The journal dreamt itself. Its pages you wrote to capture mental colony from its root in the name, Cristóbal Colón. But what captivities does the name, that sound—Colón—hide? Drop its diacritic and you drift like plastic in a sea of eroto- genic marks. How does the large intestine entwine in the same sign that names the colon: punctuation preceding explanation, dramatizing the experience of figures and forms? What does a colon do, actually? To explain: what follows is a book whose
poems examine the inner workings of colonial myth. To explore the burrowing of our colonial myths into real-life experience—wet violence in the tough skin of emblems and instincts—the author spent four months reading the journal of Christopher Columbus before sleep. Later, he transformed his dreams into a poetic record of what his memory, in its half-sleep, had forgotten it remembered: the gash, shock, glamour, void, punctuation, and spell of origins. It belonged to that history as intimately as that history belonged to the momentary constellations of a night sky. Its belonging, un- clear and unassimilated, anacoluthic but self-instructive, is the shining of dark stars equipped with consciousness.
To say simply that you could subvert Columbus and the world he left us only stages the inadequacy of the curse to do away with the accursed object. As usual, real- ity is contrary. The curse imprecates the curser, the interdict awakens the nightmare, iconoclasts are slaves of icons, and, critical truisms though these may be, you conjure yourself inside them constantly: to subvert is to crumble to the enterprise of memory overturned, to hurl body over the head of mental colony only to flip back upward, part to an assed whole. So the question, for you at least, is how to flip from realities different than those of the colonial myth—how to stay true to the reality of myth, which bakes the crust of your thought with its hot white light, while hitching some- how to new suns and ideas. How do you look inside yourself for its terrible illumi- nation while shedding new light on that light? Could you, with mirror or sword-face even for an instant, blind the gods and their higher powers?
To be clear: you are not looking for wisdom, but for a world unfolding in dreams. In October 2015, soon after moving to Chicago, you came up with a strategy for this. You came to it while browsing the yearly Hyde Park Used Book Sale, which takes place on Columbus Day weekend. In the chaotic pile of 30,000 books separated into fifty sections in Dole, Del Monte, and Chiquita produce boxes—emanations of the United Fruit Company—you came across a hardcover edition of Bartolomé de las Casas’s sixteenth-century Journal of Christopher Columbus. Reading the entry for that day, the 10th, there amid the boxes and browsing shoppers, you saw the rain chop the waves, shake the whole history from inside out, and take you into the storm pulling his ship down the sea. In two days, he would see land. But, at that moment, he was in the darkest kind of sleep. So you decided to awaken with him, to see if you could see what your mind saw in what he saw and, in doing so, to flash a mirror into the beach-boiled eye of the unsleeping colonial sun.
That night, and every night for the next three months during which he traveled the coasts, tricking history into his tasks, you read the journal before bed closely to have your sleeping mind think intently on its images, plots, symbols, motives, and feelings. You wished to see what, when left to its matrix of associations, your mind made of the colonial story. Notes throughout the night recorded your dreams. In the mornings, you made new notations to chart closer contacts between you two, dreamer and traveler. You composed the text in the evenings, putting your dreams and the journal together into a new story of creation. What you made you now hold in your hands: the positions, spaces, and temporalities of history are tasks you gave yourself, entanglements warped in a historical structure that depends on you for its unfolding churn, which discloses itself in both nights and days. Here is a study about how language is captivated by and captures the negativity of the hemispheric expe- rience surging from its southern sources—how its inconsistency and unevenness are stopgaps because in practice a body and its myth are not exclusive of each other, but reciprocal and dynamic, semiotic and aesthetic. These are signs and the instances in which they unravel themselves. Like a first being looking out from the gauzy green light of a newborn cosmos, you saw the gods then as so many cascading storms.
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Sunday/Thursday, October 11th
Roughest sea so far tube-nosed seabirds
on green reeds a cane a stick bobbing
carved iron and a small board with marks
like lizard hands
like little lights at the end of a hall
signaling pigs to squeal hopes of land
through day we landed and saw
the lizards upright like sideways
Fs or Ys upside-down
crimping their necks to look at us
impossible words by force by
fish chopping the water around us all
My Christ, my surrendering fish
I see what you signal:
To take the dinosaurs by force
Tuesday/Saturday, October 13th
To a broken planet came men
bellies and long hair, carved like
spears all wet all playing games
They are a pleasure to watch
so flat so slender so fast they
split my world in two into
a dead body hiding in my skin
Wednesday/Sunday, October 14th
The island sick fearful shouts to us
coming from heaven for help to us
Thursday/Monday, October 15th
Anchor daylight free from shoals
Hoisted sails, bracelets, legs, and arms
Crystals the shape of diamonds
I touched to make them shudder &
look away & I could take what I want
bracelets on their arms and legs
in their ears noses
and around their necks plus
some dry sliced leaves they prize
Friday and Saturday/Tuesday and Wednesday, October 16th
watching an airplane crash feels like
Is like what I feel watching their canoes
off the coast subtending
Making wobbly half-circles inside me
Bags of human shit hanging from my lungs
I don’t know how to describe it
The explosive fire across the water
Have you ever seen a plane crash?
I haven’t. But I fear what it feels like
Seeing all those people dip down