You May Visit the Cosmos but You May Not Speak of It (or on the Tackiness of Elegy).

origin: No soul could have spoken of the universe’s origin since no one could have existed to witness it. Origin is ellipsis. We believe the universe began, because we exist and because we can hear the sounds of its origin. Activating radio telescopes, gazing at the far corners of existence so dark and distant that the mewling universe can still be heard and seen cooling in cosmic antiquity, we hear. We hear the origin’s cold weak light journey to us. From our center, we can see nothing beyond the cosmic background radiation’s feeble crackle. Beyond this dark margin, we can hear no more origin. We have run out of the sound of the past. We have used up all our past we may know. Beyond this past, there is only the silence that marks the edge of the infinite. When we deploy a fantasy such as “The West,” what we often mean is specifically that transatlantic network of capitalism that formed our experience of modernity, the economic system that catalyzed the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the British and American orders. The West in this sense possessed its own Big Bang, its own founding from sublime trauma: the expropriation of land from those who lived in the New World and the expropriation of body and labor from those who lived on the African west coast, and the plunder that laid waste to peoples and nations of three continents. And here are also sublime silences. The silent images of the Aztecs’ death, which José Rabasa shows were painted by an artist asked to document their own world’s demise by the Spanish. The silence of the encomienda, blazing silence of Diego de Landa, crackling light of Maya codices and icons arsoned and non-silence of confessions, screams elicited from those he hoisted into air by their wrists and he pelted hot wax at them and he lashed their bodies with whips and they grew non-silent and then silent. And so a continent bared for those moaning boats that stole across ocean stole people across continent crammed in dark belly of ships, these captured people of many tongues who could not speak to each other and who we struck in the lungs with death by drowning people who we abducted to our country people we commanded not to read or write or speak. Such events suggest other silences: first, the silence against appropriation (How can one speak of a suffering that is not one’s own, a suffering whose responsibility one might also own?) and second, the silence of sublime inadequacy (How can one write poetry after the killing of three continents?). One can lodge many answers to these questions, the first of them being

 

moratorium: When early evening came, the Stars descended into the parking lot of the 7-11 where they held congress and declared embargo on speaking of the dead. And dawn came and what we had said about him became sky-silent.


dark matter: Because my father had died into an object, I fled my work, my friends, my art, New York. I fled my life so I could also become object. Youmna followed, but these memories are fictional (performance) and so we will drape her with a white cloth. Having fled my life, I am sitting on my bed, operating this memory indoors, underground, in basements, in locked bedrooms, in any indoor container that might further package me away from the fact and still did they pursue, still did they strike the darting arrows of the Death Star, that black radiance of leeches that flung itself down from the hot surfaces of the griefsun. The famishing lines tracked me inside, tracked me around corners, lassoing me into the air. “Where does this black sun come from?” Julia Kristeva asked. “Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?” And this is when Youmna lifted the sheet that had been cast over my body. “Why did you cover yourself like this, like an object at the morgue? What were you thinking?”

I said, “I thought what I had covered was the world.”


the unsayable: One of the traditional paradoxes of the dead is how they do not emit information. Because the dead do not emit light, which cannot escape the event horizon of the deceased, they can only be detected by the symptoms they leave on the surrounding matter, the haloed matter burning at their corona, the white marks scarring the X-rays. A person can survive within the dead once it has gravitationally collapsed. This happens for only a second from the observer’s eye, but, because of gravitational time dilation, grief 
occurs a nearly infinitely long time for the person who chooses to live inside the dead.


tlacuilo, graphic novelist at the world’s end: In those California days after my dad died, I felt the life began to seep out of me into the ground and so I brought my sneakers to the cobbler for resoling, which strangely enough did not mitigate my newfound grief. Sometimes I would find myself gazing out the window at the garden my mom cultivated behind her house, often while performing an Edwardian pose of wan melancholy, and as I approached, the glass would immediately darken as though saturated with an egglike blue shadow. (I later realized this shadow was caused by my head blocking the lamplight and decided to simply lean back.) I found myself stricken with headaches for some reason when I neglected to eat for days. I began laying my head on the carpet as though listening for footsteps, which I did often in those days, perhaps I believed the sun would itself walk inside and incite me, when I saw a woman in my mother’s backyard. I did not recognize her.

She crouched on the ground holding what I thought was a knife. 
I thought I saw her carving the earth into sections. As I came closer, 
I saw that what she grasped in her hand was a quill, though she held it with such authority that she looked as though she held the earth by its handle. All the cracks that scrawled between the grass—I saw that these were not cracks. They were sketches. And what a strange thing, looking back on it, how I never wondered what this woman was doing in my mother’s backyard. She glanced up at me as I approached and said, “Everyone I know is dead. I am also dead, but someone must stay behind and document my death. I am the only archivist, so I remain suspended between death and history.”

