35x around the sun (moon over l.a. river, electrical wiring, dec. 2006)

—in the background, the eye gone now, but the vision still in place, the river, the site, and from several hundred miles away, we exchange something in the middle of the night, the middle of a dream, my mother and I sitting on the bank of this stream—

You were born on the second day of Aquarius, January 21st, in the Year of the Rat, in the early afternoon. This is why you have always been a night person, mañoso, travieso, a survivor, crawling through the gaps in the dark parts of the night con tus movidas, antagonistic, sneaky, grabbing what you can, stirring shit up. Worshipping the moon. Your whole life, you have always stayed up through the night, and woken up around noon. Even when you were a baby, I never slept through the night. I can remember rocking you, singing to you, trying everything to get you to fall asleep while you embraced the darkness as your home, begging you to fall asleep because your father would get so angry, and meanwhile, some 4,300 years ago, Sargon I of Akkad inaugurated the age of the conquering armies, the contending mythologies, in southern Iraq. The age of sons. Your lifetime is a pivot between these two ages, you see, and that’s why you are torn, you can fall either way, any moment, you are always cutting yourself on the razor between, harmony/violence, ideology/love, rigidity/fluidity, and this one ends where it began, in Iraq, this age of death, this age of men. And a new age begins, mythologies dissolve like paper on the surface of a patient stream, and nobody knows anymore where to stand, nobody knows to sink or swim—


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"In the context of these symbolic assignments, the cycle of a single lunar month has been compared, by analogy, to the term of a human lifetime, with the fifteenth night, which is of the moon become full, equated with the human adult's thirty-fifth year (in the reckoning of three-score years and ten as the human norm). On that very special evening there is a moment when the rising moon, having just emerged on the horizon, is directly faced across the world, from the opposite horizon, by the setting sun. Certain months of the year and the two, at this perfectly balanced moment, are of equal light and the same size. By analogy, the confrontation has been likened to that in the midmoment of a lifetime when the light of consciousness reflected in the mind may be recognized, either suddenly or gradually, as identical with that typified metaphorically as of the sun. Whereupon, if the witness is prepared, there ensues a transfer of self-identification from the temporal, reflecting body to the sunlike, eviternal source, and one then knows oneself as consubstantial with what is of no time or place but universal and beyond death, yet incarnate in all beings everywhere and forever..."
—The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor As Myth and As Religion, Joseph Campbell

"When I perform, it's very personal. I'm sharing things I like, inviting the audience into my room."
—Andy Kaufman (1949–1984)


"U are either one day older or wisdom is growing shaping you further today happy living day"
—Cellular telephone text message, 21 January 2007, Luís A. Vega