#Homero Aridjis

[lillyli-74]

Nostalgia for the unspoken, omens of what will be said one day.

~ Homero Aridjis

[ma-pi-ma]

Ogni poesia fluisce (fugge).

Homero Aridjis, Vivere per vedere

[obsessioncollector]

It was almost physically impossible for me to say bad words; my tongue refused to pronounce them, and to do so seemed as violent an act as smashing a glass in someone's face. for it meant breaking an object at the same time as hurting a person, and soiling myself in the process. But the truth was, I had no talent for them and I'd forget the words as soon as I heard them or, better said, I'd bury them within my very depths as if they were slimy leviathans.

Homero Aridjis, The Child Poet, trans. Chloe Aridjis

[thebluesthour]

A trembling blessing is that which invisibly rains on your heart that which leaves on your breasts brilliant points of gold and blue that which has changed you into a long pure ray / of dawn.

Homero Aridjis (trans. Eliot Weinberger), Blue Spaces

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

U.S. Department of the Interior: On Saturday, October 14, most skywatchers in the U.S. will experience at least a partial eclipse. BUT, from the Oregon coast to the Texas Gulf Coast, where skies are clear, folks will see the full annular eclipse. Also known as the "ring of fire" eclipse, it occurs when the Moon passes between the Sun and Earth at its farthest point from our planet.

During an annular eclipse, it is never safe to look directly at the Sun without specialized eye protection designed for solar viewing. To capture this 2017 solar eclipse pictured below, the National Park Service photographer developed the image with two different exposures – one of the eclipsed Sun using a solar filter to protect the camera's sensor and photographer's eyes, while the other was unfiltered and captured the landscape below the Sun.

Photo: Patrick Myers / Great Sand D

[unes National Park and Preserve (2023)

* * * *

“Dawn is gathering. The noon of night has gone. The first gleams of daylight disclose its temperature. Stone takes on color. Treetops are roots of the day yet to grow. The moon, silver necklace from which Venus dangles like a pearl, still sheds its brightness. The abyss is only perspective, location. There will be nests on some branches.” — Homero Aridjis, from Persephone (Vintage, 1986)

[alive on all channels]

[andrescasciani]

“FRAGMENTARIA" - citas ilustradas por Andrés Casciani

(19/6/23)

“y todo aquello que los cuerpos forman

es en la sombra

un brillo solitario”.

(Homero Aridjis)

- Ilustración digital, 2023

[undinesea]

There are fruits that climb intensely toward the light that touches them and in the air they catch fire falling upward.

Homero Aridjis, from Eyes To See Otherwise. Tr. Kenneth Rexroth

[les-portes-du-sud]

Ô tournesol voyant,

ô graine jaune,

ton nom tient dans une syllabe, dit le poète.

Ô père des mythologies,

le rêve de la lumière produit des formes,

dit le peintre.

Si l’œil n’était pas solaire,

comment pourrait-il voir la lumière,

dit le poète.

Si la lumière n’était pas maîtresse de la couleur,

comment pourrait-elle peindre ses yeux,

dit le peintre.

[ ... ]

Homero Aridjis

[nsantand]

Homero Aridjis – Pela Porta Verde

e

Pela porta verde Para Eva Sofia Sou um indocumentado da eternidade.Sem papéis, ultrapassei as fronteiras do tempo.Detido pelos agentes de imigração do nascimentoe da morte, lancei-meao tabuleiro de xadrez dos dias.Fiscais astutos, em busca de lembranças valiosas,vasculharam minha bagagem de sombras.Nada a declarar. Nada a lamentar.Passei pela porta verde. Trad.: Nelson Santander Mais do que…

[sweatmeats]

a good image. From 'The Child Poet' by Homero Aridjis, translated by his daughter.

[spectaculardistractions]

To Homero Aridjis

[Mexico City, November 1982]

Dear friend, I’m putting into a few lines what I have already told you of my impressions on reading your book El último Adán. You can take out anything you don’t find useful:

Mankind will bring about the apocalypse, not God, that is in my view an absolute truth. This is the vast difference between the apocalyptic delirium of El último Adán and the mediocre description of the Apocalypse by Saint John. There is no doubt that human creativity has been enriched by the passing of the centuries.

The last Adam, his Eve already lost, wanders the ruined cities and barren fields in dense smoke under a dark sky, coming across groups of terrified humans with singed hair and eyebrows, blankly staring eyes and loosely hanging bellies. His progress is hampered by volcanoes erupting and clashing earth tremors, smoke, ash, skeletons, scattered human limbs and, above all, the fetid smell of putrefying flesh that I call ‘the sweet smell of eternity’.

