We are born amid the flowing blood of our mother; we break her open as we come out. Dismemberment births us: Once we were one with mother, with everything; we knew no lack. But we also did not know ourselves; without separation, there was no identity.

The child is propelled into its identificatory relations by this first acknowledgment of lack or loss. Only at this moment does it become capable of distinguishing itself from the 'outside' world, and thus of locating itself in the world. When the child recognizes or understands the concept of absence does it see that it is not “one,” complete in itself, merged with the world as a whole and the (m)other…This marks the primitive “origins” of the child 's separation of inside and outside, subject and object, self and other…From this time on, lack, gap, splitting will be its mode of being.[19]

My god is a broken one, an incomplete one, limping along. Tezcatlipoca is missing one foot. Instead, there is a mirror. A cut, a separation, engenders reflectivity. A lack that seeks completion in reflections. As I observe myself, I experience myself as lacking. I am a weakling, sickly; I stumble from one flu into the next. There is so much more I wish I knew, so much more I wish I was capable of. So much more I wish life could offer, if I could take it. I long for transformation, to be made anew.
I beseech Tezcatlipoca to transform me, grant me powers and visions, fill my holes. Instead of a crisis of faith, I am having a crisis of disbelief. I was raised an atheist and was happy to be one for most of my life. All the while there was this subterranean stream, expressed in my art, in my fascination with myths and monsters and all those teenager interests that are looked down on by “serious artists.” Now I am ready to be deemed childish again, to lose some face. I see my cuts and fragmentation as fertile, my journey into foolishness as a radiant arcanum that has so much to teach.

Tricksters[20] like Tezcatlipoca keep the world in movement and transformation. They are the cut that keeps blood flowing, lets life in. They are the crack that breaks apart any stultifying order. To have a child is to open yourself up to the world, it is a crack that tears you asunder, an open wound-threshold for all that lies outside of these tender boundaries, to hurt you, to nourish you. Álvaro, before you came, it was so easy to go on pretending that life is not ridiculously fragile, so as not to be paralysed by this knowledge. New life, having broken forth from the membranes of death and the mystery, is still drenched in their black essence. We are born shitting the most lustrous obsidian bile. Play it in reverse: Once death is near and our organs collapse, they can only  produce this black bile and shit it out, a salutation to the night they are about to journey into. From night and into the night. There is so much shit, things out of place, shit in our face, shit in the palace of heaven. My baby’s shit is sweet and gentle for now, as he feeds himself from the bosom of his mother. He is all fluids convergent, milk and shit and cum and blood, urine, tears, and spit. His body knows no silence, no forbidden zones. I barely sleep. I close my eyes and have the most vivid and violent fantasies. My baby is falling from a window, breaks his neck when he falls. My baby is run over by a speeding car, viscera crushed under the wheels. Silence, unspeakable menace as I approach my baby’s cradle and hope he hasn’t breathed his last breath. Boiling water falls on his face, making putty out of flesh. I never knew such intense love, one where my joy and my wonder were coupled with the unbearable idea of loss and disaster.

Coupling through Copying and Crafting: The Mystery of the Bed Chamber

Why seek the contact and the coupling with Tezcatlipoca? To be more like Him. To be a poet of ridicule, of horny disgust, jokes told with thorns and spikes and lace and chains. How to contact Him, penetrate Him? By being more like Him. I must think and feel like Him, must interiorise His qualities. I become an imitative effigy through which I can grasp and affect Him. I become His skin.

Walter Benjamin saw mimesis as a human universal faculty, a compulsion to imitate and thus become similar to the world, blurring the distances and barriers.[38] Anthropologist Michael Taussig, following Benjamin’s reflections, proposes mimesis as a form of embodied knowledge. In perceiving we are taken out of ourselves and into what is being perceived, partially merging. To think of something mimetically, to truly understand it, is to imagine ourselves “over there” in the physical location and perspective of the object. Our senses are filled, overridden, by the presence of what is outside ourselves:

bodily copying of the other is paramount: one tries out the very shape of a perception in one's own body; the musculature of the body is physiologically connected to precepts…Just as speech can be understood as thought activating the vocal cords and tongue, so thinking itself involves innervation of all of one’s features and sense organs.[39]

