Not your body (the accountants)
by Lene Vollhardt
INTRO
A group of people from the Yawanawa tribe singing, while convening around a bulky tree trunk with a rippling, undulating bark. A teenage girl with crimson markings on her face plays the guitar. She sings the loudest of all. The murky green-brown background is interspersed with the black and crimson faces of a few white men – later dubbed as the accountants – whom the camera tries to avoid. They sing along tentatively, with lower volume. This place is where the villagers pass by daily, not just for situations like this. Most of their seasonal rituals take place in this location, where bodies are steamed and fanned with lengthy, verdant leaves. These same leaves are later dried and repurposed for tobacco.
Half a year before I knew I was going to leave Europe and visit the indigenous village of the Yawanawa, in Acre, Brazil, I had a conversation with Chris Kraus (published in Arts Of The Working Class, 2018), in which I said, “Looking for signs is one of the things, that connects “I” (the protagonist of ‘I love Dick’) to Simone Weil, but surely also to others. Quoting you: “There is a tendency amongst romantic people”, “I” says, “to see their lives as grids and mazes, unfolding through an erratic but connected set of lines. These randomly occurring series of causalities may be retrospectively observed to form a pattern….” I said, “Probably a lot of people can relate to that idea, even though rationalists claim this as madness. Are you (still) looking for signs? I’m thinking of that saying: “You only pray when you need something.” When an “I” becomes aware that security is an Illusion, the attempts to draw a matrix of security towards oneself seem human. Some seek the advice of authorities like you, “some are waiting for signs” and others say that patterns of judgment and development processes represent rationality. I tend to think: “I interpret signs, therefore I am.” Why are we thirsting for the signs of a higher intelligence? Chris said, “Because life is hard and we’re hoping for guidance.”
All of the above was the case for me, when I sought an intermediary refuge from London’s inflated rent situation in the summer of 2019, in Portugal. After a few nights of ceremonial plant spirit education with healers of the Yawanawa, I persuaded four Polish accountants from London to take me along on their cruise down the Amazon amid the setting of proliferating fires in the rainforest. The fires’ increase became violently incremental and capped the record number of fires ever set in the entire territory. The indelible forcefield of destruction neatly dovetailed with the playbook of global capital interests placing profit as superior to the casualties in their way.
I felt drawn to the fire, and to getting to study the healers’ cosmologies and practices, and followed signs occurring in my dreams after the ceremonies. Could this liaison with the ones who seek to reorganize and transmute the fire's sacred properties, reverse my fear of cosmic isolation? Is chaos a teacher? If yes, is a practice of learning signified by the decision to heal? Or, does it rather shift the locus of signification altogether? With my lived condition with dissociative amnesia, it made sense to choose destination in lieu of destiny for a start.
Not unlike many others who have encountered plant medicine, I perceived the plant as an agent whose expression is delivered through the application of collective and individual stewardship, ethereal presence, and unreal responsiveness distributed over time and multiple senses.
I followed the Yawanawa people back to their village in search of healing from a failing psychiatric system. In the place where once Westerners installed their illusive system of debt peonage, and genocide upon the indigenous people, now Westerners came to receive indigenous medicine administered by indigenous healers, accrued with fiat currency. The patients-clients arrive with an expectation of healing depending on their conception of what healing means - similar to other endeavors of study, the goal is determined by the student's desired application IRL.
As a good student, I knew that comfort is only in Western societies a sign of being well, and I was interested in how pain is understood in indigenous ways of knowing. I wanted to form a new relationship with it, to find other patterns of learning from, living with, or healing it.
My understanding of study is entrenched in the suspicion of scientific/academic language, as the structuring element of Western science, which legitimacy has been interpreted as shaped by objectifying processes, via Descartes’s distinction between “res cogitans” and “res extensa” predicated on a clear separation of subject and object.
I do not dismiss it entirely, yet I refrain from accepting its form as a neutral channel for the transduction of knowledge. I seek to explore alterity through the occurrence of excess and multiplicity of language, and genres.
