listening with wind in a garage

10/5/24

The wind is coming through a garage with a half-open door propped open by an oil barrel only the barrel is empty. As the wind swirls in I sense it briefly on a couch waiting for some show to come out where the wind is not what matters.

The wind swirls in and is obstructed by the promise of the door to keep out air and keep in sound but being half-open is doing neither.

As the wind swirls in it pauses so that there are long moments where air is not sensed at all.

Rather, it’s a rise in temperature, it’s getting sweaty, that’s why the door is open presumably.

As the wind swirls in I am thinking and I am waiting with others who are waiting for a sound to happen but in the meantime other sounds are happening and the wind is not one of them.

The breeze is brief. It is noticed because of the rise in temperature.

It’s a kind of thought that only matters.

That’s what I mean when I say I’m talking about fluidity, it's not the object of water or the viscosity of oil or darkness or the way wind swirls in but the way they matter in time, become interlocking and delicate like a sink full of suds.

I’m sorry but the suds are the best metonymic object I have. A thought is coextensive in it.

As I’m sitting on some furniture in a garage waiting for the sound to happen with others waiting while the wind swirls in I’m thinking and I’m remaining separate from it yet in it.

I’m on my phone writing thoughts about wind swirling in and whether thought is coextensive with it or whether the thought is happening separately yet in it.

And that's what I'm thinking about with regard to co-laboring, a technique of remaining whole while also connecting with a whole and bounded thing; it's not porous, nor generative (both things disqualified for their habits of erasure, of assimilating, of moving in, of intrusion) rather more like wind shears or tidal vortices that retain a center of gravity and thus remain plural without denying one.

They are fuzzy, vague, “life that thrives with human disturbance” (Tsing 2012, 506).

A wind shear is less obstructed by a garage door than made perceptible because of it, we enter into relation though my sensation of it, because of the rise in temperature.

The point is between precision and vagueness.

A habit of multiplicity isn't othering but it is saying fuck off, politely. It is fascinating to me how or why political thought seems obvious to anyone, when it labors to find an edge.

A neighbor violates - stomps, screams. He thinks he is alone though the walls he shares are thin.

Why did I go here. When I could've been going somewhere else.

All this time I wanted to know what the thought was, or rather, how one felt, what a thought felt like and how to write it.

And there was something wrong about getting the thought from all these angles when the angles weren't my own, when I could've been thinking somewhere else or bring someone else too. It's better when the technology fails. More human, or more animal.

When the sound happens it’s almost that I wish it wasn’t happening, because when the technology fails that’s when I feel most engaged, that’s when the artist or figure engages with the audience, “sometimes things don’t work” and the sound ends and we go back to waiting.

It's better when the human loses control. Is confused.

Because now I'm rustier than before. Or something has more friction.

As I’m writing on my phone and waiting while the sound is happening or not and I am thinking self-consciously that it must be annoying, that girl with the light on her phone writing instead of listening or waiting for the sound to happen like the rest of us.

I watch someone without these veils on, feeling the thought and. Feeling around these angles but feeling they aren't mine.

Is that what it means to be performing? Where the theory is. Forgotten. I didn't think she was sincere and that was a problem.

Not convincing in the performance of the thinking as if she wasn't performing and I could see that, we all could. And that was a problem.

There was no authentic hole or channel and so it was clear the thought had edges and the edges weren't her own whatever that meant, as if a thought could be owned or pieced together by someone just by looking at it.

Theory was always trying to improve itself and they were trying to improve it by thinking about it as if thinking could be improved or controlled.

That’s why, when the wind swirls in it forms an interference pattern, multiple interference patterns, with the heat or the door or the technology and the sound that ends it except for the wish for it not to, because of the rise in temperature.

But thought was not a technology it was merely something happening, thought was always on the way to becoming something, which you couldn't know until you had a sense of it from the other side, once it had already materialized and belonged elsewise to someone or something else, had an attribute or form.

So it didn't make sense to trap it or think that it was possible to make it do anything than what it already did, which was think and thinking without object or form.

