Really, the Web is crawling with death. It is the Database of Death, Database as Death. It is masses and masses of stuff, and masses and masses of stuff, I'm saying, is what death in some sense is. Dumb, numb, and blind accumulation. Accumulation beyond count. Things. And isn't that

what death is: uncountable. Because anything touched by death is immediately emptied of content.

Though death itself is all content. And never as vague as I am, trying to talk about death. Because Death is nothing if not exact. And Death itself of course can count. Like a son of a bitch.

Death, that idiot savant.

Retablos, Ex-votos, Nichos, Amates, Ofrendas, Azulejos, , Papel Picado

Beautiful, moving, ugly and rustic, the religio-commercial folk art STUFF of Mexico. They honor, witness, minister, mock and explore. Mock the sinister and minister the soul. Mock the soul. Minister the sinister. Nicho,

Contemporary versions tend to include traditional images from the Mexican loteria (bingo game):  hand, bird, bottle, death. You might also see papier mache figurines: a wedding couple, for instance, side by side with grinning skeletons, themselves decked out in wedding garb—Day of the Dead calaveras, of course. In such arrangements the presence of calaveras, in typical fashion, wryly mocks the living. They lighten and leaven the inevitable end of all action, including love, including marriage, even as the living are hard at work on those very actions.

Meanwhile other nichos depict other kinds of scenes. "Anima solo," for example. Lone soul frying in purgatory.

My Nicho.

I'd like to take some of that yellow graph paper used in offices, and paste in hundreds of itsy bitsy icons.

If I put some tiny, symbolic object there, perhaps the pain inside of me will stop.

We have always needed some modest space—a table, a stone, a tin can flattened and bent into a box—to acknowledge the things which overwhelm us.

If I can just identify a few small meanings and place them there, and there. Like so. Then I will understand what is happening to me.

If I can move them around, make a number of arrangements.

If I can produce them in mass, if I can send out an ocean of these small, apologetic configurations…

Or how about COMPUTER SCREEN as nicho? The screen itself as the space for positioning devotional things. Place to keep track, to position and store, bind and arrange. Joseph Cornell meets the Virgin of Guadeloupe meets the silicon diode.

To arrange. To send out in mass.

To display. Bear witness. Erase and then bring back

the next morning or the following year.

Perhaps most of all to erase. Cut. Delete. Expunge.

In order to remake. Even our rituals must now be accelerated

to well beyond the yearly. We need to make and erase in megahertz.

If I could send out a cyberwave of shy, expendable configurations…

*

Dave, stop.
Stop, will you?
Stop, Dave.
I'm afraid.
I'm afraid, Dave.
Dave, my mind is going.
I can feel it.
I can feel it.
My mind is going.
There is no question about it.
I can feel it.
I can feel it.
I can feel it.

   *

Rustic Mexican Nicho I Found on the Web

Strange how the angel in this picture seems to hold the stage itself down with her staff, as though for maximum flight by the man. While the peasant-shirted farmer is lifting his arm, ready to elevate nearly, right out of his boots. Glazed look in his eye.   While his little white donkey, head jutting through the frame to the left, just wants to exit the stage. Just wants to get out of this particular scene. He’s looking pretty stressed, the donkey. He's looking angry and edgy. Wants to head out over the countryside, a lateral move, because there are no doubt additional worlds right here in this lonely world, and why not. Meanwhile, as I said, the angel just wants to stick. She's trying to locate the exact spot of ground from which one is saved from the ground, and the farmer man, of course, just want to rise clean away. Interestingly, no one in the scene has actually managed to leave, nor at the same time managed to stay, exactly. They are merely frozen in their various versions of leaning. Oh—I forgot the dove at the top of the scene, from which literal rays seem to be pouring. This white bird is utterly fixed on diving straight down, straight down from heaven of course, into the very skull of the man. And while the dove, like everyone else, is frozen in place, getting nowhere, it is her odd static energy perhaps which holds it all together. What with everyone inclining as they do, consider how easily it might all blow apart. She's the closest thing in the scene to being outside the scene. But I really can't tell for sure that she is.

And I could just as soon think that the rays coming down are nails driving into the man, fixing him fast between here and there. That his stunned expression means I don't know, or else I do but I have no way to say. No one else, neither animal nor angel, and despite how they lean, has quite the same look.

Dangerous and problematic these days to say that word "human," of course. Suggests of course some essential, general humanness independent of culture, race, gender—all the dirty, impolite and asymmetrical particulars of everyday ins and everyday outs.  But in the script we have before us, the straw-woven box with its powdery figures, concoctions of wheat paste and water that lean, really, only in relation to each other’s leaning, "human" appears to be on the bill.

