My dearest Pier-Paolo,


Mumbai is wild—impossible to hold all at once.
But I found this postcard and thought of you instantly.
Look: Lakshmi and Vishnu floating on Sheshanaga,
adrift in the Ocean of Milk. She radiates calm;
he dreams the world into being. The serpent coils like
a stage beneath them—everything resting on something ancient,
coiled, and half-asleep. You’d love it. A myth that floats, never arrives.


With love, Maria


P.S. I even spotted an idol of Sheshanaga at the temple I visited today.
How cool is that? :) The place is called Walkeshwar, and it sits beside this stunning sacred water tank named Banganga.

Purification of the Madonna. The sperm as a sacrifice.

“This purification occurs through sacrifice; is this bloodshed used to clean, or to soil? The victim to be bled is led around the object to be cleansed, surrounds it and confines it as it passes by; and so the oxen turned around the altar before dying. With this ritual and sacrifice, lustration becomes both spatial and bloody. […] This is another appropriation, another tenancy. […] Those of the owner, a tenant, a passing visitor? […] Since immemorial times, the male seeks the ownership of a space. […] By ejaculating sperm, he thinks he is appropriating the place where his desire is acted out.” (Serres, Malfeasance)

"Welcome to thee, O my mother!" (The Book of the Thousand and One Nights)
You, who became a new Heaven (Hirn, The Sacred Shrine),
You, the Virgin "associated... with Wisdom and with the Church [transforms you] into the nursing mother of many penitents, visionaries, and saints." (Warner, Alone of All Her Sex)

I return to you, broken by sweetness that dulls the senses, harmony that quiets the mind.
"Who will save my soul, which is blackened, soiled, spoiled, appropriated, like a dog possessed by the master's endlessly farcing voice in the loudspeaker?" (Michel Serres, Malfeasance)
This voice resounds in every object, in every repetition without origin.
"As a slave floating in space, I am losing the Cogito: I while retaining only the identical."
(Michel Serres, Malfeasance)

My “I” dissolves into sameness.
And now, "what is at stake here are our intentions, decisions, and conventions. In short, our cultures."
(Michel Serres, Malfeasance)
I beg you, let me escape.
Let me go elsewhere—
for "the uniqueness of culture means that by identifying with it I shall not distinguish myself from other cultures,
and will therefore never again feel the terrible regret at not being somewhere else."
(Pier Paolo Pasolini, Other Materials)

"After his death the holy women could not find his corpse in the tomb, which was empty." (Michel Serres, Malfeasance)
"A God without place, a God of the no-place." (Michel Serres, Malfeasance)
"To be sure He was born of a mother, but without leaving any trace." (Michel Serres, Malfeasance)
I too am vanishing.
"Humans no longer belong to themselves either. Just as we can no longer live in the space of a hard and revolting carnage,
so our souls become sewage sanitation fields of images and sounds, soft ones, emanating from appropriation's combatants." (Michel Serres, Malfeasance)

"Let [me] liberate space, let [me] liberate our souls, and let [me] liberate at least one site." (Michel Serres, Malfeasance)
If not here, Madonna, then in your shadow,
in the hush of a distant land.
"So in the future I shall have no more tabernacles.
All the rites of my mass culture
will thus be deprived of unity (or so it seems, if unity is sacred)." (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Introduzione)

But I remember:
"In the presence of my mother (who shared, consciously, my unhappiness), beside a great table,
I felt again the bliss I’d known as a newborn when for the first time I slept and ate." (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Materials for the Introduction)
Amen.

To Madonna, without Cogito

"Sharon! Sharon, wait—please just listen! This isn’t what it looks like!" (He points frantically at a frozen porn video.) "This is not just some disgusting accident. This is culture. This is ritual. This is—pollution."

