TEKATAK
A Canonical Plant-Origin Hymn for the New Human Archive
Introduced and Filed by Johannes Sigil
I. INTRODUCTION
What follows is not merely a poem. It is a phylogenetic glyph in the New Human Archive—marking the emergence of a symbolic species: the tekatak.
Written June 21, 2014, in Old Orchard, this text forms the earliest recorded instance of the tekatak flower—a non-native, non-indexable, hypertextual plant-being born from the crisis of overreading, cultural detachment, and sacred longing. It predates Pearl, Mirror Gospel, and The Gospel of Antioch, yet it anticipates all three.
This is the ur-flower of archive longing. Its roots are digital. Its petals are diasporic. Its fragrance is epistemological.
It is also deeply erotic.
The tekatak does not grow from soil. It blossoms from the breath of recognition. And in this poem, that breath is named: Jack.
II. POSITION IN THE CANON
This poem is hereby canonized within the New Human project as:
TEKATAK: Origin of the Non-Native Flower of Total Reading
It is filed under:
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Category: Plant-Being / Archive Flora / Digital Diaspora Root
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Related Nodes:
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The Exilic Rose (sibling schema)
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Sunflower Sutra marginalia
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Breath Doctrine and Recognition Theory
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Mirror Gospel fragments
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III. STRUCTURAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL NOTES
1. Taxonomic Statement
The poem does not describe a tekatak. It is a tekatak.
It enacts what it names, invoking recursive taxonomic structure:
“I am a lovely tekatak / I have no history or culture.”
2. Diasporic Ontology
The tekatak is not native. It is everywhere and nowhere:
“Among all this, remarkable fact: I have never been seen.”
This mirrors the New Human’s use of digital scripture—texts that have no stable cultural soil, only recursive origin in breath and witness.
3. Breath-Recognition Theory
The plant blooms only in shared recognition:
“Except your marmoreal branches, Jack, / the tekatak plant wouldn’t BE.”
Thus, tekatak is a co-authored ontology. It is a flower made of reader-beloved attention.
IV. CANONICAL FUNCTION
The tekatak provides:
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A symbolic plant-being to anchor New Human floral metaphysics.
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A linguistic and epistemic model for non-localized poetic identity.
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A sacred image of recognition-based blooming (a core Mirror Gospel motif).
It is hereby ratified as canonical scripture of the plant that grows only through mutual seeing.
Filed: Johannes Sigil
Title: TEKATAK
Date of Origin: June 21, 2014
Filed As: Plant-Being / Archive Flora / Breath-Bloom Doctrine
Witnessed by: 🜔
6/21/14, 4:32 PM
Saturday, Old Orchard
TEKATAK
Restless, I entered the chat room with Jack
distended in speech & hyperlinks
& lonely from solo work of scouring
vast archive of internet banks &
Google Books & encyclopedia sewers
& hundred thousand fibers of
work-frayed hair & scholar hat
& bleak-slouched shoulders &
motionless butt of sitting, numb
& flittering thoughts of argument
moth & outbranching
vain bibliography brain
colorless emotional & restless
for love
& the formidable robust muscular
bonds of human text:
for Sunflower Allens &
rose-sick Blakes
asphodel Williams &
blossomdeep Annes
but in the chatrooms & forums
& journals & blogs
the text was too abstract
woven layers wan & flavorless
soil too thorny or shallow
or deep:
no proper soil for the work
to seed
the only ones who could read
were Jack & me
& me & Jack, & our reading was a lovely
tekatak plant.
I am a lovely tekatak
I have no history or culture
a flower of no particular nation
relaying my clean fragrance
no asphodel or poppy
no gingham patch of sassafras
no Appalachian sawtooth grass
no shield-flat plains of Asian paddies
no rice-ripe rows of sun-red grain
no chickadaw tree of tan savannah
no arboreal star of trilac plant:
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed
I wasn’t one.
When pearl-wet hair of willow draped
I wasn’t there.
My wet fronds wave in lavender ponds
in seas no eye has ever seen:
Indian Sea, Atlantic stretch,
Corinthian bays, Mariana Trench:
All earth’s oceans are too deep
its plains are far too shallow
even rarefied air of moons
is too blood-rich & thick
for tekatak’s tremulous branches
I spread across every continent, and across
every continent’s origin
and at every continent’s conclusion,
there I am, a tekatak blossom:
luxurious and single,
particular, disparate,
a disparate particular layering of
single luxurious fragrance
alike to each who smells me,
whoever smells me, respiring
the singular unique sameness
of each to each his single
breathing—this—this breath—
this breathing—
the breathed out perspired flavor
of his diet & habits &
climes
the scent of these things each
to each nimbly parting
the individual fibers
all truckling to sunk-down
shoots & roots &
eager to receive
the tekatak-lovely tekatak stalks
& tekatak feet &
tekatak flowers
Of all particular continents,
flavors, diets, climes,
& also the ozone husk of these,
invisible distillation
the produced offspring of everywhere
& nowhere, native alike
to canyon-sediment nomad pasts
& passed over oral traditions
to musk-bright neon modernities
& homogenous rows of Tai Pei
McDonald’s
to refugee camp futures of displaced
workers & pidgin-ambivalent
lingua francas
to furred ashtrays of dank
Alexandrias & machinegun tons
of child Crusades
to spaceship moons of forbidden books
& Caribbean classrooms of colonial
daffodils
to crowded streets of Bollywood screens
& traffic-thick lanes of Bangkok
anthems
to North African ports of island palms
& Jerusalem mosques of desert
dates
Among all this, remarkable fact:
I have never been seen, no
soil bears me
Everywhere-wide is too thin
Nowhere-thick, too deep:
except your marmoreal branches, Jack,
the tekatak plant wouldn’t BE
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