Revenant Song:

Against abyssal thinking

Something strange has been always

happening with my names:

As the owners of the abyssal thinking,

always give me the scariest ones

or, suspicious of the value of words

and symbols,they make them disappear

Regina de Miguel

I, in the meantime,

codify

decipher

encrypt

linguistic and genetic actions

they erase inscriptions with layers of paint

they burn birthmarks

they impale

the slit open

they protect me well, they armor-plate me

they store me

like a file

a volume of data

they hurry me

to the other side of the line

Inmaterial 01. Regina de Miguel

they produce me non-existent

underground fetish

they do not realize

that I am dialectical

that I am co-present

Hail

Lamasthu

diabolic daughter

of the God of Heavens

lion-headed

bird-clawed

nursemaid of hounds and pigs

of non-human tendencies

Lilith

Espectra

Lamia

Procris

Penthesilea

Empusa

Harey

We are a pictogram

a first code

of cuneiform writing

in obsidian boards

in interfaces where

our awareness

is a state of matter

our identity

a vector

And those satellites

drones

mortal algorithms

do not know yet

of internal

behaviours

∫Terra[X]n = ∫∫∫∫...∫∫Terra(X1,X2,X3,X4,...,Xn,t) dX1 dX2 dX3 dX4...dXndt =

Terrapolis

X1 = stuff/physis, X2 = capacity, X3 = sociality, X4 = materiality, Xn = ??

(alpha) = not zoë, but EcoEvoDevo’s multispecies epigenesis

Ω (omega) = not bios, but recuperating terra’s pluriverse

t = worlding time, not container time, entangled times of past/present/yet-to-

come

100

Inmaterial 01. Regina de Miguel

Song of extremophilia: Descende, audax, viator, et terrestre centrum attinges

I have lost count of the time I have been here

I do not really know

but the suitable conditions have taken place to wake up

after several centuries

not knowing how much I could bear

because nobody ever trusts.

Tis is a lake, I know that.

A lake or a swamp or a river.

Rio Tinto.

Or a pit

And that red acidic water I dye

I metabolise.

I thank my philia for my extreme conditions

Te dissent, the dysfunctionality, my abnormal enzymes

even if I do not exist, if they do not conceive me nor classify me

being innumerable, unthinkable

I dwell the furthest, Urras and Anarres

the deepest, the most poisoned, the eight circles of hell, Bacillus Infernus

Deception Island

Xerophile, I have desiccated myself

Halophile, in the Dead Sea

Audaxviator

Verne’s Bold traveler.

Inmaterial 01. Revenant Song: against abyssal thinking

103

60 degrees, isolated, without oxygen, in the dark inside a gold mine in South

Africa.

I am an ecosystem of one single species

My mineral environment is dead

I have built my organic molecules

from the decay of uranium,

from the moisture of the soil,

from the inorganic carbon of the rocks,

from nitrogen, from ammonium

here we know neither pure oxygen nor the sun

I have not seen the light for more than 3 million years

Tis is Mars and Enceladus

mm.rnlls esreuel seecJde

sgtssmf unteief niedrke

kt,samn atrateS Saodrrn

erntnael nuaect rrilSa

Atvaar .nxcrc ieaabs

Ccdrmi eeutul frantu

dt,iac oseibo kediiY

Inmaterial 01. Revenant Song: against abyssal thinking

105

tolerating arsenic

enduring radiation

psychrophile, thermophile,

I fell with the red rain of Kerala

Tey said my origins were extraterrestrial

from the left hand of darkness

where only the uprooted live

from the consciousness of Faustine

thence descends, Audax Viator

until reaching the center of the Earth

Inmaterial 01. Revenant Song: against abyssal thinking

107

Necropolitical Song

Google Ngrams 

detects, determines, orders

words and their various assemblies

algorithms that result in time-worn ontologies 

among millions of volumes 

amassed

in data centers

and I still think reductionist substances: 

How many times can an expression, 

the association of two or more, 

be used? 

Which ones disappear?

Te black mirror reveals others acting

“Artificial Life”

from Frankenstein 1918 

to predicting large data 

you descends from its summit 

among millions of thoughts

108

Inmaterial 01. Regina de Miguel

It would be better mutating

It designs bacteria It reads,

cuts and pastes

fragments of DNA

I am a living machine

riding a comet

fallen into the prebiotic broth

millions of years without balance

I have an internal programme

I am a cell designed 

not by a higher intelligence

I am a potential tumour 

a machine within a machine

Sometimes I lose

the order of initial assembly 

my chromosomes

the markers

I don’t detect 

they simulate me to understand me

they program me to disappear

but death itself fails

Living under the late modern occupation

is to be permanently

in the pain of fortified structures

it is standardizing a certain madness

here we test with life but also with death

Terror, death and freedom 

are static concepts of temporality and politics

if my machine is a slave

that tumour is lack of freedom in my colonized body 

the same lack is the way I bear my mortality in mind

Cell suicide is also

in the simplest life forms it was there in the early seas

it lives on in algae and in viruses.

110

Inmaterial 01. Regina de Miguel