Pneumaterialism Pt. 2 (the dialectics of, reach out beyond)

Diving into the deep waters and dialectical tensions between (spirited) matter, (manifest) metaphysics, and rationality or reason.

I had written this in direct sequence to the previous Part 1, but held off from posting it. Wondering if I was revealing too much of psychoanalysis. Then the ultimate gain I got from holding off from posting was learning that the nightmare struggle is far from over, with new and unexpected hurdles the past week. Pushing my endless PhD further into 2022 and undated end.

Struggles that cause stress-induced visions and convulsions, and the following will possibly make more sense, if I frame it beyond the fact of my theorizing on Spirit, to mention that two of the recent PhDs died (same department/“supervision”) not long after their graduating. The latter within about a month of her defense, and it appears as the last person to have graduated requiring the same paperwork as me now three years ago. The former was a presence in the writing about ghosts and spirits in the dissertation since around February, and a convulsive presence in stopping me from quitting this academic nightmare in June.

The other change before this unexpected continuing struggle was deciding the focus on which direction to take for the undated PhD defense. The German PhD process, at least in this department, requires a topic tangential and beyond the dissertation. And I looked to TOOL songs and Rage Against the Machine in my fury. A mention of Ponce de León in the song “Invincible” helps me position it geographically and historically. When I was finally receiving any information about my PhD and then the detail of stalled paperwork, I was told to not do Pacific poetry, and to best do a different geography than Hawai‘i or the Philippines.

Interesting how although I was once told I don’t have the breadth to work in this discipline, I would now have to prove I can cover topics of Indigenous Studies, Pacific Islands Studies, Asian/American Studies, the BPP and Third Worldism influences into my topic, to add Caribbean and Latinx Studies. I chose Puerto Rico and South Florida from the conquistador mention and for all my marronage theorizing on palengke/Palenqueros, and the estuarine (and mangrove) spaces in these Caribbean and Gulf waters. Ponce de León died like Magellan did, with a poisoned arrow in his thigh, delaying Spanish colonization of Florida or what is now the contiguous nation-state of the USA, in Estero Bay.

Last night in my really difficult week of emails I didn’t want to write or read, causing more trouble, my sanity was buoyed again in seeking information on the last person graduating under the same professor. Her work was on the Caribbean, more specifically the island Hispaniola she was from. She was also interested in spacetimes, maroon communities, the spiritual, and vodou as resistance/revolution… Concerning this turn of events: from not knowing what was happening, to losing optimism and hope, perhaps the earlier typed *hope* in the paragraphs below is in a bit of a different tone and style as the “foreword” now. However, I reckon the whole purpose of this continued delay is to bring similar more epiphanies that will all add up in the end, as described further here. And I can’t force them for now.

Where was I going with all this Spirit? What even are the lyrics to TOOL about? Why does anyone do an unfunded PhD and connect it to a 90s Prog Rock band, and veer off into New Age space without even being on acid? And then claim it’s about climate justice and mangroves? Aren’t all the fans of this band some 47-year-old white dudes [have you read that thing I wrote on Rammstein, post-war nationalism and geopolitics, it connects into the dissertation framework and conclusions, too] or Tom Morello?

Maybe the reason I grew up listening to Rammstein is also why I listened to A Perfect Circle and TOOL since 7th or 8th grade?

Living in Metro Manila on the eve of and during the “War on Terror” meant having no real hobbies outside of school soccer practice, than listening to gritty music (but Alt Rock or Nu Metal were big in the early 2000s). The only thing I could do outside the house was occasionally go to the mall (with my parents) and watch movies for $/€1–2 a ticket price (with my parents). But then the malls and movie theaters in them were also a prime space for bombings, causing further restrictions (with my parents). Anyway, I remember being stuck in Manila traffic and having the reins on the radio dial and my Dad wondering what my 13-year-old music taste was when the percussion instrumentals started off on “Eulogy,” to spiral into where it goes.

On that note: I did get a Rammstein ticket for their 2019 concert in Milton Keynes, when I was invited to the UK that same concert weekend by friends for an *environmental justice* workshop.

