Translation: José Luis Rico
from Varjoja, usvaa (“Shadows, Mist”)
Poesia (2020)
Ghost Manifesto
1.
Ghosts don’t exist. We’re all ghosts. We are living dead in a ground zero poisoned by the inexorably advancing environmental destruction, in a necropastoral haunted house. We’re nothing, can we become anything?
2.
What words could depict us, shape us, make us possible?
3.
Writing is a cyborg technology.[1] The traces left by writing are the ghost’s technology, the negative space around it; the blanks between language-objects.
But is this ectoplasm hovering around language a part of language?
Are ghosts a construct? Or mistakes, disturbances unwillingly left by someone in the structure?
4.
There are no ghosts. Ghosts can certainly not have manifestos.
Nothing constructive can be said of us.
Nothing can be said of us.
We are not us.
We are not.
5.
This is therefore an anti-manifesto.
It’s only certain that we must undo the patriarchy and capitalism, and in so doing become free.
6.
I am arguably speaking here about myself in the we-form. But each me is a we, discontinuous, fragmentary, slapped together from incompatible bits. In what ways can it be linked to other we’s, how can the I’s glide across each other, what constellations of borderlessness and borders can be built from us?
7.
Through a ghost—that translucent entity—you can always see other ghosts.
8.
I would rather be a ghost than a cyborg,
rather a cyborg than a goddess,
rather a goddess than a god,
rather a god than an Etruscan shrew,
rather an Etruscan shrew than a man.
It is certainly unclear, to what extent this is something they will ask my opinion about.
9.
It’s impossible to know what is possible.
Draft for Three Official Genders 1
A gender that eats itself hollow from within.
A gender that forks every instant into endless new alternatives.
A gender that splits every instant into smaller particles; perhaps in all of us there are a billion genders, in endless swarming bumbling movement?
the movement of fire and rime ice, inside and out, from our lips
an almost unnoticeable crevice in back muscles
we don’t know what’s going to happen
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[1] Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1990.
Taneli Viljanen (b. 1982) is a non-binary writer interested in mixing, displacing, colliding, and destabilizing genres, modes of expression, art forms, identities, and meanings.
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