"Pollution—‘mid-14c., pollucioun, discharge of semen other than during sex’—you see? That’s the original meaning! Not trash. Not smog. But this."
"I'm not just jerking off, Sharon—I'm exiting the bourgeois hellscape of lawn maintenance and PTA meetings! This—this is the primal scream of meaning!"

"Serres says it perfectly: 'Pollution lost the vital and religious sense given to masturbation and the ejection of sperm and is now assigned to the ever increasing industrial waste' (Serres, Malfeasance). But I—I am reclaiming that vital act, Sharon!"

"'After urine, blood, and sign, now sperm. This is another appropriation, another tenancy' (Serres, Malfeasance). I am inhabiting this space, staking my claim—not on land, but on experience!"
"'By ejaculating sperm, [I] think [I am] appropriating the place where [my] desire is acted out' (Serres, Malfeasance). This desk, Sharon... it's not just IKEA. It's my territory."

"And look—'Only after contamination [do I] understand that [I was] existing in an atmosphere not only of air, but also of waves and rays' (Sloterdijk, Foams). That moment of climax? It's when I really feel alive, when I realize I'm not just breathing oxygen—I'm pulsing with signal."

"'All the various authors do not give the same explanation for this preciousness of the sperm' (Foucault, The History of Sexuality). But they know it’s precious. Sperm, Sharon—sperm is sacred."
"'The animal spirit naturally inheres in the sperm' (Agamben, Stanzas). 'The soul makes sperm—potentially a human being—into an actual human being' (Aquinas). You see?! This isn’t shameful—it’s creative!"

"'They commit the act of lust... then consume the fruit of their shame' (Sloterdijk, Cynical Reason). I’m owning my shame, Sharon. I’m transforming it into freedom."
"'The uniqueness of culture means... I will never again feel the terrible regret at not being somewhere else' (Pasolini). Don’t you get it? This is why I do it. Because here, in this moment—I'm finally not missing out."
"This isn’t perversion. It’s what Serres calls culture: 'our intentions, decisions, and conventions' (Serres, Malfeasance)."

"And you know what? 'Since immemorial times, the male seeks the ownership of a space' (Serres). Well—I’ve found mine. Right here, between Google Chrome and the lotion bottle."

"...I’m a better man now, Sharon."

Dr. phil. Randy Marsh

Kali shows Shiva the track "Aafat Waapas" by Mumbai Street Rapper Naezy. Shiva is hooked! Chaos is back! He is thinking of getting into Mumbai's HipHop scene... maybe throwing some Graffiti pieces on the citie's walls...



आया आफ़त वापस

साथ में लाया क्या?

वापस आफ़त

बचके रहना बेटा!

आफ़त वापस

एक बार फ़िर से बोले

वापस आफ़त

मेरा भाई तू बंद है!

Pasolini feels drawn to Kali, the divine mother. Her chthonic force overwhelms him. Kali is the goddess of death and destruction. Pasolini knows, that Kali's violence is not senseless, but a profound rebellion against order, a destruction that births something new. He loves that!

"This suggests that the erotic interaction with rent boys in Pasolini's mythopoetic universe takes on the character of a nature-religious ritual – a cultic service for the Earth Goddess."

- Dietmar Voss

I wake up. What happened? I can’t remember. I am bleeding.
I am looking down the stairs.
“The reflection gazes back at the face in the same act as [my] face gazes at it;
as it is made by gazing, so is it preserved by gazing back.” [1]
I look closer and— “Amidst a faint stench of butchery, I see an image of my body:
half-naked, forgotten, near death. Such was how I wished to be crucified.” [2]

This is the “Mirror of the sky! In you the clouds, the walls, the trees fall motionless.” [2]
“Inside the voiceless mirror I’m a blue fish surrounded by ice, darting tail froze.” [2]
“I now live inside the mirror, I am my own image immersed in the life of the blind light.” [2]
“It’s the city, bathed in a festive light.” [2]
“The pure light veiling everything in shades of fine dust: it’s havoc, it’s butchery.” [2]
“[This] bright light […] where there appears nothing but darkness to be reflected.” [3]

I lay here on these hard stone stairs “In the pastoral silence of the mirror white as the dawn of birth.” [2]
“A mirror, showing us two [cities], the real one and its reflection.” [4]
I am “Sliding over the water as in a dream.” [2]
I am “Agonised by the reflection, as it floated by, so near and yet so infinitely remote, […]
an intrinsic and unalterable beauty.” [5]
...