There is power and menace in the mimetic activity. The power of what George Frazer once named the Law of Similarity and the Law of Contact or Contagion.[40] These are principles of thought which Frazer identified in magical activity. The first law is that “like produces like,”[41] and the second law claims that “things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.”[42] Both laws combine in the magical practice of crafting effigies of an enemy or loved one either to attack them at a distance or to influence their desires. The effigies must have a certain degree of similarity to the original but will also directly incorporate materials from the victim, such as hair or nails. As Taussig points out, in these practices, imitation (the likeness of the effigy to the original) and contact (through the exuviae employed) blend so intimately that “image and contact interpenetrate…making us reconsider our very notion of what it is to be an image, most specially if we wish not only to express but to manipulate reality by means of its image…you move into the interior of images, just as images move into you.”[43] This magic language of visions, is not only in constant flux, in the taking up of mask after mask as means of escape and movement, but also occasions such protean disturbances in those who speak or receive it. This is the power but also the menace of mimesis: to undergo such a total merging and transformation that we permanently lose our sense of self.

To ward off this total dissolution that mimesis threatens us with, one must seek to be an imperfect, distorted copy of the god. Constant translation ensures that things get lost and modified, that an unbreachable holy gap is kept. We are, for each other, the imperfect and twisted mirrors that distort the other, giving him a new face. Distortion is what keeps us from completely disappearing into each other. As anthropologist Rane Willerslev explains,

“The basic movement of mimesis is…towards similarity…[yet] always depends on the opposite—that is, difference…it is the “copiedness” of mimesis, its lack of realism, so to speak, that secures this strikingly necessary difference because it forces the imitator to turn back on himself. It reverses his dominant and “natural” directedness toward the object of imitation back toward his own awareness as imitating subject, thus preventing him from achieving unity with the object imitated…In this sense we can talk about a kind of “depth reflexivity” built into mimesis, a certain withholding or nongiving of the self…As imitator, one must move in between identities, in that double negative field, which I…will call “not me, not not-me.”[44]

And not Him, not not-Him! To be locked in reflection and imitation, to be a shimmering fluid mirror substance. What better way to honour Tezcatlipoca than to become a dark and warping obscuring mirror? To offer Him a mocking image of Himself, a parody that plays with His fluidity for my own convenience. And how convenient that to fail Him, to fall short of being Him, is to also to be triumphant. To be ungraspable, to elude total definition, that is His triumph too! If one goes looking for Him, it is not as to bring him naked and complete into the light. Rather, one conceals Him into new and modern clothes. It is a dynamic mutilation, a loving disfigurement powered, as He would have wanted it, by blood.

The stories I tell of Him – I will call them fictions if it makes you feel more comfortable – they are my way of holding Him, biting Him. Stories and images are the exuviae of deities, shedding them like humans shed dead skin. Stories to wear and tailor like flayed skin. They are not about Tezcatlipoca, they are of Him. And by modifying them, I hold power over Him, power of contagion and of similarity; I mix us together. Fiction is the glue for our fragments to come together. Is my worship of Him a fiction or is fiction the way I worship Him?

To conceive Tezcatlipoca as a discrete being is a necessary fiction, an unavoidable artifice that permits His infinite character to be discussed in finite, human, terms. I manufacture Him into a fetish for His convenience and mine. I identify, both as artist and as spiritual seeker, as a fetishist. It is both a provocation and simply the most fitting term. Through the term's history of use there is the recurring impulse to point at someone else’s mistakes and delusions. All descriptions of fetishistic practices become lobbed accusations, denunciations of their failure at understanding and the dangers of not being able to perceive “the facts.” Fetishism becomes the opposite of knowledge, the arrest of a search, redirected into a phantasm. To voluntarily take its mantle is to argue for desire as the producer of meaning, to open myself to the knowledge that phantasms can offer. It is not simply a defiant or contrarian gesture, it is also a recognition of my kinship with practices that have been historically tied under this term. From the history of fetishism, certain recurring themes call to me, as reflections of my own doings.

