Otherworlds Review #5: Calendars

Sun in Capricorn, Full Moon in Cancer, Saturn in Capricorn

Issue 5, January 2018

The consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is peculiar to the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action. The Great Revolution introduced a new calendar. The day on which the calendar started functioned as a historical time-lapse camera. And it is fundamentally the same day which, in the shape of holidays and memorials, always returns. The calendar does not therefore count time like clocks. They are monuments of a historical awareness, of which there has not seemed to be the slightest trace for a hundred years. Yet in the July Revolution an incident took place which did justice to this consciousness. During the evening of the first skirmishes, it turned out that the clock-towers were shot at independently and simultaneously in several places in Paris. An eyewitness who may have owed his inspiration to the rhyme wrote at that moment:

Who would’ve thought! As though
Angered by time’s way
The new Joshuas
Beneath each tower, they say
Fired at the dials
To stop the day.

– Walter Benjamin

“Even as apocalyptic civil wars and climate disasters ravage the face of the earth, the capitalist class seeks to escape earthly and human limitations by turning dystopian science fiction into reality.”

2018 begins with a full moon on New Year’s Day, with an overlap of two cosmic cycles: the lunar cycle at its point of greatest fulfillment, the solar cycle at its very beginning. In orthodox Maitreyan Buddhism, the Maitreya comes at the apex of a golden age far off in the future. But certain heretics in China turned this idea on its head and declared that the Maitreya would come when things were at their worst (i.e. right now) and unleashed a storm of insurrectionary violence against the State and the clergy. If the revolution is the messiah, we are faced with the same question of when it will come: at a high point, a low point…or both, when two different cycles coincide.

Saturn, the astrological ruler of time and inescapable limitations and reality checks, has just entered its home sign of Capricorn, a sign associated with ruthlessness and material success. Capitalism is always in crisis, but thus far it has turned every crisis into an opportunity for further expansion and accumulation of wealth. Even as apocalyptic civil wars and climate disasters ravage the face of the earth, the capitalist class seeks to escape earthly and human limitations by turning dystopian science fiction into reality. In Canada, 42% of the workforce is at risk of losing their jobs to automation in the next 20 years. Techie scum have founded a church for the worship and proselytization of AI. Private corporations plot to subject the moon and Mars to the same sacrilegious mining that has desecrated and poisoned so much of the earth.

The future is terrifying, and the prospects for widespread liberatory social change are bleak. But every empire must eventually collapse, every hubristic fool who tries to forcibly climb up to the stars while still living must fall, men who seek immortality through machines are doomed to die. As the prophet Fredy Perlman wrote:

In ancient Anatolia people danced on the earth-covered ruins of the Hittite Leviathan and built their lodges with stones which contained the records of the vanished empire’s great deeds. The cycle has come round again. America is where Anatolia was. It is a place where human beings, just to stay alive, have to jump, to dance, and by dancing revive the rhythms, recover cyclical time.

The technological transhumanists and space-colonizers are enemies of the earth and the heavens alike, and despite their pretensions, they are human, all-too-human. But we are heirs to the true transhumanism, to the ancient traditions of animism and initiation, to spiritual technologies tens of thousands of years older than the aberration of so-called civilization. Animism connects us to all which is truly more-than-human, to the true worldwide web, to the spider-woven tapestry of relationships between the life force embodied in each and every animal, plant, rock, river, wind, forest, landscape, sea, star, and being in the world. Initiation promises us true immortality among the stars of the night sky below the daytime earth, among the stars whence we originally came, among the constellations of our beloved ancestors and blessed heroes.

Two irreconcilable worlds—one full of spirit and life, one lifeless but undead—are locked in battle for the heavens, for the earth, for the hearts and souls of the living and the dead alike. One world experiences and knows the ouroboros of eternal recurrence, the other believes in the impossibility of endless progress. As 2018 begins, it is not only the cycles of the moon and sun which collide, but the two worlds, the worlds of the calendar and the clock. Well into the Christian era, the Kalends of January was a day when both pagans and baptized Christians “deliberately transformed themselves into the state of wild beasts” by donning animal hides and men dressed as women, omens were observed, and feasts were laid out to bring prosperity for the coming year.