Greek Homer’s ‘endlessly smiling sea’ has been extinguished, leaving only darkness and chaos.

To my mind, the constant and obsessive reiteration offers a powerful contribution to Aridjis’s narrative of delirious apocalypse, an alternative title for which might be: Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla.* [Day of wrath and doom impending / Heaven and earth in ashes ending]

Luis Buñuel

*I crossed out the bit about teste David cum sibylla [David's word with Sibyl's blending] because I think it’s stupid.

Jo Evans & Breixo Viejo, Luis Buñuel: A Life in Letters

[7r0773r]

Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence by Homero Aridjis, translated by George McWhirter

THE JAGUAR

              Tepeyollotli, heart of the mountain

1

That one who was the image of rain no longer leaves trails through the jungle, the gold discs of his eyes no longer blink brightly.

He isn't to be seen in the morning sun floating on a log down the Sacred Monkey River. His solar pelt is a rug.

The heart of the mountain no longer wears black-and-white markings on its chest nor does the volute, cloud of speech that names things scroll from his molten jaws.

His mute cry booms out my extinction.

2

Sad jaguar of the mythologies who on devouring the sun devoured himself, who on turning into the devouring Earth devoured his own shadow in the night sky.

Orphan god of the Underworld who, on following in the tracks of man, was tricked by his masks and fell into his snares.

Poor jaguar of the resplendent, in his skin he carried death.

3

Before words when, in the bowels of the night, there was neither fowl nor tree nor fish nor river nor sun in the night sky, the jaguar meowed.

4

The jaguar that went away is on its way,

the jaguar that came back still hasn't come

the jaguar of we two within you watches me from outside

5

Our bodies two solar jaguars faced off in the night will end clawed up in the total dawn

***

THE WHITE CAT OF EARLY MORNING

                                             For Chloe, Eva, and a cat called Benita

Alone in the solitude of the living room the white cat of the first light sought me out among the pieces of furniture slip-covered in green cloth. Her eyes, used to sizing up the immensurable shapes of the night, explored the corners in the house as if no one, nothing, were there.

“Where has that one, who knew my name, gone? Where has that one, who slept beside me, got to? Who will open the closed door of the early-mornings for me, to let me sleep our cold every-morning sleep in bed?” she appeared to say to herself standing at the top of the stair, reminding me, always, with her face that would fit into a hand, that God created a cat so man might have the pleasure of stroking the tiger.

No longer does anyone give her the water of shadows to drink. No hand lifts her in the long nothing-to-do day. Left abandoned, one nightfall, in a shoebox on our doorstep, a little girl took her in. Since then, looking at us with unfathomable, disobedient, disdainful, almost ungrateful eyes, held close, she held herself distant; believing her ours, we never did know her.

***

GARDEN OF GHOSTS

                                                            For Mama Josefina

1

The pear tree with its pears isn’t aware it’s a ghost. Geraniums, roses, bougainvillea, trailing over the ground in a lapsed splendor of purple petals, are unaware of their own absence.

All are gone. The women visiting, the rains, the goldfinches, dogs, the creaking of doors, the voices, gone, and you alone, my invisible mothers, are here.

2

Birds drawn on the blue notebook of the mountain, childhood angels drowned in a basin among the dried-up flowers of memory, age-old mythologies scaling the walls down which redknee spiders crawl, transparent bodies in the passageways that come upon us like a wind to lead the way to buried treasures, namelss creatures that spy on us through cracks in rickety doors that only the air moves, pale figures, attempting to take shape on the mountain when the sun has gone in are aspects of me, quivering with unreality on the hill of gold.

3

Along the cobbled street ran the little girl, Josefina, dressed in percale and shadow

a bandit had come into town by way of the graveyard to steal women and was reaching arms out to lift her up-and-onto his black horse

through the street she ran, terrified, the small shadow with big eyes who would one day be my mother.

4

I was not aware that flowers may be the ghosts of their own morning and spook a boy who searches for his reflection in the misted-over mirror of his empty room.

I wasn't aware that the flicker cast ahead of his steps is like the whip of shadows left behind by an unremembered relative on the floor tiles.

And that my deaf aunt with the white braids, so like La Llorona,* who bathed me under the setting sun, went about rapping on doors in the air.

Come, digger of graves from my childhood, come and play in my garden of ghosts, the game of love and death.

*La Llorona is a wailing ghost roaming the earth in search of her children, whom she drowned.

***

BORGES IN FRONT OF THE MIRROR

The hotel in Morelia had a great mirror. Acquired along with a wardrobe in an antique shop, the mirror was priceless. A young woman opened the door to the room, set his suitcase on the floor, and went out. Borges said nothing. He remained seated, dozing beside the open window. The garden smelled of roses. After a few minutes, the blind author rose from the chair and brought his face to the mirror without seeing himself. Then, he ran his hand over the flat pane and felt the cold looking glass. Then, returned to the chair.

