"
The Aztec Definitions are a collection of poems assembled
to define the nature of certain objects, animals and 
places. They were first recorded in the Florentine Codex, an
ethnographic study compiled by Friar Bernadino de 
Sahagun following the Spanish conquests of Mesoamerica
in the 16th Century.I came upon them due to their inclusion
in Jerome Rothenbergs "Technicians of the Sacred", a 
collection of tribal and ritual poetry from around the world.
A grand and vital archive. The definitons repeatedly 
describe the details of a place, often repeating the same
phrase in a different tense, or placing an observation beside
one which seems to contradict it. "[I]t aproaches its objects
as if for the first time testing its existence. IT IS DARK,
IT       IS       LIGHT:       IT       IS       WIDE-MOUTHED,
IT IS NARROW-MOUTHED: all of this said with no 
apparent sense of contradiction[.]" (Rothenberg 2017). The
definitions demonstrate an understanding that there is an 
inherent plurality to our experience of place. One does not
only feel scared in a acave. They may also feel happy. We are
accustomed to having our descriptions of place filtered
through the temporal experience of the writer, whereas any
attempt to effectively describe a place im its totality must
engage with said place's existence outside of the window of
time one is in when experiencing it. If one were describing
their personal relationship to a cave, they may say that they
are sometimes happy and sometimes scared. But in order to
effectively describe the nature of a cave, as a singular
concept, one must accept that the cave is both scary and
happy. It is dark, it is light.
"


Three Hundred Thousand Souls
Joe Vaughan and Joe Summers