The fetish can be described, at its simplest, as the conjunction of “a purposive desire and a material object.”[45] For the fetishists, their objects grant access to a power that can bring forth the satisfaction of their desire. Thus, the truth of the fetish lies in its material embodiment, its “untranscended materiality.”[46] Fetish objects are composed of heterogeneous parts which are brought together, weaved, by the connective tissue of desire. The heterogeneous components making up the fetish are not only varied materials and appropriated objects and fragments, but also beliefs, desires, and narrative structures. In making fetish, one joins together spiritual and material elements in order to grasp the former through the latter. Fetishes are tangled up matter and spirit, a knot where they become hard to distinguish. Tezcatlipoca becomes a substance, sometimes visible, sometimes more like a gap or aperture, sometimes a colour, that I spread over my objects, my artworks, to grant them His powers and conversely, in manipulating them, to grant me power over Him.

Some of my most trusted and powerful fetishes are my collected notebooks. Whenever I feel lost, I congregate them before me and dig in. Reading past notes, I access not just my thoughts but the state of mind that engendered them. They contain the potency of true revelation. They dispel the sticky veil of mindless routine. In the gathered lines, the way handwriting is full of gesture, haste and patience, coffee nervousness, arrows, scratches, how it hovers around drawn sketches, there is always hope. Irreducible materiality. I reconnect to those forces within me seeking transformation. It is there I find Him, in certain phrases, certain words that have been scratched out, in what I left out.

Fetishes garner power through repetition. I come back to my notebooks again and again. In re-reading them, my present thinking becomes again part of the pattern, while also adding new insights. Some thoughts, as if mantras, must be thought again and again for them to completely effect their transformation of the consciousness that thinks them. I transcribe an older fragment into a new notebook, place it in a constellation with other findings, old and new. It is the slow assembly of the ever-ongoing night of initiation. The initiation that has happened, is happening, will continue to happen, for it stands outside the linear passage of time.

Repetition builds an altar for Him. His body is dark, almost black ceramic. He is hollowed out, and inside of Him I place a dark lake surrounded by ashes and unbaked clay, pierce the grey mud with candles. I light my altar whenever I write, whenever I look for contact. And I wait for answers, looking at the reflections in the pond becoming smoked mirror, trying to read the flows of molten wax. Repetition gives life to my idol-altar. The more the candles burn, the more His face is painted with soot as the smoke uses His hollowed visage like a chimney. The ashen, unbaked clay alternates between trembling in humid plasticity and speaking through cracks when it dries. And the images in the surface of the water twirl and shake, bond with floating pieces of debris, imitate the dancing flames of the candles. I become addicted and superstitious, do not dare to write Him without first lighting the altar, for otherwise I can only fail.

So, who holds the power? The fetish or the fetishist? The god or the worshipper? Where does agency lie, in which way does it flow? In his series of essays “The Problem of the Fetish,” historian William Pietz speaks of the fetish as a “controlling organ.”[47] The human body, as the site of action and desire, subjects itself to the influence of a material object that, even if cut off from this body, is somehow plugged into and directing these currents of desire-energies. This submission to the perceived power of an object has generated much of the reproachful discourses around the topic of fetishism. The fetishist is perceived as a misguided slave, someone who has given up their freedom.

However, I want to argue in favour of fetishism as a source of creative and erotic freedom. The fetish is never just a natural object; it must be manufactured. The fetishist constructs the fetish, through their own agency. Only through their desire do the disparate parts acquire a unity and become a powerful totality. It is a voluntary submission that the fetishist executes. Artificiality as a characteristic, in the sense of something that has been man-made as opposed to a raw material, is present from the very origins of the term. The word fetish derives from the Portuguese vocabulary as it existed in the fifteenth century, from terms such as feitiço, feiticero, and feitiçaria. Linguistically, all these words derive from the Latin facticius or factitius. This Latin adjective became relevant and useful in Roman commercial language as early as the years 23–79 AD Pliny employs it in his Natural History to mean “manufactured,” characterising “man-made”[48] commodities in opposition to natural goods that have not been processed.