For this new year, then, a transformation, an omen, a feast. May Saturn’s sickle cut the throat of Leviathan for good, imposing a final limitation on the cancer before it metastasizes to other planets. May a new Luddism arise, a new Boxer Rebellion, to break the machines of the capitalist class and herald a new sacral sovereignty: “down with all kings but King Ludd,” wrote Byron. May the Angel of History at long last be granted a reprieve from the storm of progress and be allowed to “awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed.”

Merry crisis and a happy new fear; to 2018, an other planetary rotation within rotation. To 2018, the smoldering seed in the deep freeze, the rising tides, the accelerating apparatuses. To 2018, when visions immaterial congeal materially again. To seeing pieces of dreams in everyday life, to bridging the gap between ours and other worlds.

December 28, 2017

“Good morning, afternoons, nights, early mornings.
We want to thank those who attend, be it here in the CIDECI, or geography and calendar distance, to this second Meeting of Con- sciences for Humanity, whose central theme, it is supposed, is “the sciences facing the wall”.

We celebrate that you have decided to participate, either as speakers or as listeners and seers,
My name is SupGaleano and now I’m not going to talk about science, art, or politics, nor will I tell you a story.
Instead, I want to tell you about a crime and its possible analyzes or explanations.

And not just any crime, but a crime that breaks the calendars and redefines time; that amalgamates the criminal and the victim with the crime scene.

A crime, I say. But … A crime in progress? One already perpetrated? One for committing? And who is the victim? Who the criminal? What is the crime scene?

Maybe once, some, algunoa , you agree with me that crimes are already part of reality suffered in Mexico, and anywhere in the world.

Crimes of gender or feminicide , of homophobia, racist, labor, ideological, religious, by age, by appearance, by business, by omission, by color, and so on.

In short: a territory flooded with blood. So much, that the victims no longer have a name, they are just numbers, statistical indexes, interior or fill-in notes in the media. Even when the blood is of those who, like them, work as communicators,

Thousands of crimes with lowercase, that feed on a greater crime,

The aberration is so great that the mourners of the victims have to fight no longer for the lives of their absentees, but because they do not die twice: one of mortal death and the other of memory death.

Not to go far, in Mexico, it can be said that someone “died a natural death” when he is a victim of violence.
Every activity, every step, every moment of a once normal life, now takes place in uncertainty …

Will I arrive alive at work, at home, at school, the next day? Will you find my body? Will it be complete? Will they say that I provoked him and will hold me responsible for my absence? Will my neighbors have to fight to find me, to remind me? My family, my friends, the people who know me, who do not know me, will they dedicate a thought to my death, a tweet, a comment in a low voice, a tear? And then? Will they continue? Will they keep silence? How will they react when it is not said that a woman was murdered, but that a woman died? What is your assessment when the red note details my clothes, the time, the place? Will it reach my death to the minimum necessary for the rulers to decree a gender alert? Will my murderer, yes, in male, be punished? Who will explain what of the crime that attacked me for being a woman? Yes, young man, girl,

Why did not they warn me that being born and growing a woman in this calendar, in any geography, reduced my life expectancy and that every damn minute I was going to have to fight, not only to be valued and respected for my merits, big or small? , to have a fair retribution for my work, to have opportunities for study, work, relationship, to be happy or unhappy, as I crawled or walking or running through the calendars, to go pulling, or as everyone says to live; no, it turns out that I also have to fight so that they do not kill me, not once, twice, three, a hundred, thousands of times?

Because the man who kills me kills me and he kills me who ignores my death, nuances it, makes it up, masks it, messes it up with his slander (“he dressed provocatively”, “he was drinking”, “he was in a dive”, “I walked at night”, “I was alone”) hiding that my crime is living. Just like that, live. Regardless of my age, my creed, my color, my political position, my ideas, my dreams and my nightmares. My murderer did not decide because I was going to vote or abstain, because I voted red or green or blue or brown or yellow or independent or the truth is that I do not have a voter’s credential. Neither was her mobile age: I am a girl, young, adult, mature, old. He murdered me because I’m a woman.

That’s how we are, hear. We accept that the explanation of a crime of gender, of the murder of a woman, of femicide , is that: it is that she was a woman, who sends her, she sought him out, and that the hunt continues. Because silence is complicity, and complicity is the celebration of crime. Only one change of box: from crime to normal. Let’s drink because this is the system that culminates history, where humanity reaches its maximum development, where progress and well-being can be enjoyed by everyone who works and makes an effort.
That is the capitalist system, hey, the system in which murdering a woman is part of daily life, of daily death, of terror assuming her gender identity.