[1] Ficino, Platonic Theology Volume 4 Books XII–XIV
[2] Pier Paolo Pasolini, Collected Works
[3] Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
[4] Gothein, A History of Garden Art
[5] Proust, In Search of Lost Time Vol I: Swann’s Way

Banganga Morning

Manifesto of the Eternal Honor
Lord Rama

I have returned to this modern world—a realm where the sacred, honorable essence is fading into oblivion. Today, I see a society that has lost its way, where true devotion is forsaken in favor of fleeting, material pursuits. Yet, I stand firm in the belief that “Herein, the culture of devotion is the first means” (Sivananda 1957,82). It is time to revive what has been lost.

I declare that “Therefore honor is something spiritual” (Aquinas, Summa Theologica) and “Therefore happiness consists in honor” (Aquinas, Summa Theologica). Our communities have been built on values that are “something nobler than innocence; it is the delicacy of reflection, and not the coyness of ignorance” (Wollstonecraft, Complete Works). We must reclaim these ideals and restore the sacred balance.

Yet I witness cruelty masquerading as strength—where people rage with such ferocity that one might ask, “Whether cruelty differs from savagery or brutality?” (Aquinas, Summa Theologica). In our midst, there are those who “speak and rave with wrath; his cheeks burn [with ferocious fire], and his eyes scarcely hold themselves in their place; his face is full of reckless daring and mad savagery, as of one in boundless rage; with groans and dreadful cries, he thrusts his hands into his eyes” (Seneca, Complete Works). In becoming cleverer, “lust, melancholy, and brutality are scarcely separable” (Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason), yet in this brutality, “the other, master form of reflection begins to stir” (Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason).

No longer can we abide by the barbarism of those who believe that “they think it easier and in fact more honorable to get riches by pillage than by work” (Marx, Collected Works). I call upon every soul who cherishes truth and community: Let us restore the sacred honor that defines us. Let us rebuild our world on the firm foundations of devotion, reflection, and unwavering integrity.

The time has come for us to embrace our destiny and reawaken the spirit of the honorable. Join me, for our collective future depends on it.

...
This water gives me strength…
I remember the story of Alexander the Great—his quest to find “The Fountain of Youth.” (Eco), his thirst to unmake time.
Here he is now: Alexander the Business Developer.
He has found his spring, here, at this tank.
He speaks of “democratization of youth.”
In his eyes, “the monetary measurement of goods is one of the essential conditions for equality and hence for democracy.” (Marcel Hénaff)
But what youth does he seek?
He is obsessed with youth… a return to an empty simulacrum of youth—without meaning, without sacredness.
“Mother of God, The Fountain of Youth, [they] restore the original rigor and purity of the masochistic motivation.” (Deleuze)
“We can always drink from the fountain of youth, plentiful and irreversible, its level never goes down.” (Serres)
...

