Achuar Victory! A Dream Come True Is An Awakening

"We have fought long and hard against Talisman. Now we've achieved this, but it doesn't end here. We have to remain awake." Achuar (FENAP) President Peas Peas Ayui

See the Amazon Watch report 

Proof: international networks of civil society and allied global citizenry make unprecedented change in the policies of big business and government. 

See my past posts on the Achuar struggle (Here & Here & Here), and we must remain aligned!

__________

An acquaintance, a young African-Canadian woman, confident and jovial, meets with me on literary terms, to edit a short story of mine. The story is in its very beginning stages of development, only a few phrases and scattered ideas. She is diligent, and always supportive. As I begin to tell her the story, I penetrate the image-letters and enter into the mystery of its narrative continuity, to explore experientially.

The concrete walls, unfinished, breathe with shadow. A well-known author sits in a dim corner, incommunicative. He is deep in listening, with headphones on to gather the soundscape of the strange, even horrifying darkness surrounding. Then, I notice his subject, a grumbling bunch of ruffians thirsting in the mud of Mexican pain. They secrete primal sounds from unlit depths below, before trailing off into the endless night. In that moment, the famed author saunters off with recording equipment in hand, leaving me to the bare depths, an empty memory.

I bleed on through the folds, with pain-stricken mind, searching through memory, confronted with a hollow mixture of painted nostalgias. A university campus, brimming with beer gush fads and costumed throwbacks to the glorious sexual revolution of their parents, now filling their pockets with the fool’s gold of American savagery. As I wander through the woods, the clouds gather above, warning of a rainstorm.

On the forest path, exiting from the campus, a friend and I are spotted by a group of peaceful youth, with meditative eyes and friendly sight. One remarks on my shirt, a gift from Israel. Soon, I find he is from Israel. He asks me, “Why is it that Americans never emerge from the forest?” I understand his referring to the colonial history. I empathize with his heart, worn from the break of political waves crashing in mid-sea. The Mediterranean harbors of our once shared ancestral home are now given speed to the sacrificial meaning of e-state.

We clamber on, my friend, an Aboriginal man, and I, as he critically rethinks the statement by the Israeli, “Haifa is a place not unlike Halifax? A seaport, where you fly from America without heed to the other?” We walk on into the city, through art galleries, attendants offer free espressos and truffles, through the museums of old travesty, and in an off-white room, sightless without a spot of focal interest, we separate.

__________

your eyes crack open
with subtle wanting
in the cold

drop

mourning

...

with the unforgiving pull,
a soft whirr from the sky's clear vacuum
exhaling
the rusty kisses of lips gone stale
with a life
lived too long

- excerpt from "Morning Dew"

Vegetative Spiritual Union between European and American Culinary Culture

The Marriage at Cana by Paolo Veronese

In any moment, winter changes into summer and back again. I am endless fields; they seem to be wheat fields. We are vegetarian spirits, and there are women dressed as Hindus in traditional clothing, singing while playing traditional instruments. 

On the horizon, summer changes to winter as cloud formations leave a hilltop covered in white flurries, a cross though somehow between cloud and snow, a wispy frozen mansion sits atop a hill where a youth in winter clothes plays with a white furry dog almost twice his size. And then suddenly, we are in what seems to be the mansion, dining at a long table set for about twenty to thirty people. 

The people are a mix between Scandinavian and Mexican. We are given a menu, on it there are choices of many different breads, breads with different names, Russian and Nordic names as far as I can tell, the breads are seasoned and sweetened. I choose two, yet can’t pronounce the second, so a kind fellow from across the table tells me he can lend me his dish which is the same to try it, it’s delicious, a cinnamon sugar-type braided bread, and then he calls for one in the right tongue for the new wife and new son. 

Then, a man to my right calls attention to the table. He wishes to make a toast, though a toast in the booming of his voice stretching over the table to all ears. 

He speaks in a Scandinavian tongue first, saying "there is an old saying," and then he changes to Mexico, saying "in Veracruz, they say…” 

It seems a meaningful and comical touch to the dining pleasures of all, and we are somehow strengthened in the notion that we are eating from the land, a 15^th century delicacy for the educated and mindful, who in central Europe begin to adopt new habits in eating that leave behind the rabble pouring over scraps of pig stomach and chicken bones. It is part of a revolution that cultivates self-dependency, health, and communal celebration in the joy of a diverse humanity.

July 5, 2011