Welcome to the back half of the year. Welcome to Kentucky Meat Shower, now with a new logo, made by my cousin, Keaton Mullins (@keatzone on twitter).
The good news for you is since my last issue is I’ve had a lot to think about, which is bad news for me.
Some of those things have to be written about. These events fit into the carnage of life stuck in a neoliberal malaise, the pitch is felt but only heard but those attuned to it. It is a sound with as much presence as the noise made by Aztec death whistles. According to the below video, it was blown by Aztec armies marching against Spanish conquistadors. Lewis Spence spoke of it making “a noise such as the weird wind of night might make when it whistles through the streets”. Across Mesoamerica, these whistles and flutes were intrinsically tied to the great forces: death, war, the Gods. Surveying the Yugue flute, the flute bearer they found it buried with was:
an individual of unusual social status at ancient Yugue (Barber 2005; Mayes and Barber 2008). Analysis of his teeth and joints has shown that he was healthier and performed less physical labour than most people who had been buried in the Yugue cemetery (Mayes and Barber 2008). Good physical health and reduced labour are both common characteristics of higher-status people.1
Why he was so esteemed has something to do with the Aztec beliefs that musical instruments were alive, and directly connected to the Gods, something we haven’t really escaped. In Chronicles of Michoacán, it was asserted that during Aztec sacrifice that "the trumpets were blown so that the gods would descend from the heavens." Nobody arrives now.
For those attuned to that pitch, there is a key difference. The weird wind Spence spoke of is not just at night, but throughout our every day. Violence of a type that coerces and exists as a possible end for anybody unfortunate enough to be chosen for the sacrifice, which, inasmuch as it did exist, was connected to the replenishment of civic and civil life. Now these deaths enforce the private reach accessible only to the fortunate. There is no faith, creed, or ideology behind this death other than its own self worship. The colonial violence in Palestine, Keno machines in low-income gas stations, the surveillance city, they have nothing but worship for themselves.
When I went to Bays Mountain as a kid there was an exhibit that described an animal that uproots ecosystems and uses more than it can take. At the end of the exhibit there’s a door you can open. I always hoped it’d be something badass. Instead what you opened up to was a mirror. The pitch sees this and sees not a place of reflection to but an altar.
Zines masquerading as substacks cannot stop this destructive force. But I do think there is a real purpose to this writing, which is to at least attune anybody who might read these next issues to the violence they feel whistling through the streets.
In order to write about this with the job it deserves, I’ve found myself returning to old sources, taking comfort in the reality of change. That things are a way, they somehow become that way, and either get better or worse. But we have to diagnose these divergences, write where they went from slivers of freedom to private violence sneaking more and more in and closing off the possibility for anything new.
We’ll speak again in a week or so.
Barber, Sarah B., Gonzalo Sánchez, and Mireya Olvera. “SOUNDS OF DEATH AND LIFE IN MESOAMERICA: THE BONE FLUTES OF ANCIENT OAXACA.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 41 (2009): 94–110. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25735480.