The Chimera Manifesto (Ongoing)
A Manifesto in 5 chapters.
I. Chimera
noun
1) Fire- breathing she-monster in Greek mythology having a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail;
2) An illusion or fabrication of the mind;
3) Biology: an individual, organ, or part consisting of tissues of diverse genetic constitution.
How many bodies live within ourselves?
Dreaming of Chimera as violence and kinship.
Contamination brings revolution: soiling among beings
until a newancient collective surfaces.
Hybrid derives from hubris, the deadly sin, the excess, the violence.
Hybrid as creating new categories becomes the ultimate set of disruption.
Hybrid as liminal. All liminal spaces are made of change and exchange.
There is not such a thing as a blue feather, only the trapping of sunshine.
A blue bird is a miniaturized sky, and endless array of diffused rays of light.
Are blue birds blue to themselve?
II. Bisnonna
From close enough, bodies are chimeric. I am made
of membranes that can be crossed
of collectiveness of lives lived together
of viruses that are not consider alive yet impact as
macroscopic giants stepping through the planet.
Viruses are the ordered outcome of chaos, someone
once told me.
As influenza viruses pass
from birds to pigs to horses to birds to bats to pigs to bats to horses to human:
The cellular membrane is where I dream to be a bird.
A virus connects, dwelling in bodies of different species.
Am I a community if we share inhabitants?
There is comfort and danger in sameness.
I am made of the memories of who came before me.
I am made of past & future contaminations.
How many of my ancestors were microbes?
How many of them contributed to the stories my genes narrate?
How many of my great grandmothers were birds?
She died in 1920 of childbirth, my grandfather.
She died in 1920 of childbirth and Spanish Flu complications.
She is in a mass grave of 1918 influenza victims.
She is forgotten: I don't know her name, or her face.
I require chimeric ancestry.
III. Offerings
I give you what I see, and it is not the same.
Every species sees something different in the world.
Can I gift you what I cannot understand?
I don't know.
IV. Hummingbirds
Hummingbirds like fluids in movement and genetics.
A generating that refuses categories.
Hybridization as an escape strategy.
V. Ocean
If life started with blue (an origin story)
It began with a microscopic droplet of water
secluded from the rest of the ocean.
Cyanide and water creates us, as shapes on the paper surface.
Porosity.
As the ocean echoing on the land, I am made of membrane that can be crossed. I am molecules that speak the same language across species.
Chemical translations are chimeric, they don't belong,
Life is richer int he liminal:
on the shore where skylandsea come together life explodes
in all shapes and forms and relations
it can imagine.
Membranes are the liminal origina of life separating
inside and outside,
primordial identities:
(My body still knows when I am in salt water. Still knows
when my tears and sweat could find themselves in the
The ocean and I are same, we have different currents.)
I am what the ocean is not, yet I am the ocean.
without.
Our bones are made of calcium from water.
Our blood contains the iron of rocks and magnets.
Go lay down on the ground, they deserve to feel home.