Jose-Luis Moctezuma & Edgar Garcia
TZOLK'IN/TONALPOHUALLI II
Distortion when it occurs, the exchange of shamanic power through reified intellection. Read this cosmic energy, can you? It is unavoidable that its excesses should be a limitless operation, a process without beginning. The first gift long preceded our arrival. Woe nonetheless to those who, to the very end, insist on regulating its movements. Henceforth, it shall be to them an accursed share. Whereas to those who have attributed their power to the act of giving itself, the things given will carry life within-where the event of giving, like a rock or mountain teeming with life and personhood, is likewise a living thing.
Here is song, created as a word-for-word exchange between José-Luis Moctezuma and Edgar Garcia over the first half of the year twenty twelve. Written according to the numerology of the Maya Tzolk'in and the Aztec Tonalpohualli calendars, each collaborated line follows the sacred law of fives in its five-word limit, doing so for thirteen lines in order to parallel the thirteen-day periods of these cosmological systems, which are each dedicated to and under the auspice of a different deity-animalism. Thus, with four seasonal stanzas of thirteen five-word lines, the total number of words in the poem is 260, completing the sacred vigesimal count of days that tracks the transit of Venus and is important for the cultivation of maize. Like the young maize that grows out of the earth in the mutual overflow of earth and sky, these songs of power are the product of a gift economy, a word-for-word back-and-forth wherein each word was offered in an attempt to outdo its predecessor.
The gift returns aggregated, revealing the mutual excess that always is and will be. Such exchange keeps the cultural object inalienable from its giver, in so far as each given word continues to be one writer's even as it is sent to the other for the other's use and pleasure, until it is (likewise) sent back, augmented. So grows the seed into a leafy green stalk, quite naturally redistributing cosmic energy. More than the libidinal, here is the principle of exponential animacy which is sometimes known as mana, the plasmatic continuum between economy and magic.
If it should be that we are accused of anthropoetics, then that shall be a portion of our accursed share. For us this exchange is a living thing; a certain amount of prodigality is unavoidable. We are already slightly overtaken.
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