To think about this invitation and action, I wrote down dreams that I experienced in my relationship with the obsidian stone, sleeping with it. Perhaps it was the beginning of a journey to rethink time itself, with its linear limits and its dilation, suggesting another way to align myself with life and death, a way that allows existence in transmutation. When I began to relate to obsidian, I was another person, other matter. I had just returned from Mexico, and right there, on the path between the two pyramids, the Sun and the Moon, which they call Calle de los Muertos, near an obsidian mine, because it is very close to volcanoes, I heard a person offering me a black mirror. I had no money to buy the mirror, even though I felt an immense force when I touched it. The person called after me again, offering the mirror for a lower price, and I gave him all the pesos I had to buy it. When I returned home, I cleaned the mirror and positioned it as the person who sold it to me instructed: place the mirror on my eyes and look at the sun or moon. Seeing the sun through the volcanic glass was like entering a space-time fissure. The sun did not burn my eyes. I intuitively got closer to the mirror as if we couldn’t stay away but I also understood that if I got too close, it would irreversibly transform me.
One moonless night I slept with the obsidian mirror beside me. I physically felt in my lower abdomen a pain that burned me. It was as if I had a sun inside me, it was a portal. That’s when I began to feel the vibration of events, the sound of invisible beings. That was when I understood that time did not exist.
33 I walk on the edge of a volcano. I don’t know when I am. My legs are shaking from the warmth of the mouth of the earth, I try to walk faster to escape the heat. There are kilometers in diameter, that lava swallowed entire cities. I walk along the edge of a volcano and look into the fire: My eyes are consumed by lava. I open my eyes and I am holding an obsidian stone in my lower abdomen. My hands are burned.
Imagine that there is no maximum speed that can be measured. In this case, any visual phenomenon could act with infinite speed and, as a consequence, a body could suddenly disappear or be replaced by another. In transition, my body takes other forms, through the chemical injections of testosterone but also through the possibility of mutation related to the experience of trauma.
0 My ear blows the voices of the ghosts that are trapped in this soil, in the form of vibrations. Little by little, I prepare myself to be other matter, by colliding with other bodies.
This writing and sound process experiments with vibrations as language, and also as matter. As an attempt to translate a spiritual and also temporal experience, a communication with the invisible, oracles are brought in the text as tarot cards, dream encounters, time-space travels, and mainly as an intimate process of listening that goes from the intuition itself as a guide, to the observation of the stars and telluric matter, such as the obsidian stone. An invitation to read from a non-linear temporality, as quantum physics proposes, or as Leda Maria Martins proposes in her book Performances in Spiral Time,[1] or as our dreams manifest themselves. Thus, without the information that time exists, we are infinite because we are the earth, the fire, the water, the air. We are transmutation.
21
Points in space-time are called events and are defined by four numbers, for example, (x, y, z, c), where c is the speed of light and can be thought of as the speed an observer moves in time. That is, events separated in time by only 1 second are 300,000 km from each other in space-time. The very aspect that changed my body was the trauma. Experiencing a traumatic event or multiple events modifies our body’s electrical capacity for reading time. Processing these events allows your cognition to rehearse towards the transmutation of the trauma: Time dilation
18
C: I dreamed again that I was at the mouth of the volcano H: I slept again with the obsidian C: You were at the mouth of the volcano, but I couldn't see you H: If a body moved at the speed of light, it would be infinite. Time as we know it in its Western form exists only because we are at a certain speed. If the speed reaches its extreme point, that is, the speed of light, we disappear. C: That was you at the mouth of the volcano H: If time is dilated, linearity deforms to the spiral point, which means that events happen at the same time, we just can't see beyond the speed of our own body. H: I’m everywhere, I’m a traveler.
1 FORTUNE WHEEL THE DEATH THE SUN NOOW ƎHꓕ[2]
22
After the first shot of hormones, a bit of my flesh aimed to be part of something. Because of the unpredictability of the data already inscribed in my body and fluids, my flesh turned into a cover to enable the others to access my materiality. But I saw the other beings in transition, humans and non humans and like the stars, we could recognize each other by the colors of our frequencies Redshift Blueshift[3] I was moving towards them At the speed of light.
23
When the body reaches the speed of light, it functions like a magnet. The fundamental attraction of this speed provokes other bodies to collide into mine.
0
At that time I started to feel the vibration of the events Timeless As if I was with my ear glued in a seashell, as if I was underwater or inside the soil.
33
C: Each body is a portal. We are time itself and the earth. C: Obsidian stone is a black glass formed from cooling incandescent lava from the center of the earth. Fire is the ethereal state of memory.
24 Our bodies collided. We have never been individuals. I was moving toward us
25
My body is an active coral reef A shoal of flying fishes A submarine cable encased in plastic with countless small crystals A communion of braided trees The 178 animals embedded in the whale's skin The proliferation of fungi on the soil and their inevitable explosion
0
I move at the most extreme speed. Dragging other beings Transfiguring my face My sex My body is shaped like a noise With a thousand ghost voices And the ghost that I will be I move at the most extreme speed Moving towards you Moving towards us
33
C: I long to see you To touch you To love you Forever
Ritual Invitation
Between a waning and a new moon, Let an obsidian stone sleep under the moon (For a few hours, without letting the sunlight come in contact with it) On the same night, light a candle Hold the obsidian stone Look at it with open eyes Observe its details Until you are able to visualize it with closed eyes Let the thoughts come From today's day To the day you were born
Lie down to sleep Place the obsidian stone on a part of your body Sleep with it After spending the night with the stone Write your dreams Burn a leaf of sage to clean your thoughts Cook yourself some green vegetables Or a green juice And go to the sun. Taking a sunbath after eating green, Or drinking green Makes our body enter in photosynthesis process Transmuting the wounds that could submerge After sleeping with the obsidian Store the obsidian in a dark place
This text and ritual actions were created in response to the following sentences of the text Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness:
Endnotes
[1] https://hemi.nyu.edu/eng/seminar/usa/text/leda_paper.html
[2] Tarot cards and their aspects: Fortune wheel: The inside and outside, the eternal whirl of life and its events. Inside is the essence and outside the happening. Change, birth, and death. Instinct. | The Death: Transmutation | The Sun: Consciousness | The Moon: An unconscious desert; mediunity.
[3] In physics, a redshift is an increase in the wavelength, and corresponding decrease in the frequency and photon energy, of electromagnetic radiation (such as light). The opposite change, a decrease in wavelength and simultaneous increase in frequency and energy, is known as a negative redshift, or blueshift. The terms derive from the colors red and blue which form the extremes of the visible light spectrum.