...
I wonder what Lord Rama would think of Alexander…
After all, he gave birth to this spiritual place through his arrow.
Lord Rama, the Maryada Purushottam—the ideal man who follows social and moral order at all costs, even when it causes personal pain.
In him, “honor is something spiritual.” (Aquinas)
“[J]ust as the same thing makes a man honorable and glorious, so is the same thing honest and beautiful.” (Aquinas)
But on what soil can moral honor stand today?
In his conversation with Alexander, he realizes
“that men rid themselves with ease of their scientific and technical concepts when they turn out to be lacking or unsuitable, whilst they remain attached to ‘moral’ beliefs and feelings which no longer bring anything but their unhappiness, even when they invent an even more harmful immoralism[.]” (Deleuze)
In this realization, an inner struggle emerges:
“We have forsaken moral existence in order to enter into aesthetic existence.” (Deleuze)
He still strongly believes in spiritual and moral values—but feels how they slip through his fingers.
In despair, he turns to the margins of society.
In the slum next to Banganga, he finds an organization of smugglers shipping tech parts into Mumbai.
He decides to become the modern-day pirate,
“the nonconforming smuggler, as so many others did in so many different ways[.]” (Derrida)
“The pirate, moreover, ‘in defiance of all law, acknowledging obedience to no flag whatsoever’ (H. Zeisel, Britannica Book of the Year, 1962), is, by definition, in business entirely for himself; he is an outlaw because he has chosen to put himself outside all organized communities, and it is for this reason that he has become ‘the enemy of all alike.’” (Arendt)
Just like Alexander, he also sticks to the waters of the Banganga tank,
which had already helped him on his mission long ago.
...

...
Rama finds a friend by the tank.
A graffiti writer tagging the name: Shiva.
He is nothing like Alexander, or Rama himself.
He has no desire to restore or conquer.
He is an outsider.
“He has become, as they say, disruptive.” (Serres)
“To take what is base, separated, and private out onto the street is subversive.” (Sloterdijk)
He moves through the city like a shadow,
leaving behind “thoughts that would haunt the [city of Bombay], like a corrosive shadow.” (Calasso)
He speaks little, but to Rama he says only this:
“He tells [Rama] that he makes manifest his unseen workings through those things which are seen.” (de Montaigne)
“And in the [city], growing intimate with [chaos], a thousand little [graffiti], unseen by vulgar eyes, give birth to sentiments dear to the imagination, and inquiries which expand the soul, particularly when cultivation has not smoothed into insipidity all its originality of character.” (Wollstonecraft)

The Price of Youth

The First Encounter

They meet by accident, near the old train tracks behind Banganga—an abandoned stretch of wall, layered in tags and scorched by sun. Shiva is already there, spraying. His movements are quick, focused. He doesn’t turn to greet them.
Alexander watches in silence. Rama stands with arms crossed, uncertain.
They are both drawn to the graffiti—words scrawled in thick, black lines:

YOUTH IS WHAT SURVIVES YOU.

Alexander steps closer. “You wrote this?”
Shiva doesn't answer. He keeps painting.
Rama finally speaks: “This violates the sacred. It pollutes the city.”
But there's no anger in his voice—only curiosity. A kind of reverence he doesn’t want to admit.
Shiva looks over his shoulder. “Everything sacred was made by defacing something older.”
The words hit them both.
Alexander thinks of the clinic, the clean glass, the business pitch. Rama remembers the temple, the old code, the pain of following it.
“This isn’t vandalism,” Alexander says slowly. “It’s ritual.”
Rama nods. “It’s a test. Of what can survive once order is broken.”
For a moment, all three men are still.
The wall is covered in fragments—phrases in Hindi, English, Sanskrit. Pieces of mythology rewritten in spray paint. Violence. Desire. Decay.

THE SPRING IS NOT A PLACE, BUT A PRICE.

Shiva finally turns. His face is young, but marked. Unreadable.
“I don’t sell anything,” he says. “I don’t join parties. I don’t explain what I do.”
And yet—he doesn’t walk away.
Alexander and Rama stay. They watch him paint, then pick up a can themselves.
The act of painting feels wrong. And necessary.
It’s not a moment of clarity. It’s a moment of release.
Together, they begin unlearning what they were.

