that it itself is not integral, that its constitution
only becomes so in and through relating itself to the real concrete historical
actions of humankind. Shelley was right to have said that poets are the
We must understand the direction of all future poetry in light of this qualification:
poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the primary world. The task of
meaning. We should apply Marxs thesis for the philosophers to the poets, with
modification: the poets have only given interpretation of the world a meaning;
they must also give meaning to the concrete changes of the world. In other
must first reclaim the world, if we ever wish to reclaim the future.
I. Early Period
and thoughts gain tangibility and add form to the primordial content of self.
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Language, at times, can seem like a tomb for the reality of objects,
of the metaphorical,
Let all my thoughts function as new verses in the free rhyming structure of
existence.
Oh but what bliss this density has emanating from within it!
All experience is absorbed and processed through the faculties of the mind;
let me peer into the causal relations that give life meaning
For a long time I could only relate a deep feeling of anonymity and solitude,
These were mere shadows of the true poetry written into my heart,
when all the forces of nature seemed like envoys of the Divine.
it was an awakening!
Only now do I realize that the divine potentiality that illuminates my existence
the sad, withered poetry that was once the fountainhead of all my efforts.
Now, with newfound clarity, I can decipher some of the text of the eternal poem
or a line,
its style,
or its origin.
Let the shadows of self doubt flee from the power that I now possess,
indeed no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
Let every creative function within my domain cease its dissent from this
principle,
Oh lovely lords of Parnassus, allow me to enter into your realm so I can act upon
this principle;
Radica en mi razn:
A meditation
The howl of the spirit is not out there,
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It resides in my reason:
We project our pains and unfulfilled desires into the image of the other;
We disfigure her, scale her down until her skeleton remains poor and brittle,
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Until she is nothing more than a pathetic reflection of those thoughts we cannot
bear.
But we cannot escape the homogeneity of being nor its motion and magnetism.
I yelled without air to breath and finally there I saw the sea
Only once did I blink to look at the void that was in me.
Finally the word came to rest in that old paradox of the rest.
rest. I am not only experiencing a paradox, I am creating paradoxes; i.e. the use
opening oneself up and bringing oneself to bear upon the experience of another
individual. From the beginning, ridged edge signifies the edges of pages of a
book, while the book itself is quite literally an open horizon, e.g. a book left
conventional meaning to words that are quite obviously paradoxical objects. For
example, when we read There I saw that newfound art made ancient by sound,
we must take this to mean that sound itself has the ability to ossify poetic
ventures. The medium of sound is another remove from meaning. If words are
estranged from their meaning-objects, then the sound of words are even more
Muoz 15
susceptible to being alienated from meaning. I try to do this with the word lead
which at first is meant to be taken as the metal, but which really means lead in
the sense of the verb. Thus this paradox is not simply a contradiction in the
essence of objects, but is a pathway to re-evaluating the terms. It also plays with
completed. We read edge and assume that lead is to complete it, as if edge itself
was an incomplete notion whose meaning only came into being through its
is as an aesthetic subject that we must be so. That is, since every story or poem
ourselves. At the beginning of the poem the narrator cannot do so, and so feels
own, a meaning whose utter lack of clarity is symbolized by that cloud with a
wooden door that the narrator is set free from the lead, whose position as
grammatical subject in the lead came out and finally made me free indicates
source of the spray and foam. Here, ocean refers to those oceanic feelings
which have been noted as the source of religious feeling. In other words, it was
not until I experienced, within the context of the narrative I was reading, a
genuine feeling of oceanic depth that I am freed from the lead. The previously
ego. For example, in psychoanalytic theory, Freud refers to the oceanic feeling
as the feeling proper to the individual prior to the formation of the superego and
the guilt of conscience. This feeling is an experience of being one with the
universe, of having subjectivity being objectified in all things. Also, in the words
of Lacan, such a feeling symbolizes a penetration of the real (as that which is
the symbolic order. It is this feeling which frees the narrator (of the poem) from
Being freed from being lead, the narrator finds himself looking for room in
boom in that space, we can take this to mean that the narrator is looking for a