Not Your Body
(The Accountants)
1,2,3
NOT YOUR BODY
Death
(sound of forest fading into organically oscillating white noise)
4,5
Documents
Not your history (me)
Forest
Governance
Devotion (Singing from the top of your lungs)
6 (missing)
consume (can’t release)
You’ve consumed
You’ve escaped
0.
Hi Iga, ok, so this is about Ayahuasca and the consumption of indigeneity, about the accountants, and radical study.
0.0
Mediterranean Airports: Lisboa - Madrid - Rio de Janeiro - Rio Branco - Cruzeiro do Sul
We almost didn't mention the seamless borders that are more like sound than space. The airport spits us into all the amenable polymers of quantifiable character, aerodynamic foams, and stiffened latex.
There was nothing left to copy but so many molds around us. Humans felt like matter, cats, surfaces, whatever. I would randomly say or think things inappropriate to who was in front of me and couldn’t control when it happened. When the cowboy is dreaming, he is dreaming of abolishing himself. I travel with him and the others but have no control over who is on air and when. I will be closer to the wildfires of the Amazon, in sound, and I am not afraid. Some of us are just projecting onto a forest that's currently being churned and destroyed. Some of us want to feel close somehow, but we also can leave, probably, with my body, if things get tough.
Not your body
1,
Two nights later I turn into a black bird. I re-learn how to breathe. Air, turned solid, is filling, cracking, slipping sinuously through the layers of my skin.
I breathe, as my lung expands and throbs, and it's not so easy at first, I have to fill all the nooks and crooks of my bulbous, spherical body.
1, 2,
I tell myself to breathe and stretch, the spine throbs upwards. This mechanism merely instilled to beat gravity. Some higher force assumes command, and my body concedes. The spine yields: a regenerative economic circle of leaking cells. We ascend in a fucking spiral.
2b) tangent
As to study; a thing that I’m still trying to understand what it is, would learning mean becoming conscious about what is omitted in the daily acts of self-censorship due to having unstructured thoughts that we have no semantic framework to attach to? If yes, Is this the finite answer? Spoiler: No.
That night my friend Edyta tells me as a child in church she always flirted with that Jesus image silhouetted against a sky-blue fresco and now she still is actually longing to date someone who looks like Jesus.
She also tells me she likes when things are simple. She tells me she knows she is a little stupid but that's how she is.
Later,
While our bodies become more and more round, non-human, our bones are still with us, they always were. I learned to be grateful. I say Matar, thank you. Matar has seen every portal. I think Immortality.
The humbleness of inorganic material, and the bones yield, those nested stones, animate procedures in a vertical array. They exude wholesale embodiments of visceral apparitions, bleeding in and out, so real, perhaps ancestors? Or new alters? Later I am not sure if I should speak about this with the others, and if I should say how confused I am about past lives. And that I’m thinking now differently about exogamic totemism. If I am in the body of someone suddenly, in a desert, and that body feels like mine, but I’m an approximately 54-year-old woman? And I know things I didn't know before, stuff with colour density and textured sounds and movement. The next few days I’d sit arched over the soil concentrating on the flow of my blood circulation tethering to glitchy threaded drops of energy shooting up from the soil. I have a sudden “knowledge” about, about masculine and feminine energy that I can balance, also in other people. This wasn’t study, as I never believed in archetypes relating to human biology, and as a person with dissociative identity disorder, I believe even less in binaries. But it feels really nice to feel this throbbing secrete-like sensation, and the feeling of knowing what to do, without actually knowing what I’m doing.
3.
DEATH
Sheinihoo (the young indigenous leader):
“Humans never died. We have a hard time to believe they ever die. When the first person died, it was Ra the turtle, and on his head, the Yamaoma tree grew. Since then, Humans started to die.”
I’m thinking now, maybe actually no one dies because no one is lost ever and there are no veils, no mirrors. No airports where we are all convertible in the face of our revelatory transparency.
4.