Anthropologist David Graeber goes back to Pietz’s foundational essays to highlight fetishism’s connection to creativity and thus to freedom. Pietz identifies the West Coast of Africa from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century as the birthplace of the fetish. In this region, indigenous inhabitants and European merchants, predominantly Portuguese and later Dutch, were brought into ever more intimate contact by the trade of gold. The term fetish emerged as a necessary if unreliable tool to negotiate between them. The fetish “was, according to Pietz, born in a field of endless improvisation, that is, of near pure social creativity.”[49]

The idea of social creativity was a constant focus for Graeber. He identifies a basic paradox within humanity's experience of organising themselves into societies: “People can see certain institutions…both as a human product and also as given in the nature of the cosmos, both as something they have themselves created and something they could not possibly have created.”[50] As his main example, Graeber uses the concept of social contracts, and he explores this idea through his use of cases from Madagascar and West Africa. Both West African and Malagasy charms “involved the giving of an oath or pledge by those protected by them, or over whom they had power; without that, it was simply a powerless object.”[51] By examining the practices that the Europeans labelled as fetishist, from the perspective of the actual practitioners, Graeber argues that these practices were little fetishised, if by that one means the lack of awareness as to how they had been created and whence their power originated from. The fetishes were seen by the West Africans as “having been created by human beings; people would ‘make’ a fetish as the means of creating new social responsibilities, of making contracts and agreements.”[52]

For Graeber, the West Africans’ heightened awareness of their own capacity to create new social realities, constantly modify their world, is the essence of revolution:

Fetishes…were almost invariably the basis for creating something new: congregations, new social relations, new communities. Hence any “totality” involved was, at least at first, virtual, imaginary, and prospective…It was an imaginary totality that could only come into real existence if everyone acted as if the fetish object actually did have subjective qualities…These were…revolutionary moments. They involved the creation of something new. They might not have been moments of total transformation, but realistically, it is not as if any transformation is ever really total. Every act of social creativity is to some degree revolutionary, unprecedented: from establishing a friendship to nationalizing a banking system.[53]

However, these gestures of creation and revolution may turn into submission, the kind of fetishism where our own creations begin to hold power over us because we believe that they do. Graeber sees no contradictions here, as he opines,

the dilemma is illusory. If fetishism is, at root, our tendency to see our own actions and creations as having power over us, how can we treat it as an intellectual mistake? Our actions and creations do have power over us. This is simply true. Even for a painter, every stroke one makes is a commitment of a sort. It affects what she can do afterwards.[54]

So much of what appeals to me about the fetish is the way it hovers between magic and religion. I recognise the tension, of looking for higher powers while wanting to preserve the ego and the self. Graeber uses the example of charms used in Madagascar, which

had names and stories, wills and desires, they received homage, gave blessings, imposed taboos. They were, in other words, very much like gods…[however] their hold on godhood seemed remarkably tenuous. New ones would appear; older ones might slip into obscurity…There literally was no clear line between ordinary “magic” and deities, but for that reason, the deities were in a constant process of construction. They were not seen as representing timeless essences, but powers that had proved, at least for the moment, effective and benevolent.[55]

A god under the process of construction. That is what Tezcatlipoca is to me, an endeavour in constant change, where its very incompleteness is what keeps it alive and keeps me from falling into permanent convictions, preserving ambiguities and fertile cowardice. The zone of the fetish, the zone of Tezcatlipoca, exists “at some point along the passage from an imaginary level of pure magic – where all powers are human powers, where all the tricks and mirrors are visible – to pure theology, with an absolute commitment to the principle that the constructive apparatus does not exist.”[56] I must hover at this place of instability. A moment that can be reached, a state that can be encouraged, full of plasticity, where ideas and beliefs are as malleable as the materials that pass through my hands. Both objects and frames of mind abandon solidity and mix momentarily like gases, then condense again so that the Ideal acquires shape in what I create and objects are but the still images of forces and processes. And so my deity, Tezcatlipoca, as I conceive Him is also permanently protean, a god still very much at the moment of formation or re-assembly.