It was ~ amazing ~ but I had to leave it early like a fairy tale princess to get my last train back to Birmingham.

German mail almost lost my ticket resold from a “Carlos” in the UK. I only traced it down at a random Berlin city kiosk, by chance asking the only friendly neighbour I had, if he knew where our mail got lost to, the day before flying out the same morning as the concert. I was paranoid I would need to show ID with that name or get lost in Milton Keynes for the night. Why didn’t I just go to Rammstein concerts at the Berlin Olympiastadion? 1. Rammstein ticket prices are insanely high in Germany, 2. hordes of German men of the questionable type of fandom, troupled with 3. that nazi aesthetique in a stadium built by nazis for nazis.

I’ve been wallowing in my own confused and insecure delusions

Talking and writing about spirits in Eurocentric sciences is hard. When I’m neither a Theologist or squarely in an organized religion that isn’t already considered too irrational for the culture I’m in, going by the numbers of Germans scoffing at all religions or telling me to exit the Protestant church to save on taxes.

I try to avoid the pseudoscience (like in “Forty Six & 2”) that some spiritualists interpret in their visions or explanations, but what is “pseudo” for a “non-scientist” anyway. Aside from weaving as many physical and chemical processes into a humanities dissertation that I could, I feel like cause I’m not formally a natural scientist, my actual knowledge in hard sciences is discounted. I didn’t suffer through Advanced Chemistry to get a high school degree for nothing. I did choose Chemistry over French, because I’m a sucker who prefers nearly failing at something hard, than excelling at something simple…

My point is that maybe I know more Physics and Chemistry than the average person who ends up studying a cumulative list of humanities and/or social sciences. “Humanities” is called Geisteswissenschaften in German, why if not to center the Geist in the Wissenschaften (sciences). ❤-lich Willkommen, seid gegrüßt, to my world of bilingual puns that informs all of my theories. I also make a point in contemplating

~ the Philosophies of Spirit ~

and not Theology or Psychology for now, which is where I find most written sources for Tagalog/Filipino diaspora kapwa.

Being a German is tough, with socialized guilt for ancestral culpabilities and concerns, and then hearing Indigenous Studies and other more spiritual sources repeatedly say “listen to your ancestors.” But being a non-white German is tougher than that and more with double consciousness contradictions. Which is why I no longer write about German racism unless I feel like it, read my other writing for that. Read my high school yearbook article on Chemistry class as Alice in Wonderland down the rabbit hole, with the teacher being the Mad Hatter and me being always too late, too late (7:45 a.m.).

This is about Geist as the *Enlightenment* transcendence

of cognition, consciousness, or mind to ~ SPIRIT ~

The translation of Phenomenology of Spirit as Phenomenology of Mind to either meaning of Geist, as well as ghosts, is the reason I ended up writing on the phenomenology or apparition of ghosts or specters. I will try to keep this simpler than the original first rough elucidations in the dissertation, but the gist of it is that while a lot of Indigenous languages rely on the phenomena of nature or actions/emotions of things to describe them as words, or use kaona to explicitly conceal their meanings, the origins of some other everyday words have lost their Proto-Indo-European literal meanings.

I questioned how the spirit (ghost, breath) and the specter (ghost, apparition) and the inspiration (of the divine kind that enlightens the mind) and the speculum (mirror or looking-glass, i.e. something that reflects) and the spectrum (of the colours of light in a rainbow) of the speculative (foresight or precognition), may have the same origins as respiration (breathing, in- and exhaling) and aspiration (hoping, desiring, breathing, inhaling), still somewhat traceable in the Spanish of inspirar (inspire), espejar (reflect), esperar (hope), and the Espiritu Santo.

The Optics of Spirit. The speculation/mirrors of the astronomy telescopes.

That awareness or cognizance or recognition (“seeing again,” as if in a mirrored reflection) of the collective consciousness.

A hope for that which is to come. Enlightenment.

I placed most of these deliberations into the narrative of the Maunakea telescopes and mirrors, but also on the hydrological cycle and its optics in the sky as haloes or rainbows. Of water droplets suspended in the air in liminal space as liminal beings of ephemeral existence. It is nature phenomena that relies on the subject position of the viewer and their viewpoint.