Once an object existed it was all over. Calling it anything made it disappear.

Listening as intensity, thinking unravels with its particularities as residue of form and unattributed, so it is not possible to have ownership of it or contain it in thinking even though most of us could say, at any time, at least, what we thought we heard.

And we could react to it like a form of thinking about it as if the encounter was a thought in itself or had the contours of a thought and left itself out in a place to dry out or dust off.

Some attribute the intensity to noise and describe the sensation of being bombarded by it, how it’s best to make noise with friends, when it doesn’t feel like noise anymore.

Someone calls it “biophony,” as if this is a concept one ought to know, like the territorializations of birdsongs all happening at once simultaneously and only for each other and yet we don’t call it noise until we have quieted down.

And that residue, the dust, was in excess of the common or the consensus, behaving only approximately, to the source or object of the sound but not as it were indirectly, even though that's how we wanted it to behave, as ambient, as waves.

An ambience exceeded the forms we had to contain it but it also exceeded the grasp of what was sensing, so that wind was already an object whereas atmosphere was not.

When you think about it, humidity or wind or earthquake are just attributes of heat, the seismic, and air, which are not sensed or are barely sensed or are just externalizations of sensation and even then not thought about even collectively until it becomes obstructive to thinking.

So one cannot breathe encased in ice, like always when we are thinking about glaciation as a form of history, or how it might be in the future, with its representation being that of the uncontainable mammoth in the ice, the monster enframed in the ambient, ephemeral form which has nonetheless encased it forever.

The slow increase of electricity to one's body via electric chair, or heat in the tub, and measures of intensity and magnitude in degrees of sensitivity.

The thinking is apparent only in its terms of distance from entropy, otherwise a daydream would be the theory or a schizophrenic thought would be the norm.

I imagine a thought refusing to even out.

It was the evening out of thinking that separated a disciplined theory from a poem, how I understood either, and it was the evening out that my thinking wouldn't do, or I couldn't catch up to it, or see the necessary edge.

It was when the edge went missing that I began to write again and it couldn't be called ethnographic but there was an exterior.

It came out of anger, a feeling that was necessary to exist in refusal of entropy, or the seizure and appropriation of my thought by others.

Was how I experienced it. Needing a sense of ownership to stay contained, uneven, autonomous to matter apart from and yet speaking to with a sense of direction at.

The preposition was necessary to making a hinge of anything, and so I became directional, a weathervane.

Whereas the weather was more of an extension of the thought that had become external.

There wasn't a pattern for that that was repeatable, and thus it couldn't be considered in scientific frames or with markers for hypothesis or evidence.

Its empiricism ended with temperature.

At that point thought was only measured as intensity or irritation, as an oyster "must cover its itch with a pearl."

You could see evidence of this however in a sad song drawn out to capture an insecurity about the present and an inability to contain it in a way that makes sense, for example when the song begins to resemble others in tone or when it becomes too slow to enjoy.

The listening becomes uneven with it, what people like to call wavelength or frequency and until then just various modes of experience, yawning, jiggling one's leg against the beat as if to speed up the song to match the vibe of thought or to anchor deeper in it.

That needed variation like unpredictable variation, a cause or strike of difference around the untapped refrains of whatever was happening but became cloudy and unreal, a possibility of what might happen if only, or as if, or whether or at all.

Thought was stretching out into nothing like night or static in the air.

It was insensible until it was made up and then it had substance.

You know what I am talking about.

I realized I had been doing myself a disservice for many years while others tried to get ahead of me. I took pills to even things out and thought I was winning when actually I had slowed down so much that I was unrecognizable, an event horizon.

The slowing down was good for perceiving but it was not thinking which was already coextensive with the world and only needed to listen to it.

And there was something the intuitives already knew because they shared that soup or its suds and it made sense to them why should sound and poetry come from the same place.

Say more about coextensive, well it's obvious when say you're in a snowstorm or a heatwave and you become puny, thinged, whereas the attempt to matter depended who was there to catch you or listen when you complained and subsequently became very protective of the thinking as if it was a resource to be stolen or arranged in a way that mattered, could have identity.