I realized what was occurring and asked, selfishly, “So it’s possible to talk to someone who is dead?”

“You do it all the time. It’s like what Youmna told you to write into your eulogy.”

“Yeah, okay.” I paused. “But he never remembers to talk back to me.”

She took out two cubes, possibly carved from bone, and threw them at my feet. “What’s that for?” I kneeled closer to her. “Is this fortune telling?”

“It’s your stats and hit points.”

I laughed. “You’re sending me into a dungeon?”

“No,” she said. “You are going on a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage to hell.”


initiation: To prepare for your descent (for there was no question of which direction you would eventually end up), you began your initiation into three domains of sorcery: the silent vows of grief; the generative magics obtained through meditation upon the colonial archive; and apprenticeship into all manner of low-level 
magics, including wonder-making, liberating demons, clairvoyance of the past, fierce activities, special jumping abilities, control over the three worlds, abridgment of one’s own lifespan through nicotine inhalation, research methods, the augmentation of merit and pleasure by generating poetry using your body, red optic blasts, melancholy of the spleen, a frequent customer stamp card for Woorijip Korean deli. Your first prophesied guru was the Tlacuilo, the woman historian who had ventured to the underworld by standing witness at the end of the Mexica and the cosmogony of the New World. She had painted omens of the future that now served you as diagrams of the past: the two-headed man who presented his body to Moctezuma, the comet whose banner waved across the sky and heralded the origin of the next kingdom, and the pale ghosts in steel skins who came as gods and guests, the ghosts who at the Festival of  Toxcatl came to kill us. One of them sawed off a man’s head, another speared the eye of a warrior who was betrothed to your sister. The Tlacuilo led you to the black lake that Mexico City had become. You did not know if you were in a fantasy or the past. You were in a fantasy and the past. Small skiffs wobbled by, as did wounded bodies that dyed the waters red. Surrounded by corpses levitating upon the waters, she taught you the first sorcery, that of death’s erasure. She cut off the hole of your mouth so you could say nothing, nothing commensurate with death, nothing can be commensurate to that dark infinity, and so you lost no breaths and so you followed her from the shores (sores) and the waterline slowly became the horizon line of the sky and you could breathe. White fish flew by, gliding without effort. You looked one in the eye and it sucked its cow lips silently at you. She said that this was Atlantis or one of many Atlantises and you saw yourself walking beside her on a road towards an underwater city that you could see only as a speck in the far distance. You tripped on the body of a dead man, seemingly Chinese, his body weighed down with rock-filled bags. The Tlacuilo, who by this time walked far in front of you, came back and told you this man’s name but asked you to stay silent. She led you about a mile further down the road towards the first station set aside for pilgrims such as yourself. Here she transmitted another teaching. There will also be other ages after this one, she said. Other suns will rise and fall. I will instruct you towards the attainment of a new title: The Cowerer from the Sun. She taught you how to crawl on the seabed, a weeping hog crawling on hands and knees. My final teaching is this: Go in fear of the sun. Having said this, she set her own body down in a fetal position and waited for the seaweed to smother her.


liberating the sun demon spell:

Moneyed sun of vampiric Western powers

Poor souls, they perished.
Had I been any god of power, I would
Have sunk the sea within the earth

Engraving by Gustave Doré for the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri.

influence: If influence spoken by Spenser portends the star’s fateful persuasion, flowing and fluctuating, does influenza mean the disease of fate?

the stars: Migrant to death’s second nation, Dante / emerges into the purging state and gazes up / at a supernal cross: four stars joyous, / isomorphs to the four cardinal virtues. “Dante is no bookkeeper of the literal ... [The] constellations are best taken as allegorical.” Although one of the largest star radii observed belongs to the glowering red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris, that terrible and sublime throne whose dominion could swallow our own sun nine billion times, poor yellow pebble celestial, and whose own death slain by nova during that final day shall illumine our infinite interior caverns of night — we might also regard Canis Majoris’s gigantism as hypothetical: though massive, this hypergiant is a thousand times more diffuse than air. The size of this terrorful star depends on what words we wield to define its stellar radius (e.g., whether by density or optical-depth). You can shrink the most sublime of stars using only your language. Vaporware star, luminosity leached of borders, you are all fictions.

human song: Perhaps it is the case that you never get over things. You decide you will no longer engage with them. You answer with 
silence until you are reminded once again of the wound and requested 
to be human.