A golden dawn, searching for the ouroboros, the re-assurance of a returning circle, where day is followed by night and day and night again; supermoons shine, wane and new moons wax, tidal reminders of months; seasons that bring a bouncy spring green, winter frost, an autumnal harvest, a hot night avoiding summery mosquitos who nibble on flesh regardless, ensuring cyclical reproduction.
Cut to a hot sinking sun, spritz Aperols and wheels of pizza with philosophers, artists, and monster-lovers on the graffiti-ed streets of San Lorenzo, Roma. We discover we were at the Posthuman Summer School, pre-Covid days. We weren’t known to each other then. Looking for our faces in the 2019 group photo of over a hundred people we see we are standing and sitting within inches of each other. Chiarina, an artist, descendant of the shaman Monkey King, tells me this is yuan fen, the hidden threads of the flow of life, and so our shared meal feels fated, a pre-destined circle of cyclical meeting. We are here together, gyro-scoping through philosophy into Italia, Roma.
In the high-sky heat, alighting from a bus, a stranger presses himself against my bag, violence in his eyes. I feel that something has happened and discover my phone has gone. An abrupt twist. A tale going into a wyvern’s mouth. A phone, a camera, photos, memories, apps, maps, slipping away. I head towards the circular Colosseum and stroll down to Saint Clement Basilica to see the lasagna, the layers of time, the mosaic-ed Basilica, ancient Mithraeum temple, first century Roman villa with bubbling spring. The man who sells the ticket to the excavated underground wears a Borromean knot tattooed on his arm. He explains that his family hark from a small place in Ireland, the design, a connection to his roots. I share that I have Irish ancestry too and glimpse a tattoo on the inside of his arm, and there it is, the ouroboros. Layers of body, mind and spirit, human, interconnect within layers of buildings, nonhuman. I tell him that I love the ouroboros, and he smiles, and I smile, and we are beaming into our shared smiles, threads of yuan fen. In his eyes, I sense that once our ancestors met within inches of each other, that he is me and I am him.
We are here and now, a terrible joy, the snake’s fangs about to sink into its own tail, so close we can smell the venom: a river flows with H2O, plastic, weeds grown large from fertilizer, children of war zones, a melting glacier, digital waste, pike. Imagine how it will feel under an unrelenting sun, a rising sea. The future presses down upon the present, an unbearable weight on a beating heart. A pendulum swings through Aion time. A phoenix moment? Breathe, for life is nothing if it is not a series of inhalations and exhalations; a present hopepunk moment of becoming in the liminality of ceasing to be as we enter the palpable not yet.
Beautiful