re-earthing

The secret name is the gesture that restores the creature to the unexpressed. In the final instance, magic is not a knowledge of names but a gesture, breaking free from the name.¹

Those who refuse to listen to dragons are probably doomed to spend their lives acting out the nightmares of politicians. We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark; and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.²

Now that I have named this breeze I must also confront the paradox of its death (or likely death) by exposure. I tweet it or I lodge it in a description beneath an instagram post or I mark it in my notebook or I use it to justify my academic existence. The breeze becomes a flex. Un-earthed by language; torn from the ecosystem of silence and subtlety that sustained it—ultimately made glaringly apparent for the undying appetite of the network. It enters into the discourse, consumed, but hardly digested before it is spat back out, another beautiful flex, but this time it has lost some of its gust. It is collectively flexed and flexed until it is withered and drained of its breeziness. It hardens into information and data; hardens into yet another bead on the abacus of the apocalypse. Here it remains, un-earthed, exposed in the daylight of language, burned by the sun of our linguistic prison.

Now: how to re-earth that dead secret—the endlessly chewed cud—as if it were a seed? How to return it to the night, where it can be listened to and felt, but left un-named? How to return it to some place it can only be gestured to, tucked away in the rhythm of a song, hidden in the reality of the stone. I don’t know. My language does not permit me access to this kind of thing. I can only colonize secrets.

I am caught now in the act of doing what I ought not to do.

Do you know what people did in the old days when they had secrets they didn’t want to share? They’d climb a mountain, find a tree, carve a hole in it, whisper the secret into the hole and cover it up with mud. That way, nobody else would ever learn the secret.³