Which truth lies in the atmosphere?

A rainbow can be empirically observed, but not from every angle, and not in the same perspective. From the skies above (as on a high mountain or from a plane) a rainbow is not a half of a circle, it is a full halo of light in itself. I also placed these deliberations into the life cycle of flowing lava and ancestral rocks and fossilized beings, fossil fuels that are burned to accelerate climactic changes, and human life as a body of water flowing through, returning to the soil in death, while the lava of Pele enacts a hulihia or “upheaval” and overturning of the earth.

An upheaval that in the end reveals fresh growth and abundance on more fertile lands.

The reptilian water deities like Mo‘oinanea mourn the desiccated water bodies in the lake ecologies (with oikos as “home”) of Lake Waiau, as described by Kapulei Flores in a TMT court hearing. This lake on the summit of the mountain reflects the vast expanse of blue skies as a mirror.

inhale the clarity, this boundlessness

I haven’t concluded the deliberations from my Chapter 5 of diving with manta rays of the Hawaiian and Philippine Islands. The diving experiences go back to 2013 on Hawai‘i Island, the same island that constitutes Maunakea, the child and navel to Wākea the Sky Father from union with the Earth Mother Papahānaumoku. The diving experiences, in Palawan in 2019 and off Kona, both included oxygen tanks that emptied too fast through my own accelerated aspiration, and the panic of my mind at 18 meters below sea level, where my lungs may burst with a fast ascent to the surface, ensuring death.

Child, wake up
Child, release
The light
Wake up now, child, wake up

Underwater breathing in scuba diving, but also in less life-restricting swimming, is a meditative attunement to breath, limited by the elemental water instead of air. What I’m saying is I haven’t concluded the symbolism of the manta ray, as it has immense influence in whatever else I have written until now and in the 315 pages of dissertation. The only symbolisms that bring me further with it are the fact that in certain Austronesian Islands and languages (not Hawaiian, not Tagalog) the manta or stingray holds the same name as the Southern Cross constellation. The stingray’s tail can be a tool for magical spells or exorcisms and to ward off malignant spirits.

Exhale, expel
Recast my tale
Weave my allegorical elegy

The Southern Cross, as I mention in the astronomy of the PhD and in questions of viewing planes and “spacetime,” is the very first constellation I could locate in the night sky. Because I grew up around or below the equator when I first learned to understand stars, and not in the Northern Hemisphere to learn Orion’s Belt or the Big Dipper (how is that a name).

I also wrote analogies of spirit and light, and how a shadow is not the absence of light, but the counterpart to the absorption of light in matter. A shadow is cast from oneself being enlightened, and a shadow is a counterpart to the light and beingness, it is not nothingness. Around the equator the sun’s shadow is shorter, and at high noon which is awakea in Hawaiian,

the axis mundi reveals the full Enlightenment

of oneself with the sun and skies and earth,

“sun becoming” while tethered to the earth’s core in one’s own shadow.

The other symbolism of the manta ray or stingray that I can find is that in Andean beliefs it is also related to the Southern Cross or Chakana, which is right above Cusco in varying seasons. Its geometry is in the name and figure of the Chakana or Andean cross that depicts the cosmologies. The chakay is also a “bridge,” so the Southern Cross is a bridge into further realms beyond the celestial skies…? Cusco was seen as the center of the universe when it was the Incan capital, and the temples are positioned towards the heavens in axis mundi in the same manner of Maunakea, with the sunlight and pouring of maize chicha down to the earth in honour of the Sun God Inti. Inti is the correspondent to Wākea.

We are will and wonder
Bound to recall, remember
(We are born of)
One breath, one word
(We are all)
One spark, sun becoming

Why did I suddenly turn to Quechua and Aymara cosmologies... from a dream. I have many wild dreams, they’re not that uncommon but this one seemed more revealing of riddles I was to figure out. I had spent the previous evening looking at the Manila galleon trade that went past Acapulco, down to Callao or Lima in Peru. I was looking into Spanish sources, and reading about the Manilamen or Malays or Filipinos or Orientals or indios or “indio chinos” onboard, who remained in the Americas to make palm wine and other agricultural and culinary influences.