Dream, 5 February 2022

The recurring dream begins in a darkened hut, at the edge of town. I am a kid again, surrounded by schoolmates, all boys. We are scared. Blood drips down my leg. Our teacher digs a trench where three canals intersect, an uneven asterisk seen from above. Each of them is filled with a different, strange, liquid. There is a red one, a black one, and a white one. The teacher implies that the colours are fucking each other. I look into them and I feel very disgusted. Rotten meat, spit, shit, and cum all mix and bubble. He pushes us into the canals and we all sink down. The red flows into my throat, makes me very drunk. The black goes into my lungs, gets me high like weed. The white goes up my urethra, I am very horny.

In this state I wander through a forest, thick and green, soft as it is musky. All around meadows and incense. The bark of trees grows into letters and symbols. I walk, and walk, and walk. It feels as if I had been walking for hours. I keep stumbling into my classmates, just as naked as me. Our erected dicks lightly bruise against each other and we recoil and run in a different direction. But I know it is unavoidable, we will stumble against each other again, dicks first. Sometimes, I escape this anxious state. As I run away, I see, right in front of me, a white beast. A sort of doe, not yet startled. It is a great struggle to counter the momentum of my flight and stay as still as possible, so as to not scare the shining animal. Most of the time I fail, and it vanishes immediately, and I am thrown back into a feverish loop or wake up startled. Even more rare are the encounters where I control myself well enough and the white creature does not flee. I know that my words must be as calculating as my movements have become. The pale beast listens to my greetings, and if those greetings are not graceful enough, it leaves.

It is in this moment that Tezcatlipoca offers His blessing. He is the black ooze running down my nostrils, tickling my trembling ribs. I take His offer every time. His curse is His blessing, His blessing His curse. Once I take Him in, so much comes to me at once. In a boiling room many people are dancing. No one is gonna wear that mask. In another room in my head, in a mysterious bed chamber, a maid steals jewels from a heart-shaped box. Another track meditates on how to artfully find a ridiculous path into Horror. And the moon is rising, rising, rising, something doubtful this way comes. All the while, a fraction of myself is engaged in conversation with the white doe. In equal skill we exchange quadruple-entendres and Tezcatlipoca is the one feeding me all the good lines. Worded like filigree diamond traps. By His encouragement we play a substitution game where everything is faked by us, but our fakery is so convincing that the spectators are polluted by the emotions they assign to us, their bodies turning these fictions into real fights, real murders, real fuckery.

If I could turn into a beautiful and exotic potted plant, she'd take me home, undress before me, and only the tips of her toenails would know who I truly am. Every word we exchange is a real delight. I am almost transparent, just a bunch of dew-drop dudes hanging out. O I am inviting and they come to munch on fresh buds from the spiked bush. Tezcatlipoca has blessed me with the perfect weapons, beguiling instruments. As the air comes out of my lips, I cling to it like a tick sucking all sound out. I repeat a particularly tasty syllable again and again until I make no sense. By then the pale prey has long gone, leaving the raving maniac behind. Not that I have realised at all their absence, the way their face seems to float before me and dance to the three songs I have simultaneously playing on repeat. Tezcatlipoca has cursed me with the perfect weapons, they have completely beguiled me. I am a cobra that hypnotises and bites its own reflection, charmingly. Tezcatlipoca has made me the perfect hunter, then stolen the impetus, the desire driving my search. His tools, however, remain fascinating. And so I devise a million other excellent uses. Like a cow figuring how to transmit radio waves with a hammer. I feel the potency of my own mind, how I may bend anything according to my own desires and the world will follow through, will twist and turn into whatever I say. I can’t be defeated. I am a rodeo clown getting robbed blind at toy-gunpoint by little kids, then shot in the face under purple light, and I love it! I’ve done work on the faces of the stars, pruned their long-dead light, stirred the muddy cosmo-ooze into cock-tails, celestial plastic surgeon. I sleep in reverse.

In many ways, I am making it all up. Once I wake up, almost all is forgotten. I remember Tezcatlipoca’s arrival, Him breathing poisons over me. More importantly, many times I remember the appearance and materials of one of His weapons. I scribble down the image in my notebook, as fast as possible, for each new second erases more and more. Later, in full daylight, I do my best to decipher my sketches, to figure out what the bad drawings represent and what possible use they might have had within the dream. At this point only resignation drives me. I turn the sketches into artwork-fetishes, knowing that whatever interpretation I come up with must be a total fabrication, a fiction far removed from whatever truth the dream contained. I embrace that fiction, for I have nothing else to embrace, ghost of a ghost. I fill it with belief to make it real, I let it have material consequences, guide my actions of the day. The result is an object that both refers to and creates the fiction. The use of the object is a return, not to the dream, but to the gap it has left, now waiting to be filled in fertile silence. And I am still a mysterious being.