trying to inject his subjective experience (of the real) into the symbolic order of
Next the narrator proceeds to yell without air to breath, and it is only
with such a gesture that he finds the sea. In other words, only in a gesture
which is an emptying out to a reality which negates the very content of the
gesture, does one find the sea, which is the final (note the use of finally)
object of the narrative search. Yelling is a gesture which rids the body of air,
while air itself is precisely what the environment lacks. The subject is filled with
anguish, with the inability to express the real of experience, that the only
Muoz 17
possible way to rid himself of such excess is to release it into a medium which
that the medium becomes more than lack. For example, exhaling air into a room
with no air transforms this room without air into a room with air. This air is always
filled with potential, and we must see its lack as a transitory stage, an exclusion
symbols of the other have a meaning for us, that they have a potency for
Next, the narrator states that he looks one last time at the void which he
was. This concludes the previous analysis: he has finally rid himself of his excess
and blinks only once, i.e. he transcends subjectivity (the me). In the end, the
words (symbolic order) collapse under the experience of the real (water-blue
around) and the poem concludes with the line, Finally the word came to rest in
that old paradox of the rest. Here we see the completion of his aesthetic
experience, the word (as symbol, Logos) comes to rest (as in a moment without
movement, i.e. it is a completed action) in that old paradox of the rest. Here
rest signifies the other, the consciousness of another being which is always
implied in a subjects own consciousness, but which is always hidden and alien.
This is the paradox of aesthetic experience itself: one comes to find meaning in
makes even the most particular symbolized experience of the other a real and
deconstruction. Also, he mostly uses an aphoristic form in an attempt to mirror one of his
has meaning. The declarative sentence, along with the declarative-being (Being
essence.
1 Editors note: Moncholi uses as an epigraph lines from Sartre To forget about the others?
How utterly absurd! I feel you there, in every pore. Your silence clamors in my ears. You can nail up your
mouth, cut your tongue out-but you cant prevent your being there (Inez from Sartres No Exit).
Muoz 19
XVI.
procedures of bringing into the critical field a state of affairs which must necessarily take
the form of that to which they are opposed. The authorial intent is undermined precisely
because it is what it is, i.e. authorial. Perhaps if the poet had said, He said that this is
not a poem he could have successfully detached himself from the declaratives co-
extension with subject appropriations. However, we must not be fooled by the authors
willingness to detach himself from the poem-form, because it is in such a form that he
statement made public can be said to have the same existential-grammatical grounding
as those private thoughts, those sentences which declare everything, yet nothing.
XX.
XXI.
and in so doing subsumes the positive monads which constitute the life-world
(Lebenswelt)
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XXX.
Truth is here estranged from meaning because subjective truth and meaning can only
coincide in the meaningful context of the world which constitutes subjectivity. For them,
the truth of the world (through the dialectic of history) is irreconcilable with the truth of
subjectivity.
XXXVI.
This is not circular logical, and cannot lead to a tautology. Rather it is a nothingology;
nothing, not in the metaphysical sense, but in the sense of a negated medium, a nothing
which implies the potent sensuousness and power of that which is denied. When we need
collected aphorisms above. Most of these are meant to be short sketches, and many of
the themes touched upon figure into his poetry and aesthetic theory.
III.
The world is essentially a conflict. Even as I write I am lost in ideality, I entertain the
ghost-thoughts of eras past, where communion left no hands empty. We can deprive the
world of self-conscious thought, and we would get along just fine. This is the double-
edged sword of self-reflection: it is superfluous. We need not think about the physical-
spatial place of the sun, its cosmological import, or its placement in a causal chain in
order to feel its heat. The sun burns, our bodies feel this, and at bottom this feeling is
sense of the world through its unfaithful equivocation. As long as my thought can ascend
to a higher place where thought itself becomes my object, I can never escape the
IV.
Where poetry and philosophy meet, they also dissolve. The precipitate is none other than
that notion which has given modernity her vigor: consciousness. However, consciousness
Muoz 22
is not always reflective; we need not even be conscious of it. Therefore, while modernity
domination, it also gave those structures a way to sedate the masses. When we needed
the activity of revolt we were given the passivity of the reified noun-concept of the
revolution.