I was looking into Spanish sources, because these are the ones that exist. The lack of consistent identity for the islanders of the Philippines to be distinguished from any other Asians setting foot in the Americas makes historical tracing harder when they didn’t have Spanish names listed. Unless they were said to explicitly speak Tagalog or some Spanish or influenced shrimp/fish processing. I was looking for both Latin American (or Caribbean) and Austronesian (Indonesian) comparatives to the Philippines for further research for the job applications and research statements I’m working on.

The dissertation mentions Nahua and of course Mexican relationality to the Philippines, my M.A. was on Papua New Guinea and West Papua, but I was planning on archipelagic or Caribbean parallels. I was resistant to connecting to Peru because I didn’t see how to give reason to it beyond discovering the Callao galleon disembarking beyond Acapulco. It made some sense that the galleons also intercolonially related across the ocean, like my dissertation relates Kamay-Botany Bay (Sydney) to Kealakekua (Hawai‘i Island) in an “apotheosis of Captain Cook” and the mangroves symbolism of the Gweagal Shield.

Reaching out in decolonization in my Solidarities chapter, because the Gweagal Shield twin found in the Berlin Museum archives in 2016 relates to our NoDAPL and Maunakea actions there, too. As well as genealogies of decolonization of the Pacific and the Black Panther Party, from Roxley Foley as part of the Gweagal restitution entourage and his father’s previous generation of Blak Power in Australia and the nuclear-free Pacific movement.

For a piece to cross me over
Or a word to guide me in.
I wanna feel the changes coming down.
I wanna know what I’ve been hiding in
My shadow.
My shadow.

Then that night I had a dream. I tried to understand why I had a baby in this dream that I named Ambon. Which in my dream I thought meant “bird” (a word that should have been in my childhood vocabulary), but Indonesian friends that day on Twitter pointed out that’s not the word for bird. I recalled that an island in the Moluccas was called Ambon, not far from the Bird’s Head Peninsula. The Moluccas were central to European colonialism for spices, but I was also interested in the pre-Hispanic maritime flows in-between what would become the Philippines and neighbouring islands. The region around the Moluccas and Bird’s Head Peninsula has both manta rays and Austronesian language speakers. I looked into Indonesian-language articles on constellations and fishes...

I looked up translations of “bird” and recognized that yes, manok means “chicken” in Tagalog, which is a bird. There is a coastal city called Manokwari on the Bird’s Head, but what does wari mean then. I sifted through some “Irian Jaya” linguistics research I could find, but Wiktionary was more useful in telling me that wari in either regional or Austronesian languages means:

in Tagalog: opinion, judgement, estimation

in Ternate in the Moluccas: to fold, to come out (“to reveal” perhaps?)

in ‘Are‘Are of Malaita, past the other end of New Guinea Island: uncle

in Yami of Orchid Island near Taiwan: younger sibling

in (non-Austronesian) Doutai of West Papua: water, river

in (non-Austronesian) Waritai of West Papua: water, river

in (non-Austronesian) Zia of West Papua: sun

The thing that struck me though? After noting how the Bird’s Head translations made sense for the city, but weren’t Austronesian languages that used manok in the Manokwari to mean bird: the mention of a Spanish word saying “Wari.” And it was a pre-Incan civilization on the coast and to the Andes of Peru. I also sensed this cosmic baby was tugging me across the Pacific Ocean along the same stretch of the post-Acapulco galleon, from what I saw in its black eyes.

Join in my child
My shadow moves
Closer to meaning

I then read that Ambon means “dew” in Tagalog, as in water suspended in droplet form, like that in rainbows or haloes. I was trying to feel the same kind of recognition in my search finding a specific bird in the Bird’s Head region, and then in Peru. And there are *a lot of birds* in Peru, I saw scrolling down a list. But somehow a flying condor flashed into my mind. Then momentarily the cosmic dream baby’s eyes did again and connected to the condor.