ARCHIVE

My dear Pier-Paolo,

My stay in Mumbai is overwhelming! I still can’t fully grasp
everything happening around me. But I found this lovely postcard :)
On the card, you can see Lakshmi, the goddess of fertility, love,
and happiness, enjoying a sailing trip with her husband, Vishnu,
aboard his favorite pirate ship, Sheshanaga. I immediately thought
of Captain Jack Sparrow’s words about Sheshanaga: "It's not just the keel, a hole in the
deck, and [snakeskin]. That’s what a ship needs, not what a ship is. For [Sheshanaga] truly is …
is [...]." Someone told me there is no better ship to sail the ocean of sperm than Sheshanaga.
But I still haven’t figured out where they’re heading or what their mission is… What a bummer.

Your beloved, Maria Callas

P.S. I even found an idol of Sheshanaga inside the Walkeshwar Temple, near the famous pirate lookout at Malabar Hill. How cool is that? :)

Cara Maria,


I write to you with urgency—please forgive the paper, worn and smudged, but it is nearly seven in the morning, and I feel compelled to share something while it is still trembling in me. I am sitting now on the cold stone steps of the Banganga Tank in Mumbai, the very place you once described in your postcard. I don’t remember how I arrived here… I woke in a state of exhaustion, my body aching, bleeding. It must have been an excessive night.
I walked down the stairs and saw my reflection in the still water of the tank. “Amidst a faint stench of butchery, I [saw] an image of my body: half-naked, forgotten, near death.” [1] But strangely in that moment I did not feel misery, nor pain, nor illness. My body bears a burden, yes, but it is temporary, and meaningful. “The wound is something that I receive in my body, in a particular place, at a particular moment.” [2] “My wound existed before me, I was born to embody it!” [2]
My dear Maria, I feel alive. And more than that—I feel healthy, perhaps in a way I never have before. This sacred water and the quiet dignity of the temple behind me give me a strength that resists definition.
I asked myself: What is this health I feel?
That question, I now know, will guide my film.
In our Western hemisphere, we have allowed “The fetishization of hygiene [to blur] the problem of cleanliness with beauty, chastity, piety, and modernity.” [3] The health I carry now cannot exist within that vision.
Where, in such a system, does pollution find a rightful place alongside purity?
Here, in Mumbai—this vital, layered, and syncretic city—I find the energy to explore that tension. And here, in Banganga, through the presence of Hindu mythology, I begin to understand.
“A person’s life must be marked by a constant cycle of pollution, the elimination of that pollution through some action, and an ultimate, though temporary, restoration to purity.” [4] Shiva and the neighboring deities of Malabar Hill will be companions in this work. But if “I go towards [myth], towards health, I open myself up to the world,” [5]

My dear Maria, for all you have given me—for leading me to this place—I thank you.

Always,

Pier Paolo

Apollo:
Indeed I am. But to speak of health is also to speak of poetry.
Am I not also “Apollo, son of Zeus and Leto, patron of the arts, especially music and poetry”? [1]
Health, like poetry, moves through harmony — a quiet discipline of form, proportion, and measure. What steadies the soul may also steady the flesh.

Krishna:
Ah, dear Apollo — still tracing the world with a golden compass.
But what of a world where verses scroll, skip, and glitch?
“The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster” [2], and with him, the wild poetics of rupture and repetition.
Look at today’s poetry of memes — compressing feeling, myth, and madness into a single flicker, shared, reshaped, and reborn with every scroll.
Even chaos has rhythm, if you know how to dance with it.
In today’s poetry, the measure is broken — but perhaps that’s where the pulse is hiding now.

Apollo:
I agree: “Rhythm is the soul of poetry.” [3]
But from this chaos, how do we arrive at “the uniting or synching of rhythms which [I relate] to good health”? [4]
I believe, still, that “the order is decisive.” [5]

Tilmann Heider, Selena Troll

[1] Pasolini, Collected Works
[2] Deleuze, Dialogues
[3] Rendell Penner Borden, Gender Space Architecture
[4] Cush, encyclopedia of hinduism
[5] Serres, The Five Senses

[1] https://www.kaspersky.com/

(Durga – Antimicrobials)

Pollution is not always to be endured.
Some invaders must be confronted — not with panic, but with precision.
Durga arrives with clean fire. She does not hesitate.
To act is also to cut.
And sometimes, to cleanse is to divide.