XI.
Poetry is nothing unless it can transform itself into poetic praxis. The task of poetry must
be to break the human from her chains, those chains which bind us to a cold and stale
objectivity. Poetry has for too long been impoverished, we have had too many poems and
not enough poets. We need reclaim the primacy of the notion to poeticize.
XVIII.
One cannot poeticize and not be a philosopher. We must actualize the concept of the
poet-philosopher that finds no better expression than in the person of Nietzsche. Before
Nietzsche suffered his crazed vegetation he tried to embrace a horse who was being
whipped. This last gesture represents his regret, the burden of his asociality. Indeed, this
last gesture in the life of Nietzsche is the last symptom-formation of his neurosis: that his
XIV.
Towards a redefinition of the poet-philosopher. The burdens of history have shown than
the lover of wisdom has also been the despiser of the body. Philosophy must reclaim
the philos and bring it to bear on the wisdom, not of our concepts or our ideas, but on the
intersubjective relations). The poet has since antiquity been considered a maker, or a
composer of sorts. However, precisely what it is he made was always contingent on his
historical epoch. Perhaps the poet only turned to words because the body-universe was
must be a composer of love who loves to compose. We need the philospoetes (loving
poet).
Alienation, Praxis, and a Marxist Aesthetic. The book was planned to underpin his new
The writings of Marx in his younger and more philosophy-orientated stage center on his
themes of alienation and estrangement.2 These concepts were used in his argument that
understanding of the processes which create and orient subjectivity, and these processes
2 Editors note: for example, the young Marx writes that it stems from the very nature of
estrangement that each sphere (e.g. morality and politics) applies to me a different and
opposite yardstickfor each is a specific estrangement of man and focuses attention on
a particular round of estranged essential activity (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
of 1844).
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Concerning Labor as Praxis. [] In the labor-process we interact with objects of the world
with a potential that we appropriate for our own ends. This interaction with objects of the
world is only possible if we endow ourselves with the inertia proper to those physical
objects which are governed by the natural laws of the universe. We cannot use the
hammer if we do not make our own bodily extensions (e.g. our arms and hands) inert
objects in the physical universe. It is not as though they were not already intricately
unconscious; our actions lack the determination of purely self-conscious acts. In other
words to interact in such a universe we must make ourselves the en-soi of thinghood in
order to commune with the thing. However, this en-soi cannot determine the self, for we
are also pour-soi and this order of mental acts must determine those acts of existential
determination. Our en-soi must be relegated to acts of labor which objectify the will, and
which give physical, external objectifications to the pour-soi. We must not forget that
through the entire process we are body entirely, and that the body is itself my action in
the world. It is precisely this aspect of the bodys relation to the world (i.e. the primacy of
The laborer and sense-giving acts. [] Sense-giving acts define the individual as an
act of sense-giving, he relapses into the condition of the thing, the thing being precisely
what does not know, what slumbers in absolute ignorance of itselfwhat consequently is
not a true self, i.e. a for-itself, and has only a spatio-temporal form of individuation,
capitalist society the mythology of the individual is that of an alienated self endowed
only with a spatio-temporal form of individuation. The individual is only an authentic self
if he is capable of sense-giving acts, and this cannot happen under the guise of ideology.