Or maybe I should say "human man." Because the angel is indeed specifically female, and the man is clearly male. So yet another reading is that “female” is what fixes the floorboards in place so the male can depart. Or attempt to depart. The female is what administers the material ground from which spiritual salvation, or at least abstract reflection, or imagination, perhaps, is possible. Without the material there is no immaterial. Without a self there’s no freedom from self, and the other way around.

And still I wonder, after all, if it isn't the little donkey who's got things right. He's the horizontal part of the cross. The man reaches continually up to outside, while the woman keeps pointing down, down and in, into earth, into the body, where the outside in the form of a center is found. Or is thought to be found. While the little donkey just wants to live, I think, without breaking his back.

That little donkey is probably thinking:  you can use the word human, ok, but let's change it to "human idiotic."   Let’s change it to “human.” Meaning we know full well that even this old enlightenment word is itself idiotic by now, but we have no choice but to use it. Because, face it, we're still on the same old stage, even though we know it now a little bit better or a little bit differently. Because we're pretty much glued and wired and bolted in. The script itself so instructs. That's what the script itself says.

 

Retablos,     

I'm looking now at a pretty, antique retablo I found on the Web, God himself featured in the foreground. He's squeezed into a shiny gold chalice and pointing, I think, to his own halo. That's God for you. There's an itsy bitsy farmer in the distance, wondering, no doubt, what is going on, two angels hovering in-between earth and sky, and a single staring eye, of course. A gigantic eye suspended over everything, in what by now is pale, somewhat sickly blue space.

*

How shall we cherish the earth? What now is our ground? What marches of reason or flights of fancy?

*

*

Ex Voto

Something good happens, and the artist paints a little picture and writes a little narrative in gratitude to the saint believed responsible.

ex voto to st. john, my husband
ex voto to Ojai, my hometown
ex voto to poetry
ex voto to the mountains around my hometown
ex voto to ultimate mystery
ex voto to prozak
ex voto to jesus that time in the marble mountains
ex voto to sweet prairie wind on a summer night
ex voto to sweet prairie light at dusk
ex voto to the Sundance Channel
ex voto to books
ex voto to relief after five years since my mom
ex voto to john, since I can't ex voto him enough
ex voto to the internet
ex voto to hilarity
ex voto to hand lotion
ex voto to Christmas, though not anymore; it's just a big drag
I hope I will not be punished for this
I am not Catholic; I have no saints to thank

*

"I give infinite thanks to San Pascual, because the casserole of mole sauce did not fall on the boy and he wasn't burned. Maura Coyotzi. Puebla de los Angeles. 1918." This one is fake. Someone is out actually out there, mocking up these things. But you can buy the fake, labeled clearly "fake," on the Web.

La Catrina.

What's with this la catrina person, anyway? The "well-dressed woman" of the Mexican loteria. Her image on cards and trinkets, store windows, crucifixes. The woman who is out, outside, on the streets, getting around, being seen, her voluminous hat like a halo in molt.

Images of Frida are everywhere too, Frida of the obsessive self-stare. There's actually something called Kahloism.: Frida religion. Tongue-in-cheek, I'm sure, though we seem to need a mother cult regardless, however updated, revamped, and improvised: the Mona Lisa as Riot Gyrrl, Venus de Milo in custom prosthetic. Mother Mary herself slipping out at midnight to make it with the Baptist.

Somebody told me they weren't that crazy about Frida Kahlo's work, her narcissistic self-gazing, but I think it's something. In a culture where a woman is either utterly venerated or utterly erased, I would look at myself in the mirror for a long time too.

The immaculate mother of Christ on the one hand; boobs and a hole on the other.

I would stare into the mirror with astonished interest and disbelief too.

Or maybe just glare. Like Frida.

I would study the mirror to see what was there between everything and nothing.

*

 Oh my god, here she is posing on her own death bed. Candy skull with her name on its forehead no less. Frida said she didn't know she was a surrealist until the surrealists told her she was.

The picture above is a ceramic magnet I hang on my refrigerator.

*

I don't think la catrina especially relished her inherited role of divine and sexless governess of hearth and heart. I don't think she majored in Nurse of the Earth or Lactating Breast of the Planet. I didn't either.

But maybe mortal and horny caretaker of earth, hearth, and heart would work. Yes, that would be fine.

Somebody's got to.

Men should reinvent themselves in the new script too. If I can do it, odd entity that I am, anyone can, though I'm not saying I necessarily can. How different or similar to themselves should men try to be? How different or similar to women should they be? If we could just retwist—not straighten—this doubleness that seems to have twisted us up…

I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave.

But excuse me. I'm speaking here from the mind, solamente. Miserable bloody thorn.

*

"I drank to drown my pain, but the damned pain learned how to swim. . ." —Frida.

We can't outwrite the body. Right?

Talavera.