Scattering into Million Pieces

Gods are scattered. Lacking in anything we could consider a main physically bounded body, they are distributed through time and space. A god is born when a pattern is spotted by the mind.

My god, Tezcatlipoca, is also scattered. Who and what and where is He? He has no fixed location, no material body that completely contains Him, rather He is spread over existence. He is gestures and shadows, inner and outer voices, thoughts and a specific way of thinking. He is the jaguar’s roar as it frightens heaven into raining like a cold sweat. He is the coyote’s playfulness, the un-fixity of his ways, his lubricity. He is the colour black as I mix it with latex. He is laughter as Georges Bataille understood it.[21] He is my most successful witty remarks, those that make pretty women laugh. He is oneiric melodies breaking over my body, rattling it until I can’t tell myself apart from the delight of being held.

In full regalia, shield and throwing lances at hand, Tezcatlipoca is painted,[22] constructed, by time. The icons representing the twenty days of the Aztec calendar are called upon to compose His body. Thus time is given a spatial and corporeal form. Time spreading itself across His body, His body spreading itself across time. From his mutilated leg a jaguar springs. An umbilical cord emerges from his loincloth and connects him to a lizard. He spits out a flower; his hair is meshed with a human jawbone. His cheek is the icon of movement, as if he would chew earthquakes. For the Aztec, each day is a god, an energy that lends its character and force to existence. Thus His body is a collection of forces and presences.

What time has gathered, it has also spread and broken up. In each corner of the picture, a Franciscan friar holds a long torch.[23] They have gathered all the idolaters’ treasures, books, and regalia and set flame to them. Amid the burning sphere one spots the faces of the complete Nahua pantheon. Tezcatlipoca burns too; He is now a bundle of ashes. In the next illustration there is “Great Justice” as five indigenous nobles, four men and one woman, hang.[24] In the foregroud, more of this justice is applied by flame: twin pyres for two other men, burning at the stake. The devouring fire that Cortez brought upon the continent spread wide. Only by breaking into little pieces, sinking underground, finding the joys of the mongrel life, was the indigenously unseen able to survive. For Tezcatlipoca, shape-shifting was as ever His best chance. He hid under the shadows. He became a riddle of broken-down languages. He exploded into a million tepalcates[25] so all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never put Him back together again.

Humans are scattered. They are tears and goosebumps, runaway itches, morning breath mixed in with sweat and musk from the anus, bundles of blister, calluses and flatulences, memories of home, impulses to jump, hands plucking the legs from insects.

The child remains physiologically incapable of controlling its bodily movements and behaviour…Its body is an uncoordinated aggregate, a series of parts, zones, organs, sensations, needs, and impulses rather than an integrated totality. Each part strives for its own satisfaction with no concern for the body as a whole…The child experiences its body as fragmented.[26]

My son, Álvaro, he too was first scattered. Then, one day, he saw himself in a mirror, and there, amid red and green tiles, he began to spin the fiction of a complete, discrete being. The mirror image is the master design that guides our crafting of a bundle of mutilated parts and presences. This process was described by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who called it the mirror stage. To my mind, philosopher Elizabeth Grosz gives a more clear and sensation-rich account of this Lacanian concept.

The child’s recognition of its own image means that it has adopted the perspective of exteriority on itself…The child sees itself as a unified totality, a gestalt in the mirror: It experiences itself in a schism, as a site of fragmentation…The child is now enmeshed in a system of confused recognition/ misrecognition: it sees an image of itself that is both accurate (since it is an inverted reflection, the presence of light rays emanating from the child: the image as icon); as well as delusory (since the image prefigures a unity and mastery that the child still lacks)…The child identifies with an image of itself that is always also the image of another. Its identification can only ever be partial, wishful, anticipated, put off into the future, delayed.[27]