Within an ideological framework actions never give meaning but only relate to a pre-
established meaning; to a source of authority that is also outside the system. For
example, in capitalistic society our actions are accorded to impersonal market forces and
an underlying presence that never comes into question. We make ourselves things but
this thingness is not merely a transitional form that allows us to engage with the inert,
Muoz 25
as in productive laboring praxis, but rather it is the ground for all our engagements. The
ideological false-consciousness of the individual does not become aware of this inertia
which he has himself become because the entire process of subjectification has been
The subject of ideology. [] The ideological subject is and his actual material becoming
turns from a process of dynamism into a cold stagnant pendulum in which motion can
only be conceived along certain trajectories. For example, the quantifiable nature of the
functioning of capital, its ability to be made sense of, leaves no room for trajectories of
subject movement that are outside the system. When a laborer thinks of change it is
merely a horizontal movement from one pole to the other, e.g. from poor to rich,
unknown to know, useless to useful; vertical movement and the prospect of another
horizon never occur. The system never allows the process itself to become something of
import. The subject along the trajectories of capital never reaches that thingness which
of a thing. The laborer thinks but does not know: he thinks he is a thing but does not
know it. He does not give meaning but suspends the process entirely in order to get
meaning from the system which merely points to a pole on the horizon and says, Wait,
lies in labor as praxis or process. When Marx argues that social being determines
relations, but that the only way consciousness can express itself is through universal
consciousness, a consciousness that interacts with the world that precedes the advent of
the self or ego. With this in mind, Marxs statement can improve from qualification:
social being (the way society is constructed) determines our consciousness of the self.
This is not to say that our interaction with the world, founded on primordial
Muoz 26
consciousness, is wholly determined by the society in which we are born into, only that
we cannot think of ourselves as asocial individuals. His statement is meant to criticize the
philosophical thought that reason exists prior to society with its laws intact, e.g.
Rationalism. This statement must not be understood in such a way that it makes
impersonal social relations the only determining causal factor for our existence; this
consciousness can only be authentic when it has freed itself from the impediment of
social relations in which we are mere things. If we were engaged in social relations that
determined by our own interactions with other subjects. This consciousness would be
plastic and would not only think but know. It would be a consciousness-in-process which
would have intimate knowledge of the dialectic envelopment of many subjects. Only if
social relations are impersonal and systematic, i.e. capitalistic, can they determine a
consciousness that is false. Marx is arguing that we must not simply try to change the
way we think (as Hegel suggests) but the way that we relate to the world and to others.
understand that for Marx the primacy of world-relating lies in labor. According to Marx,
an abstract sense through a false relating to abstract labor, we become alienated in the
process. Only if we deny the process of our own subject-becoming, which is founded on a
basic material intentionality, do we then become alienated. This also implies that human
nature is not itself alienated which is why Marxism can serve as a viable Humanism.
[] Our interactions with the material world constitute a horizon of intelligibility which we
use to make sense of the world. Motility is the basic intentionality because it precedes
3 Editors note: Marx writes that if then the product of labour is alienation, production
itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation
(Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844).
Muoz 27
The subject-object nexus of laboring praxis. [] Our interaction in labor concerned with
our use of equipment.5 There is no product without the tool, there is no way to take raw
natural resources and produce something to serve a purpose without a process which
imposes such a purpose or end. Paper does not become a tool without the writing tool;
the writing tool does not become a tool without a system of intelligible symbols and so on
and so forth. This is important to Marxist theories because it implies that equipment is
not a thing in the sense of an entity with a stable nature; a piece of equipment only
becomes what it is through use. Even if it is not used it still has a use-potential that is
implicit in its being a tool, but this does not mean that it is a tool in-itself without
reference to use. It becomes a tool once it has been used and this use is integrated in a
a piece of equipment. Both have potentialities for creating values. The wage-laborer has
a labor-power which they sell for a wage while a tool has a use-potential which is
appropriated during the labor process. Therefore, wage-laborers can be seen as tools to
the capitalists, as pieces of equipment which are to be exploited. Exploited labor rests on
the creation of surplus-value which rests on the use of the laborer as an exploited tool.
For example, the capitalist ends up with more value in the commodity than the value a
Capital therefore rests on ideology in so far as such an ideology already constitutes the
human subject as an inert product with a nature that is stable and given. Such an
ideological perspective places the subject in a relation with the world that demands him
to remain inert. Capital rests on the perpetual inertia of the human subject in economic
relations, he is quantified, reified and then his consciousness is always in this mode
because without the system he would lose himself. Humans have a different ontological
structure than the tool or the thing and it is this discovery that both existentialists and
Marxists assert.6 However, I believe that human are tools in a qualified sense: a human is
a tool which has the ability to understand itself as tool because it creates use-values.
