From The Telling by Koyote the Blind: The Devilish Ones.
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From The Devilish Ones Telling Series
Koyote the Blind
True to his sacred art as Hablador (Master Storyteller) in the tradition of his ancient Toltec lineage, Koyote the Blind defies the conventions and assumptions of ordinary categories or description. Words are insufficient to express or contain this magical art and invocation as Koyote moves across and between the known and unknown spaces of reality and consciousness.
Weaving together sound, mood and attention the Hablador navigates the wonders and dangers of the mystery to deliver his audience back across the threshold of the familiar, but somehow transformed space where that voyage began.
Koyote the Blind is a Man of Earth in the A.A. lineage of Grady McMurty through the Queen of Heaven Clerk-House.
photo credit Kathleen Dreier / Esens Photography
Koyote the Blind Artist Bio
Koyote the Blind is an exiled Salvadoran performance artist working in a disciplined, improvisational art form known as The Telling, which was originally created by Toltecs in tenth-century Mexico and preserved throughout Latin America by drifters who told crazy stories to the children. Koyote has developed the Telling into a form that provokes in its audience uncommon emotions, strange cognitions, and ways of seeing the self that are not easily defined.
Having studied philosophy at the graduate level, Koyote approaches his art of The Telling in the spirit of the ancient philosophical tradition, disarming the mind and the personality in such a way as to release the being from the domination of habitual thought.
Koyote has been performing The Telling weekly in Southern California since 2005, in addition to appearances in Virginia; San Francisco; Grass Valley, CA; Mexico City; Sao Paulo; and San Salvador. Koyote?s Telling also has a presence online with a small but regular international audience, and has been featured in non-commercial radio and cable TV community programs.
Koyote was not born. He just became a possibility.
One night, he got drunk. In the darkness before creation, he tumbled and threw himself into a burning furnace and all the game he had eaten and swallowed whole burned with him in a fiery maelstrom. He exploded, and each piece was writhing and screaming sacred names in agony.
The serpent fire swiftly moved around all other creatures that sprung from the explosion, trying to make a whole out of the chaos. The doves were looking to fly high into the expanses of Father Heaven, looking for a breath of air and the coolness of infinite darkness, the bosom of Nuit. The maggots and earth serpents were struggling to blend into the cool earth and stone, to escape Sister Death, the dark-cloaked huntress.
Death, the hunter who stalks the shaman, threw a net around him, weaved from the primordial light and sound from which creation sprung. His consciousness, trapped in a field of light and energy, had lost all perspective. No past. No future. No identity. Not even madness to comfort him. He was nothing but pure, clear awareness of his demise.
To trick Death, he became the fire that consumed the beings. The fire spread through the net, taking the form of the net, becoming the net. Knowing that fire runs out if not fed, Death became Time.
As Grandfather Time, Death surrounded the shaman from all sides waiting for the fire to run out. The shaman became the empty space , the dark hole surrounded by the fiery net - untouched by the demise of the fire and untouched by time.
Death became Desire, bringing an end to the empty silence, destroying the ternal vacuity of space.
The shaman became an Indian. He sat in silence and equanimity. He made the fire of desire and life his core, and sounded it with the cold detachment of pure awareness - having no qualities or characteristics. The Indian sat, smoking his sacred smoke and singing the ancient songs. Even if an earthquake shattered all creation, he would not react.
Death became Language, defining reality and trapping the things that were named.
The shaman became a Talker, a teller of stories. He used not the naming but the scenes around the naming to loosen the grip of Death upon the world. He told stories about himself to avoid the iron grip of the Death of the naming.
Death became Reason. It spread through the world denying the storytelling, making entertainment out of the Sacred Talk.
The shaman became Madness, scrambling words and realities, the mixing of words and symbols without reason.
Death became Reality, the assemblage point around which all talking, all naming, all seeing and all comporting revolved. She became the Stone of Wisdom around which both sanity and insanity revolved.
The shaman became the Nagual, the scrambler of the assemblage point, the destroyer of the world.
Death became Eagle, the eternal Sun World consuming all consciousness so that no one could move beyond the point of assemblage.
The Nagual became Koyote, the trickster who moves, who talks, who scrambles what is.
Death became the Hunter, the eternal Stalker of consciousness.
