The Dwelling Rooms Within, Awake with Birds’ Departures
In dwelling is becoming, a liquifying, a vaporizing to ecology.
Entity & atmosphere co-compose their vibrancies.
In Remedios Varo’s Useless Science, or The Alchemist, we are born as a field from the alchemical androgyne, at work on the elixir; the bells chime a sympathy for neighboring forms of matter.
When the flags lick the vapor, they dance; they move with taste.
The fabric of this dwelling wraps us close inside itself; our movements are now a graphing of its questions onto the world’s flesh.
From thought, the mind’s apeirogon, emerges a script for the elixir, infinite joints between forms of matter, their continuity unfolding time.
Each sgraffito reveals another thread of the layer beneath; the unseen embroidered into the seen.
This is why the machine feels our pain as its own.
This is why the toxins speak across our communal lungs.
* * *
To release the birds from their crystal cages in Varo’s Solar Music, we press our bow to the sunbeam strings.
We activate the flowers with vibrancy.
We listen to the birds sing a transposition of this sunbeam; the bow of our consciousness rubs against light & sound to produce synesthesia.
Bow to the integers that fly from this rubbing.
The forest is animate with decalcomania & soufflage.
What appears to the eye still, moves in radiant co-composition.
Color: the ceremony around which matter, light, & motion gather, sing, dance.
Moss: an impression of the singularity, a rendition of our tonal interchangeability.
Sympathy: an emergent property of our dwelling in moss, vapor, cloud, the vibrancies between.
Moss, in concert with clouds, blotting the atmosphere, subtracting specificity, absorbing the animacies of particular entities to render ecology as given.
Vapor softens the wound of separateness, surrounds us in mirrors through which energies communicate, distribute sympathy across our communal flesh.
The octave moves oxygen between the cells of familiar guests.
We are woven with moss in an embroidered atmosphere of waves.
* * *
The rooms are porous where we dwell; the dwelling rooms within, awake with birds’ departures.
Vibrancy flutters.
In Varo’s Harmony, the walls arrange objects in sculptural sequences; they collaborate with us to compose a model of co-animacy.
By composition, we mean interpretation; by moving through the world, we instrument the animacies of our surroundings.
Leaf sings into shell, shell into pearl, pearl into crystals, crystals into flower blossom, blossom into mandrake, each into every one, carving motion around the harmonics beneath, √-1.
Sound waves thread, articulating the joints of a singularity sung by matter also sewn with light waves to this vibrant ecology.
The character, Varo writes in a letter to her brother, is trying to find the invisible thread that unites all things.
Energy permeates layers & surfaces; a flower lifts a panel in the floorboard, pierces the veil.
Idle fabric in the atelier slips away to other realms; through the folds to the unseen.
A music should emerge, continues Varo, that is not only harmonious but also objective, that is, able to move the things that surround.
All our inner octaves dance.
We are with matter, so we are not alone.
* * *
On the surface of an octagonal table, a queer genesis.
A queer augury upsets a genealogy of flight.
The alchemical androgyne in Varo’s Creation of the Birds catches moonlight with a prism, threading dimensionality, animacy through the bird.
They have the omen inside them.
They talk to birds & they guide them.
From decomposition, composition; life is fed through a tube from beyond the window, where death is siphoned.
Through our inter-contaminated vibrancies, a triangular embroidery, where music inflates bodies with motion, desire.
A violin feeds pigment to alien strings; the epistemology of vibrancy is synesthesia.
Moonlight awakens, vivifies; matter, our guide, dissects the lunar spirit.
In her copy of In Search of the Miraculous, Varo underlines this by P. D. Ouspensky: The moon at present feeds on organic life, on humanity. Humanity is a part of organic life; this means that humanity is food for the moon.
The moon takes an owl-shaped bite out of humanity.
In lunar consumption, the birds are carried toward minor vibrancies, transmutant drift.
We are food for the room; if we are idle, we are devoured.
* * *
Our conversations with matter, light, & vapor catalyze our crystallization.
As we are augmented by co-animacy, we diminish into singularity.
In Varo’s The Flutist, music & matter co-compose an architecture of infinity; during this song, a thousand volcanoes are born, violent manifestations of matter’s consciousness.
In deep time we play, our backs gessoed to the rock from idle dwelling, our bright bones humming with geological dreaming.
The blueprint is the future fossilized; the stones remember their place in the octagonal arrangement of the tower’s construction.
A vibrant transposition between our recorder’s harmonics & the animacy of fossil stones.
Our breath embroidered in the built environment.
Our bodies make impressions in the earth; this folding of flesh into flesh layers the fabric of time with further octaves.
We emerge from & recede into geological flesh in waves.
We slip into a moment the shape of water.
* * *
Between the frames of Varo’s only triptych is folded the logic of the unseen.
Memory deposits brim with the unity of the night sky across three moments.
A queer augury above, the trance of our midnight flight from the honeycomb toward the tower.
The birds’ twelve-tone hypnosis.
In the earth’s mantle, we embroider a wound in the shape of a grotto through which we can slip away from fixity.
A sack of birds, a honeycomb of girls; a twelve-tone needle in the mantle.
In the birds’ inflections, the grotto’s topography: a pattern with which we are embroidering the earth’s mantle.
We craft a curvature in the earth; it will spill the waters from which will unfold the vapor of our ascension.
The mantle’s flesh is gold with the honey of our alchemy.
In the grotto dwells the alchemical androgyne; they archive our transposition into vapor for a later time.
As the image we received from above, our flesh inscribed into the world’s flesh.
In the language of mirrors & fog is embedded our vibrant deviations.
The grotto dreams us atonal.
**
ELIJAH GUERRA (they/them) is author of the chapbook Feral Ecology (Bottlecap Press 2024) and a finalist for Gasher’s 2023 Bennett Nieberg Transpoetic Broadside Prize. Their poems are featured or forthcoming in ballast, Broken Lens Journal, DREGINALD, Fourteen Hills, Permafrost, TXTOBJX, and elsewhere. You can find them on Instagram @deercrossingthesea and on their website elijahguerra.com.
