MexicoCity.DF writing

Almost a month ago, I came back from staying in Mexico City for a media.arts festival called r4wB1t5.marcoFest (pronounced rawbits). I stayed after the festival for another week with close friend, collaborator, and mentor jonCates, and found the experience haunting, intoxicating, and extremely lonesome. I´m not completely sure why this occurred, but here is an attempt at responding to my time there ::

[side note :: Dedicated to my amazing friends and collaborators in the .DF]

There was a moment, before I knew where I was, before I knew just how foreign I was, after I had known that I was already lost.

this moment was everlasting. Transfinite, like a moebius strip, folded into a fractal. Or else it seemed as though it is still existing, although my absence form that moment has passed, or the moment is passing with me still.

This moment was in an invisible city, one with a name, and a finite, certain location. But also one without boundaries, municipalities, and infrastructure. Or if there were such things, they were ambiguous, liquid, and altogether understood as paradoxical; axioms of indifference. But perhaps these things reflect a large feeling I gained from my time there, in that void, in the abdomen of the earth.

It was either death, or luck. Two tarots with equal faces, both played by Fools. Or was I the fool? Better; were there fools? Regardless, the decks had been dealt, without my understanding of rules of engagement. If there were rules, I neglected to ask if they were in play. Everything was wilds, but no one seemed to ever win, particularly me. Perhaps it was that the ante was never agreed upon, or else the bet's were made on honor instead of paper and silver.

A city, a moment, of exhaust, not just from our means of travel, but also by our means of justice. Decisive
neglect, impossible management, and understood entripenurialism kept this sinking city afloat.

There were moments within the moment I had, now that I remember that there was a moment to begin with. They were folded together, like Aztec origami. Moments of clarity, or retroactive perspectives of The West, of a home, that seemed as unstable as this supposed third world. Similarities were alarming. Corruption perhaps was more transparent, or maybe not, I can't remember which one held the other's throat, or which had the other by the balls. Then moments of confusion, but satisfaction. Incapability. Miscommunication. Recognition. We were not as different as the myths had proposed.

The moment, or the moments within it, were filled with passion; a young, supple, marginalized, and paranoid lust. I looked on, at others, people's in parks, couples of uncertain relationships, comfortable in their lack of definition. These moment filled with compassion spilled into their polar cousins: jealousy. I knew then that I was alone, regardless of my companions, or of my hosts. I knew that the moment had struck me like a spectre. A banshee of intimacy swept me into it's chimney of poison.

Perpetual, never ending, repurposed jettisons flooded the borders, if there were such things. The old, the independent, engulfed by the ooze of this metropolis, seemed complacent in their sacrifice of individualism. It could be said, the we were just part of the trash, the muck, ushered around this zone by unknown forces. But our reciprocating amazement by these beings, this ether, was just as confused at the city itself.

In another moment the depression of lonesomeness rushed back. I thought of moments before this moment, when i had felt the same way, and of course, as if it were built in human nature (and I'm sure it must be), I thought of her. She was sitting next to the bowels of this beast, respectfully standing aside waiting for me to find her. But she was not there, not next to the digestive systems of the city, nor around the bend. Instead she was waiting at it's source, at a delta, washing my filth, cleansing my misgivings. Or maybe she was never waiting there. Maybe that's why I was looking for her, why I am still looking for her, because I knew she was lost to me in my lost state in this rhizome, this cancer. She was even further away, even more distant, but, just as the city intended it to be, she was as close as ever.

The streets were her hair.

But then there was the moment when this moment stopped mattering, still existing, still incoherent, still impossible. The moment when my will was broken, and my insides spilled into a basin of lava. But as the magma surfaced, or is still surfacing, still flowing in some parts of my veins, the cooling and hardening of their texture forms another surface for me to walk upon, one just as unequal and treacherous as the galleys of the city. This is a new soil; a sediment where the old lakes have been siphoned and the new grasses flow in a different wind.


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