DOCUMENTS
A cluster of bluish-green-yellow ruminating in front of the crescent shape formed by the singers. In their place, I see a quick zigzag a flutter of butterflies next to which Cowboy walks away, on his own, from the big bulky tree into the rainforest. He is chewing on coca leaves, he thinks
“The obsession with documents, its extent I only grasp desperately trying to find a store that sold paper. Feels like control, as if interchangeable with my senses, my sense of being here and now, experiencing. Observation as if firsthand. And also, the magic of creating neutrality. Neutrality can be achieved on a paper, using a language we have learned from our ancestors.”
Earlier on, in 1552 AD ?, La Casas Bartolomé (a missionary priest gone rogue, whose writings are the only ones you can find in London bookstores if you look for the genocidal quest of el Dorado) writes on a clean sheet of paper:
“That which could only be known by language is different from the unmediated experience. We make of it what we are capable of, pressing into our little boxes of knowledge and holding onto the knowledge of that form, was valuable. You will not gain an understanding of the quality of the fruit, for such cannot be understood without the senses of smell, and taste.”
“Only the appeal to the senses, which link to the body, seems capable of bringing closer and guaranteeing – that which is lost in language.” “historein” means “see, know”, only those who have witnessed are historians. “A true historian is a witness.”
—
What did we do there, in Yawarani?
Navigating the water, I hear Shinihu say.
And I still think about what value transfer means. I’m hoping the accountants can tell me more. I just know the conversion hurts in the heart.
Otherwise, to my surprise, I find no iconography, no heightened and symbolised gestures of suffering, but joy.
There are,
SNAKE
PANTHER
TOAD.
There is dignity in the face of the fire all around Acre. The accountants and us are helping build new houses.
5.
(not me)
Hey Iga, so yeah today I was thinking like, a lot about like transactionality and complicity in these western systems, of, you know, value transactions that are in itself insanely injust and insanely painful and I’m trying to make my way out I guess I don't know.
so the weird thing was that I was going into the village with Polish rich accountants who live in the UK and like, so random, got in touch with them really randomly because, cause you know I was broke, I was in Portugal and I had a dream of the Yawanawa after a ceremony with them and then I reached out to the Ayahuasca organiser and they put me in touch with those rich accountants and they said they're going to go to the Yawarani village in August, in Brazil, and that I can join and pay them back whenever so took them by the word and I went with them and they're really like nice guys, I was the only woman in that group, I thought it was going to be completely fine for me to go with them because I was going to be so grateful that they're taking me, anyway, and I really should be, but they're basically filming themselves all the time like non-stop, with a selfiestick like, from the moment we met until the point where we arrived at the village with the motorboat down the Amazon , and then they continued, they continued every day, every morning every day, every night, whenever they're walking like to the hut to get food, they would film themselves. Actually just one person in particular all of the time. Ahm. Whether he went into the rainforest for a walk or together, or alone, he'd just film himself all of the time it'd drive me mad because I really didn't like that behaviour and I really didn't want to be like, associated with that, so I wanted to kind of set myself apart. I wanted to believe that I'm like much better than him, but then the weird thing was that he had a really good connection to the indigenous people all the time like that. Basically they had like a really nice kind of connection, for me was way difficult because I didn't speak Portuguese and I didn't even try to speak Portuguese, yeah and you know, I basically relied on my kind of instinctive interest and projected field of connection onto them.
Which? I was believing going to like create that exchange that was needed for me and well I guess I am like slowly unpacking the ways in which that has actually shown the degrees of my own ways of projecting onto into indigeneity and through that like also creating the Other, separation.
So in that othering there is this demand to be shown otherwise and to heal my relationship to everything that's wrong everything that I'm suffering from here it's all of that it's kind of loaded onto this other figure of the indigenous, leader or whatever, to provide some kind of counter-existence and, and I wanted access to that and I got access of that. And it was really that simple for me to get access to that, even for free I mean I didn't pay for it, up till now I haven't paid for it because there was Covid afterwards,
and I was since then so insanely broke like everything I was just exploited by white men in these seemingly ethical and altruistically oriented crypto firms back then, and I told those accountants about it, back then, in the forest, and they told me that everything is going to work out just fine, just wait until after the ceremonies, the universe will have sorted it all out for you, and guess what it wasn't, and so yeah I think I think that also made me a little bit mad that all these people thought everything was going to be fine for me, and then it absolutely wasn't.
