9 THE AMPHIBIAN

9 THE AMPHIBIAN

Numbers are akin to wine or narcotics; they intoxicate us. How many souls have vanished in the rooms of Monte Carlo or Las Vegas, mesmerized and lost? Money governs all. It is merely an abstract power, printed paper adorned with countless zeros. Money is god; when nature cries out that the emperor is naked, it simply does not exist.

Nine is a number—a number that the Nuer people, an African tribe, do not count. If you add or subtract nine from a series of numbers, nine remains invisible. Nine is the magnetic spiral. It embodies rhea, a force that assassinates time (chronos) through a divine conspiracy. Just as rhea, the feminine principle, cannot end her own existence while birthing.

Nine is a number—a number that the Nuer people, an African tribe, do not count. If you add or subtract nine from a series of numbers, nine remains invisible. Nine is the magnetic spiral. It embodies rhea, a force that assassinates time (chronos) through a divine conspiracy. Just as rhea, the feminine principle, cannot end her own existence while birthing.

Nine will consume all other numbers, devouring both odds and evens. Like an amoeba, it will emerge as the new unit. Nine is the python, which has hibernated for years. Apollo bound it with numbers when time stripped away the sanctuaries of Earth. Yet now we wander toward the sun of eternal night, and the python will stretch, preparing to burrow into the core of the Earth.

From the pain of this world, a ring of tension encircles the nucleus of the Earth. Through internal light, it radiates. In the sea, lightning devours the elements, gaining mass and form. The flames, the water, and the air coalesce into lava. Lava envelops the children, the mountains, nature, and the souls. Into the abyss, the souls gestate within the seed, waiting for the ice age to pass, dreaming.

The spiral, the healing serpent of Asclepius and Imhotep, the thirteenth zodiac, Unuk Elhaija, the Ophiuchus constellation—nine, the amphibian, gestates.

Lydia Venieri
New York, November 2024