An Elemental Thing

by Eliot Weinberger

In the Bosavi language, the word for “tomorrow” is the same as the word for “yesterday.”

“A new line is a new mind.”

In one version of the Aztec creation myth, Quetzalcoatl, as God of Wind, blows a conch shell horn over a pile of bones to create mankind. A conch is a vortex you hold in your hand. In Nahuatl, the same word means “to whirl” and “to give life to.” They believed there were certain poems that were born on a tree of flowers in paradise, that came whirling to earth.

Doing no violence to living things, not even a single one of them, wander alone like a rhinoceros. Affection comes from the company of people, misery comes from affection, wander alone like a rhinoceros.

all stars move and shine in order to be most fully what they are—light gives light because it is its nature; ac-quaintance with the stars is essential to an understanding of the poets; if the stars did not radiate light they would explode; souls after death inhabit the stars—the blaze of a new star might therefore indicate that the soul of a great man, or woman, had reached its destination;