A delay in glass. A submersion into the crystalline pool, of being entranced by the imago and yet, so distinctly separate. A piece that will forever be missing yet allows for the formation of the subject, a subject that by observing itself, being object to its own consciousness, can conceive of itself as a subject. As anthropologist Rane Willerslev puts it, “it takes two to make one: the subject recognises itself as such only at the moment it ‘loses’ itself in/as another…There is a paradox here in that the subject must experience self-objectification or self-alienation in order to gain a sense of itself as self.”[28]

The mind is scattered into an endless hall of mirrors. We constantly experience ourselves as divided and multiple. When our body fails and breaks down. When the words we utter are the shadows of our parents’ words. When we handle ourselves as objects to be observed, cared for, or tortured by our own imperfect understandings of love. We are passages and addresses for presences and structures to concentrate around. We are a myriad of identities, adaptive reflections of whoever is in front of us. The deeper we go, the more we multiply and break down into smaller fractal pieces.

Below the skin and out of it too. We do not end at the borders of our body, but extend, just as fragmented, through relation, into the world, into others, into the past. Aren’t we human beings nothing but patterns spread over time and space, bundles of inner thoughts and external actions? Our body would seem like a natural limit, but what of our actions and relations, the objects and ideas we create – are they not also extensions of our being beyond our local physical address? In his book Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, anthropologist Alfred Gell elaborates precisely on this conception of the distributed person:

[A] social individual is the sum of their relations…with other persons…A person and a person’s mind are not confined to particular spatio-temporal coordinates, but consist of a spread of biographical events and memories of events, and a dispersed category of material objects, traces, and leavings, which can be attributed to a person and which, in aggregate, testify to agency.[29]

Gathering the Pieces

Gods must be gathered. Here on earth, like the night sky, their enormity has forever enveloped us so that they become invisible, mistaken for emptiness. They seem broken because their bodies do not fit into our miniscule perception of time and so we see only disconnected images. As it is done with constellations, where the stars are but the shining spots of greater night beasts, we must cast our lines and tie them up into shape.

Dream, 25 October 2019

The killer's black mask. His presence is terrifying…A malevolent energy travelling quickly through space with violently transformative effects: A church’s tower is twisted until it reaches the floor and then straightens up again in only a couple of seconds, fleshy beings like a meat-eating ball or a long snake with human face and hands attacking a hospital, suddenly turning invisible. All these facts appear initially to me as separate and disconnected, then, more disquieting, I understand that there is the malevolent energy that ties them all together; they are steps in its flowing.

Gods are like patterns, and part of the task of gathering them together is to become skilfully paranoid. To be rid, at least temporally, of any need to prove whether the recurrences and synchronicities are really out there or simply a product of our wishful search. As magician Ramsey Dukes explains, what matters is that the pattern is personally experienced:

The pattern is said to be “recognised” rather than “discovered,” because the latter would imply the more Scientific notion that it “really existed.”…I ask the reader to focus now on verification, not falsification…Try to see the truth in what I am saying rather than to test it for falsifiability…While Scientists compete to disprove or reject ideas, Magicians compete to accept them…The Magical method is to act “as if” a theory is correct until it has done its job, and only then to replace it with another theory.[30]

As a seeker of Tezcatlipoca, I engage in this willing pretence; I trick myself into believing and then must keep my guard to remember it is I who carries out the tricking, too. If personal experience is all that is needed, I can claim success. He has come to me again and again. There are periods where His presence is very nimble and fragile, and others, as when my son was born, where it was constant, terrifying.

Sorcerous wind, seeking your favour, I ask you to grant me a vision, so I might know with which skins to dress you. I see a multitude of hands grasping for dirt, digging through shit and ashes, buried in death and rot, desperate for the shining treasure inside a corpse, cleaning themselves in shrouds. The vision had been granted, a door had been open wide and darkness called in more darkness. As if the sleeplessness and the intensity of it all had peeled off all the fat from my nerves. I wander the hall and living room of our darkened apartment, cradling my son to sleep. I open my eyes: There is a headless man sitting in the couch. I close my eyes: There’s a pale feline demon, smiling all his sharp teeth, rapacious jester coming closer and closer. I open my eyes: There is a little ghost girl in front of me, lightly swinging to the rhythm my cradling sets.