Or not? Or does it all depend on who explains my death? Or does it not matter anymore? Is not even worth an explanation? My death is like the rain that slows down the traffic and that one, one, one , suffers with the annoyance of who will be late for the next murder as it is late to the next traffic light? Chin! Again red, another dead, another murdered, another delay.

The late SupMarcos said that, to be taken into account, the natives had to die by the thousands. That if they were a few, normal. That if there were a few dozen, “it is part of its barbaric nature,” “symptom of cultural backwardness,” “the government must comply with the historical debt with the most unprotected.” That if there were hundreds, “ah, natural misfortunes, poor things!” If there were already thousands, then if someone asked “what is happening ?, why?”

So you might ask yourself: How many murdered women are needed for us to ask ourselves what is happening and why? Who is responsible for the crime? Who is the victim? What is the mobile?
Or are we going to wait for the next scandal on social networks? Really? Where before there was the alms of the lament or a coin, now a tweet , a thread if they hurry me?…”

–The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN)

The new year renews dedication to the lines of attack and resistance that don’t abide time, but crawl through the centuries as long as it takes to break the spell, burn the cage, free the prisoners.

“Between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the spatial horizon of Europe expanded considerably. The Atlantic gradually became the epicenter of a new concatenation of worlds, the locus of a new planetary consciousness. The ships into the Atlantic followed European attempts at expansion in the Canaries, Madeira, the Azores, and the islands of Cape Verde and culminated in the establishment of a plantation economy dependent on African slave labor.”

To 2018, the end of the american plantation.

To the flowing nature of time as water, renewed blessings and respect in 2018 to the water, boiling, freezing, and flooding. The concatenation continues by the tens of millions trapped in servitude the world over: in the human-drug industrial complex of the Bakken oil fields of sacred North Dakota, in the hell of gender, the terror of white supremacy, the violence of colonialism, trafficked by the worshipers of greed, ego, power. The planetary consciousness continues, the strong hearts of prisoners across time weave and breathe life and death and we welcome them.

Other worlds overlay ours and we hail the presence of those who arrive by our side to bolster our bravery, to guide our sight. To 2018, to strengthening our bonds to ancestors of insurrectionary action. “While some citadels have collapsed, other walls have been strengthened. As has long been the case, the contemporary world is deeply shaped and conditioned by the ancestral forms of religious, legal, and political life built around fences, enclosures, walls, camps, circles, and, above all, borders.” To 2018, the collapse of the nation, cataclysms of empire, the destruction of what binds us to unfreedom at all levels, an end to enclosures.

“Think of this: When they present you with a watch they are gifting you with a tiny flowering hell, a wreath of roses, a dungeon of air.”

To time on our own terms, to healed memories, mended lapses, trauma that comes to a close. To openings, slow and old growth alike. Webs of our own spinning, encrypted, intimate, to the security of true commitment, depth for the roots, purchase without capital, multiplicity without commodification. Seeing that “thinking is not necessarily circumscribed by language, the symbolic, or the human,” to representation left to ruin in 2018. To the growing affinity of ranters, dreamers, and augurs, undoing the material and spiritual existent.

“Listen, holy lightning,
listen, holy hill,
listen, sacred thunder,
listen, sacred cave:
We come to awaken your conscience.
We come to awaken your heart,
so you can shoot your rifle,
so you can fire your cannon,
so you can close the road to those men.
Even if they come at night.
Even if they come at dawn.
Even if they come bringing weapons.
That they do not hit us.
That they do not come to torture us.
That we do not get to violate
in our homes, in our homes.
Father of Cerro Huitepec, mother of Cerro Huitepec,
Father of the white cave, mother of the white cave,
Father of San Cristóbal hill, mother of San Cristóbal hill:
Do not enter your lands, great patron.
Let their rifles cool, let their pistols cool.
Kajval, accept this bouquet of flowers.
Accept this offering of leaves, accept this smoke offering,
Sacred father of Chaklajún, sacred mother of Chaklajún.”

So that the Army does not come
by Xuaka’Utz’utz’Ni’