Back In The Sea Of Time

Images by : Paul Zisiwe

It is commendable that in South Africa, there still are places where we can go to get a more in depth study on past cultures, extinct animals, and the general evolution of our planet. These places are well-preserved and stocked with information that provides a unique prospective into all different aspects of social evolution, and are usually an extremely interactive atmosphere in which to touch on the important events, phenomena and creatures from the past. Yet, in a country inundated with galleries than museums, we now sadly see our awareness of our accumulated national heritage dwindle like a flame in a murderous wind of technologically induced complacency.

Research shows that people who have had first-hand experience of historical information are more likely to retain it in later life, and museums provide a unique interactive experience of getting up close to things we usually only see in books, newspapers or on the television. This allows for a more immersed mental interaction between people and their history, a cultivated sense which we hope future generations would possess. Unfortunately, our current school system does not stimulate the proper level of importance the historical significance of the past holds on modern society. I recall my visits to The Sterkfontein caves as a young man in primary school. The impact of those encounters had an indelible mark on my future perception of life and history. So I wonder how many of our children have visited a museum this year. And how many parents make it a point to allow themselves to lead by example and engage with these places of memory?

A Black Hair Project Songbook

Song 1

Death of a futurist

We died my friend

The other day…

The future’s dying

Everyday…

Begged of mother

Put a scepter in our veins…

We gazed at stars

Vaginas were killed…

We lie, I die

Without befuddled aims…

Stealing love’s gowns

Wailing with clowns…

We tear our friends

We found in losses…

We say we love

We say we’ll die…

We name ourselves

Claiming heaven our own…

With other’s promise

Scaling blind for scores …

We’ve come undone, yes

The blessed in debt the young…

Gods shutting ears

With sales of fire…

We dreamt our life beyond the womb

Inside his leaky lair…

Ghostly trances being our wound

Never here together and cold...

Can’t claim bonds of the soul

We are all daughters...

Bulging Sudan shitting wells

Summer pays the gunman...

With gold teething heirs

Skeletons of fables badged in motley flags...

Applauding blood in stables of luck’s mutants

Is the next Day...

Did we ask our fathers

About god’s bleeding asshole…

About how it’s churning

Slave-beacons without souls…

Traverse these thorn planes

Soldiers exiting the game…

Asking of mothers

Does birth rub off the shame…

Song 2

Trudge on a concrete sea

Captain of the sun-ship

On the horizon’s blade,

Tears a cigarette from his ghost-lip….

Thunder’s renown for rain tearing the gory sea;

The storm nigh.

Lazarus wing-flaps his tongue in archangel tones;

Commands of caution carousing the chambers…

Over the vast pond in silent reflection…

Oarsmen returning from landscapes of insobriety,

As of last night…when the ship had burned a hole in its belly.

Every strength held

Marbled ligaments unclamping war when he imploded his heart…

Calling out to the sea’s pits,

Unto his son’s sleep, and

Other bait taken in impeccable chivalry.

The murky waves were writhing;

For they’d swallowed a sarcophagus of other heels…

Those that treaded the underworld.

This wreck…now a morgue of dreams, cramped other

Demon strata wailing at their innocence…

Glib-gab before saying goodbye to his tomb, and

The captain crucifies his deck with fire…

Snares with his rear eye unto the maw;

Paradise was that which he had left for vultures.

Gulls towering above - the stark band behind the sail

Awaiting patiently

The hour of death’s birth.

Lazarus cringing

A stallion and serpent at horns.

Light charring his veins – furious lightning

The panic of darkness;

The waves crashing…

The sea swallowing more wounds

As panic snaked in the eyes of those who survived.

Salts of muscle molten,

The wash of a rising water cliff;

Panic for the wounded and

Every breath wormed out of alarm.

No light,

Just odors of composure

On the ghost ship, the curtain of souls rent by the rough

And flirting with disaster…

Zadkiel’s drowned sarcophagus with deaf faces

Staring at scabs leeched on the captain’s forehead.

He was blinded by steel blood;

Tyranny his soul’s immaculate reward.

To his wife a ballad he hums –

The sun-ship drowning with wrecked skeletons…

In the corners of their eyes, the reaches of death’s fright.

This womb’s night never ceases –

The work of age calling his children to his fore-brow.

Faith was hanging on a tree –

He hummed, as shadows cleaved fangs into the corpses of his oarsmen.

Why watch this with sulphur in the yes?

Longer with wet breath writhing in inner currents of hatred –

A hatred for the self

Who loved so that loss would leave a swine’s lick

On his blizzard sores.