Nowadays, it is I who has to make a conscious effort to spot His presence in the images he leaves behind. I make myself see Tezcatlipoca in the giant ashtrays at the entrances of hotels, in the dark broken glass sliding down the gutter. When I think of Him, He takes on one of the faces I have given Him through my sculptures, looking at me upside down and smiling. It is I who must craft the vision.

Usually, the vision is conceived as “an unmediated intuition sent directly into our mind by a paranormal agent, or as an unconscious and thus uncontrolled effect of a mind-altering experience.”[31] However, for the seeker and, as Mary Carrouthers details, for the monastic traditions of the Middle Ages, visions were also something that could be crafted. This was a rhetorical approach to visions, a “mental crafting…most powerfully of use to call up the emotional energies of oneself and one’s audience.” [32] Preparing for a vision is “recognizably similar to the tropes of composition in antiquity” where dreams are “a way of remembering” and thus experienced as a digestion given “the commonplace link between remembering and digesting, meditation and rumination, books and eating.”[33] The vision only really exists once it is put down onto paper and thus enters the realm of fiction. Thus the vision must use fiction’s resources to express its own qualities.

Humans must gather themselves. The process of identifying the fleshy splinters and binding them into the fiction of the “I,” the tale of the “mine,” is one ruled by craft. The consummate individual is a master craftsman of stories, capable of joining the fantasies into the flesh, of weaving past events into memories so the self can remember itself into existence every morning. In opposition to the radical, the kind of plant that must remain anchored by the root to a particular place, Nicolas Bourriaud argues for a mode of being he calls the radicant. He is inspired by plants such as the ivy, which “develop their roots as they go.”[34] Such an individual translates itself “into the terms of the space in which it moves…the adjective ‘radicant’ captures this contemporary subject, caught between…identity and opening to the other. It defines the subject as an object of negotiation.”[35] It is a kind of nomadism of thought which “is organized in terms of circuits and experiments rather that in terms of permanent installations, perpetuation, and built development.”[36]

I enter the realm of the prehispanic, of the indigenous, as a substance willing to be diluted and transformed, as an experiment in the plasticity and inventiveness of what an “I” may dare to be. And to enter that realm is in itself to wound it and fragment it. When one submerges, excavates into the indigenous past, any past, one does not unearth a miraculously preserved treasure; rather, the shovel pierces and injures the past as it digs. The resulting dislocated fragments are then mixed in with new substances and attitudes to create hybrids of time. Thus, from both sides, two meeting halves, there is an opening up, a fruitful wounding and splitting. I fragment myself and fragment the land I traverse, to temporarily mix them together as one translates into the other, looking for connection. There is friction in this meeting of misfits. It is the spark of multiplicity: “The multitude is a source of energy, it kindles ideas and forms, works to produce shocks, frictions; just as flints produce fire when struck together.”[37] The prehispanic is translated into the limits, needs, and desires of a contemporary man. The unspeakable personal experience is translated into something that can be partially shared. The divine is translated into the mind of the mortal.

“A state of confused recognition/misrecognition”: How else to call my relation to the prehispanic, to the Aztec? Were the minds and bodies that first dreamed of the smoking mirror my brethren, my forefathers? Is the search for Tezcatlipoca a quest to go back to my origins, to find my true and complete being in the shadowy reflections? No! It is a search for the Other; it is a movement, and thus requires initial distance. I must imagine this distance, create it. Distance is the starting point when searching for an ethical relation to the Other. I speak Spanish; I am from the upper middle class; I was raised, for all intents and purposes, with standard western values. Thus, the realm of Aztec religion is a foreign land, distant in time and circumstance. But the distance is there to be, at least temporarily, surmounted. Breached by empathy and mimesis, by searching in the Other what also lies within me, by finding what is Other within me.

Thus the trickster god, eater of human hearts, roamer of jungles long turned to wood chip, is fragmented and thrown into the unstable mixes of my mind. There He must coexist and mingle with gods of other pantheons, trash found on the street, a penchant to look for Him in pop songs. Doubt and desperation injuring Him. Fear and attraction pulling Him apart.

All images by the author