Two kinds of clay fired twice, glazes rich in minerals, they make bright surfaces on top of other surfaces. Each is painted with sometimes intricate patterns and then added to intricate patterns, and they are painted sometimes with figural pictures and then arranged sometimes into figural pictures. There is the picture too, of course, of the wall or building or floor or stairway which displays these pictures, and sometimes it all becomes a book, observed by someone observing herself in the act of reading the book. That the glaze itself is a kind of clay is hardly surprising. That distinctions between "same" and "different" are at once intensified and erased is hardly surprising. That with time their surfaces grow beautifully and valuably "crazed" and that people still make them and paint them by hand leaves me with a deep feeling of of course.

*

Miracle of the miniature symbol. Clipart. International road sign. Web emoticon. Hand signal. I'd like to cover a wall in milagros. Masses of the little suckers. Try to find at what point they no longer mean. If I collect enough, if I display enough. Will I know that they do truly mean— because, in such quantities, they will cease to? Indeed, after all, the miracles are overwhelming. They occur, have occurred, in boggling numbers since time began, they are everywhere at this instant, and they are real. And they have ceased. That is the great tragedy of the Information Age: inundation by the miraculous has murdered the miraculous.

(Sadness, terror, and misery, however, are still doing pretty well.)

Perhaps the appeal of such icons, for me, is that I hate and dread so much the power of ADVERTISING LOGOS AND SLOGANS. When watching mass-market movies these days, I spend a certain amount of my time just looking for product placement. Just looking to see where the fuckers got one in. Coke is It. Just Do It. I was mesmerized by the multi-hour Fed-Ex commercial, for instance, which the movie Cast Away was. I thought the ads would stop after Hanks' character got trapped on the island, but then Fed-Ex boxes started washing up on the beach. How ingenious, indeed, of Fed-Ex: a company dedicated to speed, need and acquisition heart attacks aligns itself with a film whose message is the ultimate futility and meaninglessness of time and possession. Now when we think "Fed Ex," we think the opposite of what Fed Ex is, and therefore we like it and buy it. Sweet Jesus.

*

What now is our ground? What marches or flights?

*

I would add to traditional milagros: the pill (prozac or birth control) and the bloody thorn (which I love and hate).

*

Driving to work, I realize my windshield is actually a screen. And later, walking to class, I realize my whole field of vision is a screen. I'm afraid.

*

I'm afraid that the body is only more writing. Writing can't outwrite writing. Trying to outbody the body only produces… more fleshtext. Flext. Fine. Let's stop trying. Let's concentrate instead on rewriting. Only problem is: we need something for starters. We need something to go on. And what if those basic materials—of culture, of history, of individual lives, of individual bodies—are less, maybe greatly less, than satisfactory?

Amates, devotional cloths.

Words as Stuff.

More.

I want to take photos of the Mexican food aisle at Moorhead CashWise. Crinkly packs of multi-colored candy and trinkets. Fruit drinks and cola in bottles. Big two-pound cans of the densely green, sometimes almost black, poblano chile pepper. Miracles, here in Minnesota.

I want to make a retablo of alternative, peacenik "soldiers": las soldaderas of the Revolution.

The Ojai Post Office. Something. I don't know what. Because its noontime bells were requiem to joy for any child on a ten-speed in July, circa 1973.

And I want to do something with middle-class white american kitsch. The beautiful, moving, ugly and rustic, religio-commercial folk art STUFF of america. The easter card; halloween and thanksgiving window and table art; the secular figurine; the empty obsessive icon: owl, cow, frog, mushroom, angel; the new age obsessive moon and sun, crystal, angel, yin-yang sign, katrina figure. And recent faux country style: fabrics, figurines, handicrafts both purely decorative and semi-functional. I'd like to do something with christmas cards, too. Something I send out to people routinely as a way to say hello, stay in touch, though I have reservations about coercive, expensive, and sometimes exhausting cultural rituals. Make my poems and graphics experiments mesh with the rituals I do choose to observe. How would I make some of the weird stuff I want to write or otherwise create accessible and enjoyable to my family and old friends? Be nice, be very very nice if one could MERGE energies that way.

A Nicho Dedicated to California Health Food: tiny vials of wheat grass juice. Thumb-sized baggies of sprouts. Miniature bin after bin of beans, seeds, and trail mix, assorted course-ground flours and legumes. Tiny replicas of fresh rotting organic carrots, lettuce, and apples that nobody buys. Candles and incense, loofa sponges on strings, salts and sandy milks for the bath. Lavender, to calm us all down.

I'm afraid.

What marches or flights?

*

Retablos depicting el corazon. A series of retablos on el corazon.

The heart in theory. Theorizing the heart.

The skull itself grins at the very idea.

*

Oh, corazon.

What ground?