The childhood house

and the wars

I watch the seventh season of a fancy family real estate show I love, in France, expanding into the entire world, on Netflix. My chance to practice the language, sometimes without subtitles,

and to marvel, once again, at the amount of exquisite marble extracted from the many sources of mining stone from around your own world, Bahia Blue, Pure White from the State of the Holy Ghost to cater for the exquisite tastes of humans of means, who admire formations of marbled framed art, carved deeply out of the ground as bathtubs, kitchen counters – who admire the geometric love embedded in these stoned natural creations… the meshing of look-alike subtle art with hints of transcended vaginas inside kitchens is always a pleasure, isn’t? Art placed where, according to whose rules and according to whose desires? And here we go…¹

Paulo Freire appears. I read an article about him on a Substack flow from the School for Radical Attention I do recommend. ²

Freire was not concerned about teaching the poor to write so they could join the ones who read and who wrote, the better society of those who could. He was more interested in motivating the disconnected poor to read the alphabet, so they could decide if they wanted to extract marble or not, as peons, by learning to read that foreign language…to vote and to write, maybe.

So as to change the rules, if so they wished.

He was interested in finding ways to facilitate the knowing of your own languages, and of different languages that you did not know, with the tools and knowledge you have, built-into your own. Language explained and expanded to mean your entire encounter with the outside, your yang manifested, and your yin interior, both in constant flow. Not some internal and external you, but rather a multiplicity of places, creatures and times that are as alive as you are, in co-habitations.

Freire designed and implemented a literacy program, now known worldwide. At the time, a military general named Castelo Branco stated: “young man, you’re fattening up rattlesnakes here in these backlands [sertões].” The project managed — astonishingly — to teach literacy to three hundred participants in just over a month.”

Oh no, don’t let the rattle snakes out of their cages. ³

And I am paraphrasing here, because this is exactly what my recent dream about grooming and planting the entangled poisonous copper coral snakes for the future was showing me. Plant it and it will grow. Seed it and it will sprout… Yet we continue to plant and to grow without access, without asking access to the layers of knowledge to destruction we are entirely responsible for… combined with the many levels of creation. Are we to be held responsible for …life? with death implied? hardly…

Literacy is a way to define and to separate what poison is and what snake is. It is a strange modern way to codify the praying… 2

A strange way to justify the plunder. It is a very weird and strange way to name love.

When we do not own the future, we do not know the languages spoken there and we pay homage and close attention to signs who might give us portents…of otherwise. We improvise.

and we dream.

The wars and my childhood house

I am sitting on the red tile front steps of the veranda, in my childhood house, alone, no one, not a soul, not a sound, anywhere. Raw, rarefied, shimmering light of night, not yet morning. Where you can see forever.

Someone else lives here now, they’ll wake up, greet me and take me in. No. There is no one home. That house is abandoned.

March 18 2026

I wake up. Flashing imagery of how small I am. Perfectly small. Now, in my childhood home, in my current size, in my being, alone.

I am no longer tall. Maybe I am a child. Maybe not. It is just a great feeling of completeness.

How small the ties of me…

"When the mountains were made of marble,
I was then alone.
I traced the cold veins of the surface of the mountains with my tongue.”

1. The opening up of the earth as structure and matter, for the extraction of this enormous volume of wealth is at the core of war now, and is at the core of life for every single individual living on earth. To ignore it is to accelerate deconstruction. To the point of imagining we are mere functioning machines of desire… oh, but we are, are we not? Desiring the marble, condemning the marble, desiring equality? Oh, no, just for love, we want to feel love. Loved? Or just love?

2. The School of Attention

Paulo Freire’s Radical Method Was Rooted in Brazil’s Historical Inequalities, by Bernardo Bianchi, a research associate at the Centre Marc Bloch (CMB), Humboldt University of Berlin.

3. “White House Seeks (additional) $1.5 Trillion for Defense in New Budget Request

The huge proposed increase would be partly offset by steep cuts to domestic programs, some of which the Trump administration describes as wasteful.” NYTimes headline.