Bogotá Notebook
Mentiría si escribiera que volví intacta.
No one returns unmoved from Bogotá.
Movement is the subject we’ve been summoned
to activate collectively. The kinesics
and kinetics of bodies shifting with each other.
No one’s hung up on difference. The landscape’s
craggy edges soften when the greenery of the Andes
vibrates in the surrounding hills, in the bodies
performing at the night market for medicinal plants.
“La noche es el manicomio de las plantas.”
Night is plant life’s madhouse.
Pasaron cosas, pasaron como pasan cuando están pasando,
pasan, estaban sucediendo, pero no habrá más sucesión,
porque a Colón y la Reina Isabel ya nadie los quiere
ver, y si los llegaras a ver, imagínate que no los viste
y no les tomes fotos. No photos. No posts.
Things kept happening, as when they are coming to pass,
they pass, meaning, in Spanish, that they’re taking place,
and overtaking is no longer commended, so patrimony
and memory management officials preemptively removed
Columbus and Queen Isabella of Castile from their pedestals
flanking the avenue which never led to El Dorado.
Time is golden. History is not.
Moved to a secret location before the Misak peoples toppled them,
beheading them perhaps, before they would meet the same fate
as the statue of Quesada, founder of the city, toppled,
for whom the Muisca peoples performed mortuary rituals,
since when felled, he fell on his face, signaling his regret.
Their rituals cleansed him and, through forgiveness,
rid the city of colonial toxicity.
Womb city purified.
The relocated statues and artists in the live arts
converge in a reclaimed train station in Bogotá,
statues half-hidden behind a skimpy tarp,
insufficient given their monumentality.
*
Upon arrival, we sit around a tree in an enclosed garden.
We thank the genii locorum for receiving us, placing shells around a magnificent trunk.
The remnants of ritual, fragments of stories of those sitting nearest me.
Saeed born to an Iranian father and a Mexican mother in Aguascalientes and Luis who I never
see dance, who went to the same grade school as the magical realist in Zipaquirá and is a student of unknowing.
My power circle peeps. My provisional coterie. Mis chismosas.
We lock gazes and choreograph our words.
Yo te veo. Tú me ves.
I see you. You see me.
Yo te veo. Tú me ves.
We walk in circles, careful not to step on slugs and other organic matter, until we find a space to ground us.
I sit on the piece of an old train track that reminds me of the rods in my scoliotic spine.
It’s been so long since I saw my distorted body reflected in somebody else’s pupils.
Cuerpo etc. Expanded movement practices.
Cuerpa cuerpo cuerpe etc. A new neo-Baroque.
We receive healing instruction.
Those of us with vulvas practice breathwork and activate our organ’s energetic channels away
from the statue’s frozen gazes.
Ser una en varias. To be one in many.
We do a vulva
practice—oh, dear organ. I had
forgotten you so.
Práctica vulva
órgano esencial y el
menos cuidado.
Breathing we’re anchored,
we channel the syllables,
crystals of process.
Expand me my flesh my contours Plexiglas high-filtration ultra-fine fibers.
Listen to an alien language and touch someone else as if touch didn’t touch.
Gather between what’s intentionally left unfinished and the unintentionally unfinished.
Return to the enclosed garden and hear the correspondences.
Witness the traces of the shamed ones forced to work their love in secret at the station, hear the
channeling of their voices.
Dance the vestiges of a warrior dance until in a trance you return to the enclosed garden once
again.
To learn to let go, find a spot to dig a hole to bury a decomposing body collectively formed with spit hair rotting fruit horrid and gorgeously lacking in facial features.
An exquisitely putrid lump of organic matter swathed in a wet, sullied shroud getting heavier and moister on a plastic tarp.
Buried so we can find the first person.
Salt from Zipaquirá will not cleanse the stench. Mint leaves half-trick the senses.
Bury the bright, pungent rot under a glorious Chinese lantern shrub.