***

CODA

at the hour of his death they say Turner began to mix pure colors with solar rays

he dreamed tender yellows cobalt blues and angels standing at the edge of a cloud

with that amalgam of animated shadows and warm colors they say he made what lies beyond close by and the distant visible

***

WITH CORRUPTION

                They have brought whores for Eleusis                 Corpses are set to banquet                                 - Ezra Pound, Canto XLV

They built houses for the poor with corruption, painted fake heavens over the church altars, wrote lies on elementary school blackboards, marked their face with the sign of the beast avarice, passed on the rapaciousness of their fathers to their children, with corruption they plundered the lands of their ancestors, fouled the waters for their descendants, cut down the tree of life and through the roots of the mother ceiba, disfigured the effigies of their primordial beings, their millionaires made millions of the poor, they sold their daughters into the sex markets, and turned borders into venal territories, converted the country into a hellfire of death, with corruption they sold the Virgin's pearls,  sat harlots at the altar of their gods, brought criminals along to banquet with their judges and sent hucksters into the House of Song.

***

INSOMNIA

It all began with the images I was afraid to lose on closing my eyes that might not be there on opening them.

It all went on with the bolting night- mares that ran through the streets knocking down doors and walls.

It all kept up with the chimeras, awakened under the black moons flowing along the river of poetry.

It all took place in the night within me, in prenatal time, in the workshops of the resurrection, when I was prone to blackouts of conscience.

It all began before I was born, in the world of the contingent beings, when we are exposed to thirst and being orphaned.

It all began with the long insomnia of the infinite inside of us, which dogs us to the grave.

***

FOR BETTY, AN AUTUMNAL POEM OF LOVE (excerpt)

I don't love you for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you.

***

THE CREATION OF THE WORLD BY THE ANIMALS

                                                         (according to the Popol Vuh)

Across an empty darkness, across unmoving sky, flashed scarlet macaw— so day broke; and yellow orioles with turquoise eyes began dancing a solo of light

and within a mighty ceiba tree, the “mother of birds,” appeared a skinny spider monkey his privates dangling—and howler monkey, scriving prophesies on the mirror of dawn, and a lunar owl, perched on death's arm.

Caiman lurked on a river bank, his back marked with celestial stripes, and sharp-fanged jaguar pursued the fleeing deer; and eagle, aloft on clear wings, spied the horizon— and all was a feathered dream: yellow and green.

Then figured from water, clay, and wood, came woman and man: offspring of the sun, children of forest and mountain, with their eyes they could behold themselves, their voices named the animals.

Heart of the Sky, Heart of the Sea Heart of the Earth beat as one, and all the winged creatures, creatures of the waters and the land could be, breathe, love, and cast shade. And life is re-created every day.

***

SELF-PORTRAIT IN THE ZONE OF SILENCE (excerpt)

At the foot of life and death's double pyramid, the god Quetzalcoatl offered flowers and butterflies to his followers in place of human flesh.

And amid such splendor, only the sadness was mine.

[obsessioncollector]

There are moments in your destiny when years are compressed into days, and days into hours, by the intensity with which events transform your life, events almost able to erase a past, and if not to erase it, then at least to shut it off from yourself, erecting a wall that separates the days of your childhood from the days of your adolescence, as if those days had been lived by two separate people, not by one person at two different ages. To build a bridge between the two, to pass from the adolescent to the traumatized child, to know that they are one and the same, to find that only one who was and who is; that has, to a large extent, been the purpose of this narrative.

Homero Aridjis, The Child Poet, trans. Chloe Aridjis

[kuiama]

Homero Aridjis

[shy-girl04]

10

Today is yesterday and tomorrow is another place.

Nothing's farther away, nor nearer

than your being here.

Homero Aridjis

From Poems for an insomniac, Translated by George McWhirter

[me-soltanto-me]

So cosa pensi di me perché gli occhi ti frugano dentro e trattieni sulle labbra un sorriso che sanguina Ma sei lontana e quello che pensi non può penetrarmi ti grido Vieni, apri in due la mia solitudine e muovi in essa il tuo canto fai girare questo mondo fermo .Ti dico Vieni, fammi rinascere sulla terra.

Homero Aridjis

I know what you think of me because your eyes rummag inside you and you hold a bleeding smile on your lips But you are far away and what you think can't penetrate me I shout to you Come, open my loneliness in two and move your song in it make this still world turn. I tell you Come, let me be reborn on earth.

Vieni ...

Come ...