IT'S BEEN HALF THE MORNING after that cutting stone . . . or, I should say, trying to let myself be found by the stone. Meanwhile my little plant has grown a little older, more potent with the sun of another day, before I dig in. . . .
The bitter-tasting plant . . . "only so much as seems salubrious to eat," I hear Ali say in one of the last utterances he leaves with me, before I am led into a remote realm of microscopic images which overtake my vision behind closed eyes, expanding with cinematic zooms into figures of grandiose, global proportions. . . .
First, not surprisingly, earth. But it is astonishing: to behold it as cross-temporal incidents of de- and recomposition is a fitting but fitful revelation. A fistful of deliberations over whether that's death or life in my grip, see: the array is unmistakably Mestizo . . . and it isn't because I have seen so many serapes over the past several weeks, an eye-influence blithely (bluntly) influencing my visions--no, it's the organic origin of the pattern, the seed of a million Sonoran visions: so THAT'S where all those blankets and ponchos come from, a design that has occurred to millennia of other invoked pilgrims, many who have woven it into their work.
See, what is seen is the way earth is elementary, vibrant and inveterate; it's task ingenuous and yet it attacks with unflagging tenacity: to be a medium for the recycling of life, which is itself a byproduct of depthless death. Here are maggots eating the bones of an Aztec grandparent, my own as much as a my Mexican sister's, and shitting soil; here are maggots eating me, I see, in a time as easily experience as now by me as by the unborn progeny. The unborn gives birth to an Aztec king. It's easy. An Aztec king offers another son to the sun, and instantly the vision is replaced by a grunt getting a chestful of bullets in the jungle of Vietnam, his hand opening in a round, redoubtable " how *?" . . . and expanding into the globe: plates spread out over the earth, and we recognize in them the yin and yang.
Last, as it were, the earth. The article makes the matter massive, a totality of all the composite clots of mud and man that make up the planet. Silly little word. A turd.