Djed

sporadicq:

The djed symbol is one of the more ancient and commonly found symbols in Egyptian mythology. It is a pillar-like symbol in hieroglyphics representing stability. It is associated with Osiris, the Egyptian god of the afterlife, the underworld, and the dead. It is commonly understood to represent his spine.

Fourth Emission

With a heave and a few friends’ helpful hauls, I opened the doors on a new solo show, A Hundred Thousand Dead Homos. The room smelled like sweet musky incense, palo santo, we blocked up the windows and they came and made out on the soft leather, surfed the website and and laughed long into the night. Came to the last, triumphant note on the homage: designed, documented, laid out, edited, translated and bound it into some beautiful cataloguitos. Down the humid blustery night highway to dancing and delirium in the capital. Then packed half my bags, and headed for the train station of the South. Busker punks invite me to their old hotel squat, but I have to head South but not without trying to smuggle them onto the night train in the most wasted but gorgeous awesome train stations I’ve ever seen. Those are actually two pretty perfect adjectives for Argentina as a whole. And we sped down, severely dehydrated with the Fernet-cola glug.

The wagon doors are open to the wind and I lean between the cars, the kids were caught long back, and I watched the moon and the machines of the city’s periphery under floodlights. Really, really feels like I’m in a movie. Meet some kids by the side of the road, at the spot I’d picked too. No luck. Sweaty and a little poorer, the sun rises over scrubby hills for ever and ever. Pilkaniyeu. I’ve crossed the desert. Back in Mapuche territory. Another day by the highway, this time, walking miles and miles out of the city, into the mountains. I am filth and soot and my excitement is mounting too. When I finally break out of the land occupation neighbourhoods along the river, over another mountain, I find sweet Hannah waiting for me. Sauna already fired up when we get to the valley floor. Dear heart. We chat away with champagne and freshly chopped wood. You can hear the river rolling away, the freezing blue river which would be blanketed in the morning with fog as thick as my sleep in the little loft under the sauna roof. Mind blown by the Cordillera. More things than I can put words to. We eat well and as every night the cold drops down the mountains a little colder, I know it’s time for me to head. I smile into beautiful eyes on the banks of Nahuel Huapi, hop back on buses and steer towards the Atlantic. Fishing with nets in the surf and feeling the pull of the city streets.

Back in the heat of it, heavy with noiseless lightning and persistent rain, I feel like I’m back home, which I wasn’t expecting. Walking through the dark, imperfect grid of the capital, along the boulevards and round and round the obelisk commemorating the first founding, just before the original people sent them off in boats. I experience deep hospitality. We fill the patios and cuartos with belly laughs and wake up shivering, the damp sneaking through the windows. The leaves are falling. I would learn that 50 people lost their lives that night in the city I spent the last month in, most of them electrocuted in their houses, water rising from the drains and under the doors. My stuff’s still there, at my friend’s. It would be days before I could reach him. I read a list of identified dead for the first time in my life. A wish of mine came true.

Distant friends blow in. I learn that my uncle had a huge seizure and the little tumor growing in his head was found. Cleaned the spirits from an old house for a band of sweethearts, giving and receiving gifts, tender ones and stupid ones. Just before I’m set to keep on Northward, I look out over the big thundery pile from way up high and I know it’s all good.

I’m in a very, very different place. With a slog, I’m through to the coast of the Caribbean, I instantly find inspiration and set to work once again; and, oh how good it is to be back at work, with refreshed purpose and I’m productive as all fuck and the sea is my backyard and there are iguanas in the bedroom and a tortoise in the patio and the kitchen has no walls. We used to build those too – we called them summer kitchens. This is big. There are floodlights along the beach that come on just as the sun finishes setting every night and I try my best to be in the surf for every flick of that switch. I step into the florid saints,sequins and LED-lit bus where the schoolkids want to touch my tattoos and we bounce the whole acid trip way across a parched hilly countryside that hadn’t seen rain for 5 months blasting salsa and reggaetón straight into the City of the Red Night straight out of the book and markets, more kinds of fruit than I’ll ever be able to name. I receive a very unexpected email. I go to bed every night thinking about the old pier breaking into the sea, with the skeletal customs castle on one end. We visit the amazing warehouse down by the river where we’re staging an art show and I steady and ready myself as the moon slips backward into near-perfect alignment with the sun, at places in the sky where something very serious was happening that hot early morning of my birth.

Like Spain, I am bound to the past. Tomorrow, an eclipse of the moon.