(Vishnu – Immunomodulators)

Not every disruption is a threat.
Some poisons must remain — balanced, not erased.
Vishnu does "not come to destroy what he had found, but to seek what had been lost." [1]
Health is not sterility.
It is rhythm.
It is tolerance.
"Health requires a balance or harmony between the different elements." [2]

(Shiva – Vaccine)

Shiva dances at the edge of life — and burns what clings too long.
To save the whole, we sacrifice a piece. "Some of the most fascinating [...] methods are those that seek to turn the strength of a species against itself..." [3] To wound with purpose is not cruelty,
but courage. "We destroy what makes us sad — and then we feel joy, which increases our power of action." [4]

(Yama – Inhibitors)

What is health without limit?
Yama stands at the threshold and says: enough.
Too much becomes poison. Even growth must be slowed."If the concentration exceeds the set limit," [5] life turns inward, collapses on itself.
The wall is a discipline.

(Chandra – Sedatives)

Silence is not absence. It is method.
Chandra opens the gate not with answers, but with softness.
"Immersing yourself in silence is a form of healing." [6]
Within the haze, new forms emerge.
"We have lost a considerable measure of control over the fertile ground of silence." [7]
But the gate still opens,
if you stop asking what waits on the other side.

[1] Augustine, Political Writings
[2] Sallis, The Figure of Nature
[3] Carson, Silent Spring
[4] Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy
[5] Zimring, Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste
[6] Serres, The Five Senses
[7] Steiner, On Difficulty

You’ve arrived.

No rush. Take a breath. Put your phone on airplane mode—or toss it in your shoe. Either works. Just you in this space, and a small circle of others who also wandered in.

I am Chang’e and I will be your guide throughout this experience.

We gather here—at the place of the Jeevant Samadhi—who chose stillness. A long, patient act of stepping back. He gave up words, movement, and even attention. And somehow, in that absence, a kind of presence began to grow. Quiet, but steady. Like steam rising off warm stone.

And now? There’s a warmth left behind, like when someone leaves the room but their tea is still warm. That’s what we drink tonight.

You may recall the Chinese Mooncake Festival, where sweetness softened longing. I floated to the moon, and those left behind lit lanterns and passed cakes, trying to taste connection.

This gathering echoes that spirit. It’s simple. It’s slow. And it’s sincere.

THE GATE

FRIENDLY
FIRE

Krishna:
Tell me, Apollo — are you not also the god of divination?
Your oracle at Delphi once shaped destinies with riddles wrapped in incense. But how does one divine in this world now, where poetry fractures and multiplies with every click? Where rhythm is scattered across memes, fragments, and flickers?
There is another way.
Have you heard of Ifá? “Ifá is the principal Yoruba system of divination.” [6] It’s not prophecy from on high, but a ritual that listens — to patterns, to context, to the chaos itself. “The most complex system of divination, Ifá, consists of a large number of poems that are related to a set of 256 divination patterns.” [6] Each casting does not end with an answer — it begins a dialogue. “These verses are part of a considerable corpus of unwritten scripture, known as odu or orisa.” [6]
What we offer here is not a verdict, but a beginning — a ritual that reads the cracks, not silences them.
Where health isn’t returned through purity, but through participation — through a rhythm that adapts, listens, and repeats.




[1] Homer, The Odyssey
[2] Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
[3] Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance 1
[4] Burrows, Fictioning
[5] Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
[6] Lewis, Witchcraft Today

Neokoimesis

Hydromoon

THE WALL

THE
EQUILIBRIST

THE BLADE

Here’s how it unfolds:

I will walk to the Jeevant Samadhi. I carry a vessel. It once belonged to him. It’s been used many times now, but still feels quiet in the hands. I’ll draw water from Banganga—not for purity, not for power, but for presence. From that space of stillness, into this space of togetherness.