I continued looking for sources on the Wari civilization. I was on some hot research trail. Not quite sure of what I was seeking, but connecting the ambon dew to the Wari, and then the condor sprung up more heated cognitive reaction than the other results. I checked if there were manta rays in this coastal region of Peru, of course there are. I also reasoned that the manta ray and condor wingspan and movement were complementary or parallel in skies and waters...

This was not the first time I was playing word associations across languages, enough to turn from ghosts to Geist and make it make sense in returning to Hegelian dialectics and community of Spirit. To the extent of theorizing spirit and optics and futures and digging into ancient sources of Proto-Indo-European dictionaries beyond what my dissertation needed. In my search of what the “Kamay” in Botany Bay meant, which Captain Cook had originally wanted to call “Stingrays Harbour” for the abundance of stingrays until the botany overwhelmed, I looked into a language list of the local Gadigal languages sent to me by a Sydney Museum researcher.

I was looking into kamay, because it means “hand” in Tagalog, and it was both a word and metaphor in the Solidarities chapter from a poem on diaspora and Supertyphoon Yolanda/Haiyan and reaching out and building things together. It is simply not the same word as “hand” in many other Austronesian languages, where it is identical to lima or “five” of the fingers and in the laulima of Hawaiian collaboration and “working together.”

There was something I was supposed to find in the kamay meaning.

I wasn’t finding it in the Gadigal lists, because it’s still inconclusive what it means there. Maybe it means something red, but no proper lead if that relates to the red of the mangrove, or the red of flesh wounds, or anything else that is not a “hand.” I left it at that in the dissertation.

I was typing in combinations of Spanish words into Google Scholar relating to the Wari or the condor or its eyes and dreams. I was finding Quechua and Aymara stories or poems, and noted the authors as potential sources for literary theory research purposes. I also typed in a search on Twitter looking for more Andean theorists for decolonial philosophy, in addition to Aymara Sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s work that I was using already, and I landed on results of a Twitter mutual I didn’t know but who appeared to be Peruvian. I messaged, asking if he knew English and had any knowledge on condor stories or symbolisms. He had done a save the condors campaign and had started following me from climate tweets at some point, so yes, and his name let me know I was on the right track.

eyes full of wonder, bless this community

I looked into Sociology, Anthropology, Archaeology,… articles on the Wari and Andean cosmologies, and I suddenly found in the dozens of downloads some Spanish language explanations: on rainbows and estuaries and other water bodies as liminal spaces. I didn’t know the Spanish word arco-iris for “rainbow” then. I deduced it from understanding the paragraphs explaining the content of liminalities and waters. Mysteriously my Spanish was better than expected.

And then I found: the word kamay to mean vital energy or essence, or I guess the spirit of relationality that I had theorized in my work. I found sources telling me that the liminal space of *this* spacetime is kaypacha. That this “here and now,” this material world, is the in-between to the upper- and underworld. That the temporality of the realms was parallel and not linear.

Meaning that spirits from the future could exist.

Or spirits from futures that are in the past.

Spirits I had sensed in the past could now make sense in the present.

What do I mean with “the dialectics of” Pneumaterialism? From the perspectives that I feel I’m in with my ADHD lack or disregard of spacetime awareness, and from the Hawaiian/Oceanic/Indigenous epistemologies I work with in Philippine collectivism, I was theorizing trinitarian or spiral dialectics.

A spiral form of higher or heightened being and becoming in trinity.

It is not thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

It is the sublation in reflection/recognition with the complementary being to a higher existence of consciousness.

The axis mundi Enlightenment of being tethered in high noon sunlight through to the earth’s core.

Only after submitting the PhD I found sources that the Tagalog word for “estuary” is wawa, which is also the word for “sense” or “meaning.” The estuarine space of heightened convergence (in organisms or in metaphors) relates to the collective consciousness (in kapwa or shared space) and sublation towards community in spirit… Think of it as ecstatic bliss. Asphyxiation may do it, meditative breaststroke, near-death experiences…

But community and spirit *already is*, when born *into community*. It is intrinsic, as is breathing. Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind.

