It is strange Occupying this name, coldhearted scientist, since it does not go with the blog concept — which was (a) an anonymization game, I was speaking from beyond the grave and beyond our culture, and (b) a project designed to enable myself to rise up in real life. All the names I have had fit these purposes. The blog was a codex, the posts were performances, the author was an 8th century Mayan, and I was the interpreter of an ancient text whose original was lost, or whose fragments were dispersed among different Western museums. Our mestizo purpose was to pierce the mirror so that our spirit could reach its homeland, and the souls of the dead could reappear in the living world.
Now as coldhearted scientist I am not sure how to make my textual system work. I think this character will have to be a practitioner of vodun and an astrologer, so we can grow our axé.
I feel completely strange, unfamiliar, and then again unconcerned and utterly familiar, as though I were actually a scientist back in my laboratory. I invented the blog concept because of the feeling of being inside a glass case, trying to get out so that I could walk down the hall, or enveloped in a cloud that would not leave. I could remember what it was like on the other side of the glass and I could see what was there, but I could not get through.
Now I get to claim my place again, or so it seems. Representations of Haiti would be an interesting course to give.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 