You sit. However you need to. Cross-legged. Upright. Quietly restless. Eyes open or closed. You don’t have to perform calm. Just be here.

When I return, I’ll hold the vessel. Nothing will be said. The water speaks for itself.

One by one, come forward. I will pour a small amount into your hands. You drink—not to forget, or to fix, but to remember that silence, too, is something we can share.

There is no ceremony beyond this. No photos. No applause. Only the sound of your breath and the quiet space between others.

We live in a world that never stops talking. That’s good. But here, for a little while, you can pause.

Health is a well. We draw it from each other. We don’t always know what we’re missing until we sit beside it.
This is not medicine. It’s a moment. Not a fix. A gesture. Come when you’re ready. The vessel is waiting.

the latent space of wellness

Dear Mr. Heider and Ms. Troll,


I hope this message finds you well and energized as the opening of the festival at Banganga approaches.

I am writing to propose a modest yet meaningful contribution to the experience you are curating. I would like to offer a tarot reading station as part of the festival landscape.

The idea is simple: a reading where each card reflects tensions within contemporary health — infection, immunity, sacrifice, restraint, delirium. Rather than offering prediction, the tarot would create a small space for reflection, helping visitors recognize movements already alive within their own bodies. In this way, health may not be approached as a perfect state, but as something that "dances like a curtain of flames" [1], full of shifts, rhythms, and unexpected harmonies.

The tarot is imagined not merely as an aesthetic gesture, but as a quiet bridge — a place where the sensibility of Western diagnostics and the deeper currents of mythos might meet without canceling each other. Healing, after all, is not always correction; sometimes it is simply "a joy that is mixed with surprise" [2], an unpredictable unfolding rather than a measured plan.

I would be honored to integrate this offering carefully into the spatial and narrative rhythm of the site. I am available to discuss placement, atmosphere, and framing at your earliest convenience.

Thank you very much for considering this proposal. I look forward to the possibility of contributing to the world you are bringing into being.

Warm regards,


Alexander Grand

Founder & Director, Aurea Aqua Inc.

[1] Serres, The Five Senses
[2] Carter, Shaking A Leg
[3] Proust, In Search of Lost Time Vol II: Within a Budding Grove
[4] Naginski, Sculpture and Enlightenment

After Purity Failed

I leave my table behind, the last card still stirring in the warm air. I want to see more.
At the foot of Vithoba Rakhumai Mandir people kneel, casting handfuls of earth outward — not drawing, but marking, letting the dust find its own way. A boy watches the scatter. A woman presses her finger into the dust. "There, through sunlight and shadow, a soft and gentle breeze did blow" [1].
I kneel too. What is this ritual about?
Apollo the healer — is that you?

[1] von Strassburg, Tristan and Isolde

Asklepios: When did healing become so clean?
Vishnu: When danger became a service. When fear could be packaged, filtered, sold.
Asklepios: And yet they come willingly. They choose the window sealed against noise, the breath counted by machines.
Vishnu: Maybe health isn't clarity. Maybe it’s compost — decay feeding life, breakdown breeding renewal.
Asklepios: They want protection. But from what? The mess? The grief? The dream that slips its own borders?
Vishnu: They want the image of balance, but "doing this we would in a greater and greater way manifest a divine harmonious perfection" [1] — so they polish the surface and call it care.
Asklepios: They call it health, but they mean silence.
Vishnu: They call it joy, but they mean sedation.
Asklepios: "It reduces stress and increases energy" [2], they say — as if health were an efficiency scheme, a cost-saving plan.
Vishnu: But who gets erased when the map is cleaned? Whose breath doesn’t match the rhythm?
Asklepios: "Most people take the act of respiration for granted" [3], until it’s measured and corrected and sold back to them.
Vishnu: "We value our bodies, which are strong, healthy..." [4] — but not every body wants to be streamlined. Some bodies want to remember.
Asklepios: Some wounds want to stay open. Some wounds, "bandaged with our love," [5], may leave scars that never fully disappear — and maybe that’s the point.
Vishnu: They measure healing in stillness. But stability is not always survival.
Asklepios: "You concentrate on healing" [6], but healing isn't a straight line. It bends. It leaks. It refuses containment.
Asklepios: I see someone weeping in their sleep. No dream visible. No data logged.
Vishnu: That might be healing.