He recalls himself skinned out of his mother –

The seeds he threw into the ocean, and

The lure of death by water…

He assassinated his eyes on this platform of the sun-less…

A heap of rope laying sordid upon a block of wood.

His monsters cannot sleep,

Under solemn stars in travail when light was with others…

Descending through the tempest of his imagining.

Lazarus sends records through his pacing eyes –

To drowsy lovers and dwarfed hearts with scum as their ware.

The stern rising settling the pinnacle hold…

The sea not listening to the passing of a drone.

Death tempting the night,

Arms naughted in harm of seeking air.

Some fall of wills upon the stormy sea…

The web over a wreck, thundered as

A captain folds dying without a love of ends.

Electric storm whipping the illusive day over the clime of roars…

Tundra looming as no safe lands,

Just wild, calm confident of any approach.

Passing time of wretched laments

Bagged with light he fathomed tunneled –

A shaft of turbulence –

Fueled by soul-struggles that untangle themselves from the metal.

He whispers love’s final sigh unto an estranged life -

A leper messiah with bleeding claws at his ankles.

Friends drank to his death elsewhere,

He kept the hope…

Devil Company when stupor would be roused…

A magician’s ray leaving twinkles on shrubs of his cowered mind.

He sees light outside his bones

Further retreating from the speed of a sink…

Time waiting in the deep; many-tongued despair of

Sea-weed ghosts camouflaged in the shimmer of other shells…

What rosy fish in his sockets?

At worship posture rippling with beads of vapor…

He was held up in this abyss,

Paddled with forgotten trunks that dealt with the god of water

In the burrows of a tirade mystery.

Song 3

For Meek Love

(A song)

In our bedroom

Alone

With friends

Behind the fence of escape

I stand

Shred my skin to pull through the knot-hole

And forgive loving me.

I hang your sheets on my soul

All wired up

Shrunk to a needle’s eye

Blow a candle for a kiss

At the edge of a hurt when

Time’s deathly creep is burning my throat.

A heart eroding roses

Heavy glass

Married to a fossil life

Fastened to a pearl of lies

Substrate calls to ricochet with new demises

Un-allowed to defy false kids

A rough lover who

Wrecks lungs with mouth-wars.

A Letter dated to 16 June 1976 (continued)

Tin-corpses freed unto surveillance’s zone de-mined,

Bony shacks stapled to dung creeds;

Homicidal bravado grails adangle

As red flushed in hurricanes sewer-sloshed.

Wound parade of ashen breeds

Molten at curtained dawn of murder’s seeds,

Withering flesh in death labs;

Masquerading blindness with minced lids –

Butcher-breath stinging

As mutehood blisters throats…

Pigments of the shamed

Tumoured for puss hills.

Rebellion’s route contraflowed

Piles of riot discharged

Sermons excreting cranial libation

Barged towards putrid vaults of memory.

Epistle mirage of polished upheavals

Tegumentally fleecing the Kains;

Coin leeches as education’s brigade

Reconciled with abortives toil born.

Brace of our path’s tentacles

Fossilized strung on our hospitable cowards;

Panged with steel-toed penitentiary’s myth,

Unruffled by our throats’ posterity vanquished.

Birth’s corpse a totem vile victory

Perfumed with poverty nestled in implosive death’s

Chorale in freedom’s mourning sling-vocals;

Bowels historical in claws of dust cannibals.

Brain streaks of famine’s zeal powder-teared,

Entrails on infants soles upon thrones of shrills;

Fluid bustle of men fashioned of gore,

The pottery of skulls sweetly stewed bestial.

Tongue-sky slanted over skin-town,

Nameless roars hummed through anorexic tripes…

Sleepy torrents broken in dreams of strife’s

Orange-bright machine sunset poking the concrete bindings of plight.

Inebriation’s theatres brim liberty’s dilapidated walls,

Brawls hoodwinked past the pinning night;

Age-wells of abandoned moments hurtled for vengeance…

The dead dictum of our pallid ashen fathers amitotic.

On WORDS.

My most hearted words art those I haven’t written.

I don’t sense the words I write…

I write that I’d sense words I haven’t yet written.

I write that I’d read what I haven’t read.