A perfect site to leave there, half-buried, our offering.
No one returns unmoved from Bogotá.
Movement is the subject we’ve been summoned
to activate collectively. The kinesics
and kinetics of bodies shifting with each other.
No one’s hung up on difference. The landscape’s
craggy edges soften when the greenery of the Andes
vibrates in the surrounding hills, in the bodies
performing at the night market for medicinal plants.
“La noche es el manicomio de las plantas.”
Night is plant life’s madhouse.
Pasaron cosas, pasaron como pasan cuando están pasando,
pasan, estaban sucediendo, pero no habrá más sucesión,
porque a Colón y la Reina Isabel ya nadie los quiere
ver, y si los llegaras a ver, imagínate que no los viste
y no les tomes fotos. No photos. No posts.
Things kept happening, as when they are coming to pass,
they pass, meaning, in Spanish, that they’re taking place,
and overtaking is no longer commended, so patrimony
and memory management officials preemptively removed
Columbus and Queen Isabella of Castile from their pedestals
flanking the avenue which never led to El Dorado.
Time is golden. History is not.
Moved to a secret location before the Misak peoples toppled them,
beheading them perhaps, before they would meet the same fate
as the statue of Quesada, founder of the city, toppled,
for whom the Muisca peoples performed mortuary rituals,
since when felled, he fell on his face, signaling his regret.
Their rituals cleansed him and, through forgiveness,
rid the city of colonial toxicity.
Womb city purified.
The relocated statues and artists in the live arts
converge in a reclaimed train station in Bogotá,
statues half-hidden behind a skimpy tarp,
insufficient given their monumentality.
*
Upon arrival, we sit around a tree in an enclosed garden.
We thank the genii locorum for receiving us, placing shells around a magnificent trunk.
The remnants of ritual, fragments of stories of those sitting nearest me.
Saeed born to an Iranian father and a Mexican mother in Aguascalientes and Luis who I never
see dance, who went to the same grade school as the magical realist in Zipaquirá and is a student of unknowing.
My power circle peeps. My provisional coterie. Mis chismosas.
We lock gazes and choreograph our words.
Yo te veo. Tú me ves.
I see you. You see me.
Yo te veo. Tú me ves.
We walk in circles, careful not to step on slugs and other organic matter, until we find a space to ground us.
I sit on the piece of an old train track that reminds me of the rods in my scoliotic spine.
It’s been so long since I saw my distorted body reflected in somebody else’s pupils.
Cuerpo etc. Expanded movement practices.
Cuerpa cuerpo cuerpe etc. A new neo-Baroque.
We receive healing instruction.
Those of us with vulvas practice breathwork and activate our organ’s energetic channels away
from the statue’s frozen gazes.
Ser una en varias. To be one in many.
We do a vulva
practice—oh, dear organ. I had
forgotten you so.
Práctica vulva
órgano esencial y el
menos cuidado.
Breathing we’re anchored,
we channel the syllables,
crystals of process.
Expand me my flesh my contours Plexiglas high-filtration ultra-fine fibers.
Listen to an alien language and touch someone else as if touch didn’t touch.
Gather between what’s intentionally left unfinished and the unintentionally unfinished.
Return to the enclosed garden and hear the correspondences.
Witness the traces of the shamed ones forced to work their love in secret at the station, hear the
channeling of their voices.
Dance the vestiges of a warrior dance until in a trance you return to the enclosed garden once
again.
To learn to let go, find a spot to dig a hole to bury a decomposing body collectively formed with spit hair rotting fruit horrid and gorgeously lacking in facial features.
An exquisitely putrid lump of organic matter swathed in a wet, sullied shroud getting heavier and moister on a plastic tarp.
Buried so we can find the first person.
Salt from Zipaquirá will not cleanse the stench. Mint leaves half-trick the senses.
Bury the bright, pungent rot under a glorious Chinese lantern shrub.
A perfect site to leave there, half-buried, our offering.