Human-beings have a use-value which is different from all other use-values: its use as
tool generates more use-values. A human-being seems to be a tool (in-itself) which has
[]I believe that for Marx authentic consciousness accords with the ability to free oneself
which both creates and uses itself.7 In the capitalist system false-consciousness is two-
fold: the laborer only sees herself as a thing to be used (she does not create) and the
capitalist sees herself as a transcendent subject who only creates (she does not use).
Only in a system in which use and creation are integrated into a singular process can
consciousness be liberated. Only once property has been abolished can the individual
appropriate his energies in such a way that every product of his labor is simultaneously a
self-use and a self-creation. This genuine labor process can only arise if we adopt a
certain attitude towards ourselves and our productions, and I believe that for both
6 Editors note: For Heidegger the human-being has a specific ontological structure: that
of Dasein.
Marxism and Existentialism the best model for this sort of process is that of artistic
creation.
Labor as art. []We must be engaged in a long process of appropriating all those actions
over actions. To be what one is, is to integrate past actions, intentions, and feelings into a
whole and this rests on an assumption of responsibility. In the labor process, this
The worker cannot see her actions as her own because they always over-determined by
the system. Her actions are never her own but are the actions of an ego; a fiction which
does not exist. Also the capitalist is not a genuine self because he takes responsibility
over actions that are not his own. For example, he will take credit for the production of
commodities that are not fully her own; they have a surplus-value which originates from
the worker. Capitalism forbids this construction of the self (using our freedom)because
authentically subject-appropriated. []
This authenticityis only realized as an artistic endeavor in which one gives style to
oneself. We must make characters of ourselves and learn to stylize our action in order to
fit them into an artistic plan.9 This stylization is precisely the taking of responsibility as
mentioned above. To give style to our character is to constantly re-interpret our actions
and to fit them into a larger scheme: it is to use ourselves as tools that produce meaning
and to take responsibility for those productions because they constitute and create the
8 Editors note: For example, Marx states that the possessing class and the proletarian
class represent one and the same human self-alienation (Marx; Alienation and Social
Classes).
9 Editors note: This paragraph and above arguments center on Moncholis reading of
Friedrich Nietzsche.
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To be the novelist of oneself implies that we must treat our lives as an artwork itself; we
must become both creator and created. We must be a new type of human being. 10 We
must be free spirits who are free from the metaphysical caprice which makes our
principle of motion an estranged figure over and beyond ourselves. We must preserve
that sacred innocence of becoming, which is nothing other than taking a stand on those
acts which have a meaning for us. As Nietzsche said, as soon as we fancy that someone
is responsible for the fact that we are thus and thuswe corrupt the innocence of
Our life constitutes a particular history and it is this history which must be enriched by
artistic nuances if it is to properly reflect our freedom, i.e. our responsibility. This entire
actual process and in this sense it is like Marxs dialectic. Each integration, dissolution,
and re-integration is constantly working at a whole and the success of this process relies
on an intricate equilibrium of the self. Like the dialectic, each part of the process is
retained and becomes necessary to the whole and I think that for both Nietzsche and
Marx existence is a continual dialectical process. To engage with the world while adhering
to its ebb and flow is to take proper responsibility over actions and to make them
necessary. This aesthetic interpretation of ones history and ones self is the foundation
for liberating the consciousness of the worker. He can only view his life as a piece of art if
10 Editors note: Thought taken from Nietzsche: What is the ape to man? A
laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a
laughingstock or a painful embarrassment (Nietzsche; Thus Spoke Zarathustra).
Muoz 31
Which surface
When surface
Has gone.
It seems that no matter which way the skies surround, the wind always blows
South.
All movements lead me to those boundaries and borders where people obscure
the cityscape with towering shadowy shapes which have colored the world
around them.
Every commitment finds its completion there where the individual and
community are one; with my people.
There are ties to that valley set beyond those hills tainted by modernity and
industry alike.
They extend to every person great and small; the community made flesh does
not care if you are a tooth or a toe.
There, skins gently caress each other like grains of sand along the beach.