My opinion is that *certain* Euroamerican psychologists, philosophers, theorists of religions, like those known in other regions and spiritualities, have come across these spirits, but explained them as one divine God, or the individual psyche, or the sublation of these. Musicians embed them in song lyrics, writers place them into novels, painters do as they wish. Those with heightened and harnessed senses from chemical enhancement (like from alcoholic spirits), those who don’t fully go irrational (lose their hold on this here and now) in their rationalizations of phenomena they sense beyond the material or visible…

I posted a story on Instagram, what if some ancestral messages aren’t ancestors but descendants who exist simultaneously… And then a friend replied saying “100” (yes), so I said, I was reading Andean philosophy and found this a useful consideration. My friend said, “and then your Peruvian friend reaches out,” which confused me, cause I thought he was Mexican all this time (people have been confused I was not Mexican all this time, so it’s fine when I do it). I asked him about condors and dreams, and his PhD methodology is “soñadora theory” or dream discourse.

He sent voice messages from his friend who interpreted the symbolisms, saying her screen had frozen on a condor that morning, but she asked if I had ever seen one. I said no. The only Condor I recall, was me flying with that German airline on my first trip back to Hawai‘i from Berlin, to do what I felt was necessary cultural protocol in introductions and go to Maunakea… The symbolisms she explained were similar to my Australian friend who had done a rune stone reading for me weeks before, out of her own curiosity. They were also similar to the tarot reading I had another friend do within days…

I was being a German in denial, trying to rationalize that *none* of this made *any* sense, and that I wouldn’t shift my focus to Andean philosophies (despite seeking something Latin American or Caribbean) because of a dream. Despite explicitly calling spirits/ghosts in my writing, and having one explicitly stop me from quitting the PhD 10 days before I was to submit… With all the readings relating to the celestial heavens and the sky and sun deities of the respective cultures being read, and strength after struggles.

It took almost exactly another month, as the tarot reading was stating in time period, but I rationalized the cosmic baby as an “El Niño.” More wordplay that only my mind could consider to make probable sense in spirit. Relating a Tagalog word to a Quechua one that meant something else entirely, but seemed to be the reason much of this was happening, in this way, at this time.

But not everything has to make sense, if it has meaning.

Refusing to believe in some of the meanings, certain pasts/presents/futures don’t make as much sense as believing in them does.

I choose to live and to grow,
Take and give and to move,
Learn and love and to cry,

Learn and love and to do
What it takes to step through.

I came to the El Niño interoceanic relation when clicking through the long list of potential mentors for a climate PostDoc in the USA, which needed a mentor before application. The 32nd name on the list, an Archaeologist, specialized on geospatialities in the Andes and was interested in social philosophies (politics), and again I felt a need to dig deeper. I considered if Archaeology made sense with what I do and plan to do. You know who reaches into the material past to make sense of it in present spirit? Historians, Archaeologists,… Palaeontologists. I typed in the name of my Sydney Archaeologist mentor, who had given me the Gadigal linguistics connection, together with this scholar’s name in case they knew each other, and found it in a planned project in this one’s CV.

Anyway, that application didn’t happen in time, cause I was too late, too late, but my *cosmic baby* of an academic degree is still incubating, and I’m struggling to make it through in full or partial or dewdrops of Enlightenment (“Child, wake up/Child, release/The light/Wake up now, child, wake up”)…

See my shadow changing,
Stretching up and over me.
Soften this old armor.

Hoping I can clear the way
By stepping through my shadow,
Coming out the other side.

When you think about it, like I try to reason, El Niño Southern Oscillation is a dialectical Pneumaterialism in the Pacific Ocean. It is relational kamay. El Niño comes and goes in turn to La Niña, and they are spiralling.

Change is coming.
Now is my time.

It is heated essence. It is the atmospheric warmth and the ocean waters oscillating, influencing spaces and times and matter. Far beyond their reach. Manta rays migrate with the warming waters. Condors feed on the abundance of carrion and change their breeding habits.

It is also turning more unpredictable in climactic extremes.