[1] Frisvold, Marsilio Ficino and His Platonic Psychology
[2] Schildberger, On Food
[3] Mitchell, Daoist Nei Gong
[4] Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology
[5] Tagore, The Home and the World
[6] Powers, The Overstory

As I approach Banganga, the city folds around me — heat through cracked stone, crushed marigold petals underfoot. "What is the city?" [1] I keep walking. People pass close — laughing, calling. The rhythm is chaos, but invigorating.
Lakshminarayana Mandir appears, the stone steps before it veiled in shade.
The festival begins. I take a seat at my tarot table and unwrap the deck. A woman asks if the card will fix her. I say, "No. But it might show you where the pressure sits."

[1] Mumford, The Culture of Cities

The festival pulls in every direction — smoke, chanting, the clang of bowls — but I move through it, slipping past the noise toward a side hall of Shri Venkatesh Balaji Mandir, its entrances hung with heavy cloth.
I am stepping through. The air smells filtered, almost sweet. "The perfume of a ripe fruit that lingers on the hands." [1] Inside, sleep pods are lined in pale rows. A touchscreen stands in the center, offering subscriptions. Healing is available, but only if you already believe in it. I approach the screen.

[1] Warner, Alone of All Her Sex

The stone path narrows as I reach Jeevant Samadhi. No banners, no lights. Just a circle of low walls and the faint sound of water breathing against stone. People sit cross-legged around a shallow basin. I stay at the edge, waiting my turn. The water smells old, clean in a way I can’t name. I wipe my palms on my jeans, then hold them out.

Surgery of
Fortune

Surgery of
Fortune

After Purity Failed

Japan Mausoleum

Roman Thermae

Mikveh (Jewish Bath)

Yoko Onos hospital room

Talks at the kitchen table

Ziggurats (Mesapotamia)

Hamam - Turkish Bath

Medical Garden

Festival

Curtains

Amazonian Maloca

Capoeira

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Kumbh Mela Tent Cities (Temporary City)

"Heal me Dirty" Friends

Community Gardens

Hôpital Saint-Vincent-de-Paul (Repurposed Hospital) Community project

Lina Bo Bardi the SESC Pompéia

EMBODIED HEALTH

Health is how we live in and through the body, shaped by identity and experience.
It’s individual and physical — grounded in movement, strength, and personal rituals.
This is the realm of fitness, vitality, quantum intuition, tarot readings, and the pursuit of bodily clarity — where health is felt, tested, and transformed from within.

SYNTHETIC HEALTH

Health is something we can track, design, and enhance through technology and science.
It’s a system of biohacking, sleep algorithms, engineered dreams, isolation pods, and digital wellness.
This is health as architecture and interface — a space of rest, protection, and psycho-optimization where the line between body and machine begins to blur.

CONSCIOUSNESS HEALTH

Health is inner alignment — a rhythm of mind, emotion, and energy in motion.
It’s mental, poetic, chaotic, and participatory — built on art, divination, memes, the trickster spirit, and digital sadness.
This is where rupture becomes ritual, and healing is found in creative disorder, global moods, and shared emotional codes.

SYSTEMIC HEALTH

Health is access, equity, and justice — determined by the structures we move through.
It lives in community, infrastructure, urban flow, and cultural ritual — the societal body.
Health here means reshaping cities, policies, and power so care becomes a shared foundation — a collective consciousness.

Dust
Patterns