At a later point I’d realize how much I need to work, how much of the work lies within myself.
So yeah, what is that fantasy? What is that thing that you like, go onto the other side of the world to meet the other that they then provide this like, in, insane like, landscape of solutions for you, and for your life that you were like basically turning into this new person, and then when you turn into a new person, because it's quite extreme those rituals and to see all the shit that you see, which not everyone does, but yeah on the other hand,
This is when integration happens: going beyond the feel-good stuff.
The other is a fetish the other is so much bigger than me but I accept that I command access and actually they just know how to live and how to be and they have magic powers and its all the same coin.
You only start the process of dying the plant spirit told me in these sessions. Basically like fuck off, like just like go and fix your shit, just go and fix it or die. Cause then you're useful. You're really useful to the Earth, and I was quite distraught about that message. It was like, I wasn't really very happy about it, but after I got that message I felt the need to go into that new ceremony on the other side of the world.
Yeah, so I'm thinking like about this dimension of access, and that dimension of projection, that sort of doesn't really allow for a human figure in front of you, because they have to carry that, that projected field in order to be legitimate. In order to be like, useful in, in western categories.
6.
CIRCLES
We fold our arms into one another, our embrace shapes a big circle. We’re dancing together. Weaving arm into arm, next to another one’s spine, there is a wing held by another arm, I tuck my arm under. The wings of the angel next to me erupt with rotating faces, rotating bodies.
Dissolving each other’s timelines, the times in which we are.
Everyone’s flesh is a face.
Folded into one another, we walk in circles, always in the same place, but no circle ever is the same once we reach the point of the beginning.
Everyone has glowing skulls. I can see through your flesh, I can see your skulls and they’re beautiful. I wonder if the other ones see them too, if this is a special skill of the Yawanawa. I cannot ask questions, I don’t speak the languages of Yawarani, nor Portuguese, the music is loud, we’re all meant to sing. I see all of us are holding the lines of our ancestors, threads of other timelines, all kind of stacked in parallel.
It’s too dark to see anyone’s eyes, all the bodies are covered in layers of shadows, they have the texture of an iris that is only for me. Iridescent, glowing the surfaces of dancing, interweaving bodies in the dark. We are turning the wheel that we are the sparks of. Not a totem, just a maze that can turn into a wheel.
7.
GOVERNANCE
Internally disassembled, we align throughout the plane that is our ceremony. I feel every part of this plane, I feel everyone around us. I feel the movements of the pajés, especially their feathered crowns, that emit this choreography. What happens here is governing. Every movement in space is a piece in this opera.
TEACHING THROUGH DEVOTION
SINGING FROM THE TOP OF MY LUNG
HOW THAT FEELS WHAT THAT DOES IN THE BODY
synchronistic events
Happiness is endless exercise in devotion to ancestors
Can you imagine being so satisfied, satiated that you do not need anything. Everything is its own beautiful fragment, its own texture, the way it holds itself amongst the others.
THE ONLY THINGS I’VE WRITTEN IN MY DIARY
Sacred seeds, new language, new structure
Momentieren (moment as a verb)
existenzielle Ausfuerhlichkeit (a circle) consequential abundance
To be defined:
WOUND
Goal:
peripheral attention
WEAVING: time zones. oceans, soils, breath
MATTERING
Why choose words to describe what only their hands know.
Despite the hands’ ability to be in service of translation.
body to line
Line to cypher.
Cypher to symbol.
Symbol to scripture,
Scripture to substance.
In our system all is full of hierarchies.
The bird slushes through my chest, there she is. Inside there now. It’s white.
It teaches me how to feel such satiated warmth in my whole body, almost as if through the warming of my stomach a sunset appears, warming up all my blood, under my chest, held by my ribcage.
(The bird caressing me)