To write is to contaminate thought. An encumbrance to any raked prophet, whence the

pangs of self-will wrought with the unction of spiritual trifling…those growls ludicrous and melancholy, fuel the laments of the dismantled cranium. A hypocritical indictment on language hence the mind’s disdain for replies to life’s inquisitions…

To write these sparse sorrows is fruitless but true and at its time’s function - this dribbled speech without breath, rasping the throat similarly with recycled creeds from hearts feigning age. Take words already jotted unto blades and carve a reconstruction to utter new impressions, since no thought is original. The purpose is the mark of difference…

Enthused by assimilation - the craze of pain so common to many…the words becoming the fleeting admiration for habits and bibles of fixations churned at any finger’s lost repute. Words mask the regrettable distance of a flawed memory; that effusive visage ever constrained by the litany of eternal births. Souls of a wretch fragmented into coded attempts of erasure, cancellations of salty human experiences. Now, that is the nature of words - postponing misery and incarcerating terror.

Patronizing its death, the first word art written in MIND, that all others would conjure a pretense toward its completeness, unspoken, yet tattooed. It exists independent of a medium to unravel it, such as thought requires no brain to think it out. Thus I realize that I have not a technique of interface with this necessary scourge, I textualize too mechanically…a cheap satanic verse churned from an eventual Blind and Deaf puppet  transforming merely excited nerves to work with an artistic principle of a super objectivism. I need embrace a monologue that battles on impulses to repeat with precision my scores of inter-relating in-tensions. Remembering also that these impulses that constantly draw us into life’s tragic sanctum of visions art cynical mockeries not to be dismissed as empty. To focus on the benefits is to trivialize tragedy. Recognize not only that language as flesh’s yield can penetrate any rejection, but that it art rendered impossible to diagnose in terms of black and white, even inextricable from its deadness>.

Be unpredictable, a poet rendered inarticulate and plagued by inner contradictions and vestigial critiques on truth that animus within, united with the great silent aegis of psychic automatism by which one possesses to express…THE WORD…the functioning of thought. Not a mere measure of participation ‘in the scheme of things’ thought. Start first from an abstract enquiry into the possibilities developed and fostered by sensations, expressing a poetic trance. Corrupt all with imitations of accidental aspects of the immemorial in a formed set of particulars those extracts of a dead mirror – what is not, yet becoming. Aim at a profound thought-dictatorship that should be enough to resemble without being.

At the level of such ideas, nothing should be a reborn error on past tenses (tensions), nor a boded chortle in social defense of narcotic morale. We are patriots of our own worlds not any other linked to the reciprocal objectivist fatigue now paralyzing all recesses of language.

All BEING revealed unto us guarantees the BEING of actions apart from actuating themselves. And thus, word REALIZES (make real) itself as the author of unrealized lives.

First chose to cut-out words from articles of text and frozen ideas. These randomly place on an empty blade…and commence their automatic rearrangement in an order of their coincidental alignment. For the poet who curses the spoken, the aim is to vulgarize any linguistic rationality, suffocate language and sanctify the disintegrated nomads at Memory’s Death Consummation.

I know nothing about love - Lineo Segoete

I know nothing about love, except what I feel

I know nothing about people, except what I see

I know nothing about love, except that it heals

I know nothing about people, except that they can be both loving and mean.

I painted a picture of all the ways I love

Watered the paintbrush in my tears, this way I bore my soul

Dipped the brush in colours of my vulnerability and capabilities equally

Transformed my energy into the frame I would keep this picture in

Then I called the piece; my heart

I think nothing of my mind, it tends to stray

I think nothing of what I see, half the time it’s all an illusion

I think nothing of the mind, so I feed it, that it may not decay

I think nothing of reality as long as it does not cloud my vision

This painting I created is dear and treasured

It is compelling; aided by sleepless nights and daydreams

I am paranoid about this painting, especially about who touches and sees it

Within it, is engraved a key, a key that tames ogres and strengthens idiots

To protect it and those around me, I keep it safely locked away

Locked in a place that has been a mystery as long as time has existed; the mind.

Strange Factories - The Necessity of Fine Print

Source: http://strangefactories.tumblr.com/

The Voynich Manuscript

The manuscript measures 23.5 by 16.2 by 5 centimetres (9.3 by 6.4 by 2.0 in), with hundreds of vellum pages collected into eighteen quires; depending on how some of its unusual fold-out multi-part pages are counted, approximately 240 pages in total.

The top righthand corner of each recto (righthand) page has been numbered from 1 to 116, probably by one of the manuscript's later owners. From the various numbering gaps, it seems likely that in the past the manuscript had at least 272 pages, some of which were already missing when Wilfrid Voynich acquired the manuscript in 1912.

Source: Wikipedia