“Zayin is masculine—ZACHAR. And there belongs to this man a beard—ZAKAN. And this man is old—ZAKAYN. And this man can look back through time—Z’MAN, and he remembers—ZACHAER, everything.”
MMXX is a Spotify playlist I made in/for #TwentyTwenty and @rbinbetween.
“Only he who is beaten—KATEET, like oil which has been beaten from olives, until he is—KASHER, pure and fit, shall drink. Then Kaf turns itself into a crown.”
AMALGAMA is a Spotify playlist I made during eclipse season.
“There is another kind of Resh. This is the end of pretending. ROSH HASHANA, the day of admitting. Master of the universe! RIBONO SHEL OLAM, have compassion—RACHAMIM—on your children. The harder a soul tries, the harder yet it must try. And this is the striving of Resh. That one who is pious knows that he is far closer to wickedness than someone who is in between. This is how he became pious.”
BIRTHDAYS IN BARDO is a Spotify playlist I made for my solar return, which is today, ten years after an actual birthday in Bardo—the nightclub in Beirut, the capital of nightlife—and the last time I celebrated with friends like @rbinbetween.
These past ten years have indeed felt like bardo—an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth, a place in betwixt & between.
In between—what? Then and now? Old and new? Lost and found? Arbitrary bookends to moving goal posts; there is only maneuver and motion—betweenet, raw7a bala raj3a, elakh.
This is not a lament—this is a celebration. Like the queer fraternity of under-leg lambada in open-secret utopias by the mythopoetic sea, this life is free love and this bardo is a blessing in drag—until Kingdom come—linking words, without end.
“More conservative minds deprive coincidence of meaning by treating it as background noise or garbage, but the shape-shifting mind pesters the distinction between accident and essence and remakes this world out of whatever happens. At its obsessive extreme, such attention is the beginning of paranoia (all coincidence makes ‘too much sense’), but in a more capacious mind, it is a kind of happy genius, ready to make music out of other people’s noise.”
(Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World)