O, my close friend, death. Forest, an open grass field, a still river that speaks of nothing but peace, was a place I found this self of mine. Naked, sleeping on the soft ground, from afar I could see a boat floating, empty. The sun burned as if the place were a desert: I stood up and walked closer to the water, etching my half-numbed arm. While I was standing and getting confused by what was unfolding, a rabbit appeared and came closer to where I was standing, and jumped straight into the river. I thought ‘a rabbit committing suicide’, what a strange thing, as if my own presence was not strange enough. I was contemplating this event under one of the trees along the river, a crow, larger than a usual crow, appeared and began smashing its wings against the tree forcefully, breaking both. Just like that unfortunate rabbit, it came slowly, shuffling and walked into the water as if it were being baptized by the lord himself.
I was shocked by what was happening to me, and these two events marked for me the ambivalent nature of nature. Confusion, born out of the familiar, became a shade that cooled down my naked body. I sat down, questioning everything and trying to remember how on earth I came to this place. In this process of decomposing the mind, I learned to expect the inverse of what one expects from wild animals; if events are self-explanatory, the two are the recipe. What do they explain? Well, they explain a quality one expects from humans, the negative, if I am in the position of judging those qualities as such. The quality of self-humiliation, of shame, of degradation, of disgust, of intimidated submission to all that exists; such was a quality I deeply felt permeate this place, not reflected in humans but animals.
A turtle, after formulating my diagnosis of the “illness” that constituted the place, out of nowhere began laughing a laughter that triggered a memory of that wretched woman I called Mother. After that lousy, annoying laughter, it miraculously began to utter in human language the following words: “It is a wind, it has always been a wind, and it is about the searching that you participate in. The search for an axe, an axe that can break and remake the closed system that you triumphantly call ‘duality of the she’, which you left unexplained, for you believed explanation is the root of all evil. Why should the spirit of explanation and order visit you? Since you hold this belief, even for me, let alone humans, don’t long for any explanation to whatever you have found yourself in.” As if my mouth was muted by a third party, controlling when and how to perform a mere act of utterance, it seemed I was condemned to listen and think. The turtle disappeared into the tall grasses. That creature provided me with a misnomer. I felt whatever was said by that thing had no relation to me, but since my memory was obscured and in need of order, I opted to place its accusation at the centre of both psychic and physical journey.
Let them talk, let them be, and observe. Set out on the road to nowhere, since it was really nowhere. When one is at a disadvantage of the past to orient oneself in the present, the primordial instinct of association appears, but for me, it was not in its purest sense. Because I could discriminate behaviour which was a part of the human self, I wished to uncover, fill the hole of being somewhere. It was this, almost insatiable, that pushed me up from the gaze into the water and towards the wild, waiting to be judged by my yet infant appetite for self-knowledge and order, an appetite that later might become perverted.