The sun beats down upon us, but this is not tyranny, it is translation.
We sweat not from exhaustion but from over-abundance; can you not already see
that the liquid on our naked bodies has lost its salt but not its flavor?
We walk in that puddle set beneath us; solid land is not too clean, it is too safe.
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After all, has not the American city taken away from us all that moderns call
dirty: tradition, faith, family, hard-work, and above all community?
No we inhabit new spheres of existence where old beliefs make good homes and
no fires smoke because winter never comes.
We are a people of stick and mud, but we would be insulted if you filthied our
name with those empty abstractions of the post-modern epoch; you see pro-
gress I only see proto-re-gress.
Already you have taken that primordial mud and made it concrete, you fill it in
with the contraptions of technological fetishisms and see only the crass
exchange of false realities.
You are Capitalists par-excellence, but you sell us stability and safety and
demand that we give you our honors and virtues.
You give us the media already deprived of the individual, human relations
deconstructing the individual, yet claim a hitherto unknown allegiance to the
individual.
You communicate with signs not our own; you scream at us and are angered
when they do not sustain.
We are not merely shadows, we are presences; and all presences have their
magnitude and motion.
You take from us all interaction, intention, and ideation; you make every hand a
foreign one, you take all labor and make it your own.
Process, purpose, and people you have stripped from us and produced it in your
gilded factories of commodity production, selling it back as if you were the
solution instead of the disease.
We were here when the lands went by many names, a time in which signs were
not designed and produced to sell on the market.
In your ears only clamor the humming of machines but in those days all forces of
nature spoke with their own power and nuance.
Before the free market our markets were free, before your surplus of things we
were surpluses unto ourselves, before you gave us the wage as noun we had it
as verb, before supply and demand we only new need and sharing, before capital
we were a community.
Democracy is glitz and glamour without substance, it is a few hands raised here
and there but voices silenced everywhere.
You play government with images and half-humans and claim that in this lies
truth.
No, truth is nowhere there; a truth that hides in the beyond is no truth to us.
Hermanos y Hermanas, this is a song a lament, but it is not far from a funeral
dirge.
We must take those tamed images of ourselves forged by those phantoms of the
mind; our modern, American, Democratic selves.
We are done with playing with sights and sounds; we wish to grasp things and
the power of life within them.
We mud-people are not afraid of being too wet or too dry, because we know that
from the well-spring of life flows waters that will always replenish and
reconfigure.
Perhaps I was wrong, this is a funeral dirge, but only those people set on the hill
are dead.
They died many winters ago and they have not yet caught the scent of their
decomposing corpses. Yes even ideas decompose!
Mud-people grab your sticks and re-orient yourselves. There is a vast ocean set
before you, but never forget that this ocean is never beyond you.
You are mud, you are dirt and water, and you absorb the waters of life as much
as you spread your dirt amongst its many currents.
We are people of the sun and we never tire of being made solid only in order to
be made liquid again.
We are never one or the other, we are process, we are people, and we are a
community.
In mud we rise and fall, feast and starve, but we never claim autonomy because
for us autonomy is a euphemism for egoism.
Muoz 34
Mud-people, my people, mi gente, let us reclaim our huts and hammers, let us
work for one goal: the eternal recurrence of our mud-existence.
[Untitled]
The act embodied
Holding on by letting go
In bleak entropy-flow
We break to infinity
Without notion
Projecting ourselves
When we are
Muoz 36
I is excluded
I am excluded
Which we touch
When we touch
Tonacatecuhtli, Tonacacihuatl,
An authenticity-made-conscious.
Our bodies-having-been-warmed
Of songs to be heard,
In cosmic uniqueness.
As sacred remembrance.
To create is to ex-sist,
To sing is to be heard,
Muoz 41
To touch is to live.
Utter fate of the straight steel path bent towards earth and grime
The steel bars begin to wiggle and wallow in their own space
Demarcations of difference
In the soul
Lost in non-words in ( )
Disjunction
Conjunction
Hair-pores infiltrated
Ears deafened
She is needles
Junction
Into world
In unitary world-flow