All dogs have temporality and communicate by it, just try leaving one an extra hour and see what develops from his habits or attention.

They communicate through rhythms thinking yours are definite and therefore thoughts begin and end by the hour you come home and the smell that trails off in the waiting.

A dream has a curfew.

It can be a source of irritation, then, to recognize a similar coextensive thought in someone whose wind swirling in may have been similar or wasn't at all and it was performing as if.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “On Nonscalability: The Living World is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales.” Common Knowledge 18, no. 3 (2012): 505–24. DOI: 10.1215/0961754X-1630424.

thermophilia

9/23

“Everyday life subsides into insignificance even while we attend to it constantly.” - Lyn Hejinian

The yellow belonged to the same plants (in Ohio) that I thought I'd left in the desert (of West Texas). Goldenrod (solidago) is not a daffodil, little bluestem (schizachyrium scoparium), switchgrass (panicum virgatum), etc. It made me sad to know I already knew their names. I expected something else. That does not also thrive in the heat. However, I felt less alone. The sun radiates white heat, but the sky scatters light at the blue end of the spectrum, so it appears yellow. Scattering is an effect of the chemical composition of the atmosphere. The heat of yellow begins at 2000F. Thermophiles thrive in extreme heat. As bacteria and fungi in hot springs or the deep sea. They need water but not the sun. Instead of photosynthesis, chemosynthesis. As what breathes methane or diffuses it. Like the daffodil, which has been proposed as an antidote to cows and the methane of their burps. Can the daffodil resent how it becomes useful? It needs the sun. "When a thing acts on me...I am ~thinged" (Coleridge). I struggle to write clearly, or to write at all. The thought is content to live without the sun. “Wordlessly over time, the ice retreated into liquid puddles of itself” (Warren). I make the sentences shorter, as if more punctuation might slow things down, like the theory of speed bumps that in practice are just obstructions to an otherwise smooth ride. I use simple words. I parse through the thought as if there’s a concept worth pulling out of it, to make it useful. "He makes a toy of thought to imagine or remember himself at a size susceptible to being toyed with" (Terada). In the sun, the thought insists I write it, but when I begin to write, another thought takes its place. It is usurped by tone, some low sound, that is gloomy, like in the story “All Summer in a Day,” (Bradbury) it rains on Venus all the time. School is a practice of standing in front of a scrim of light, a fake sun. Kids prepare for the sun to come out for an hour before it disappears for years again. One remembers the sun on earth. The other children lock her in a dark room. Because it’s a story, the sun appears. The sun makes them forget her. They pick flowers. It passes and the rain starts again. They give the girl their bouquets to apologize. In the prairie, thought is not a bouquet, but density. Sound completes the sense of this density, being imbued-with something, the color yellow, a chemical, of air, the buzz of millions of insects, the accumulations and motions of leaves even in death, roots that don’t let go. I take shitty photos with my phone and apply filters to it. A bad image remembers like a bouquet. The thought becomes technicolor, a point on the electromagnetic spectrum with the power to matter.

foams

“...foam is fleeting, momentary, plural, “not nothing”’
       – Peter Sloterdijk, Foams

“But that shouldn’t stop us from listening…this is the way we prepare for the lesson of echoes, imitation, conversations, duets, and other types of shared refrain.”
       – Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacies

“That’s where the bubbles come in. It’s pretty quiet in here right now but I know what you’re thinking. Like to take responsibility for those thoughts. [Opens can of diet coke with a loud pop.]”
       – Eileen Myles “Foam”

The hot tub obviates flesh and water and being in the world— the way sound is a way of being in the world, the way the elemental enfolds bodies into it.

I moves a layer of foam from one instance of the overpowerful bubbling of a jet, revealing movement in advance of its accumulation.

The wave touches her, hot tub foam in the shape of cupcake frosting, though I admits it could look like many other things, that it was not limited to cupcakes or even anything at all: an idea ought to reflect its possibility—and not submit to calls to clarity.

That said, the full jets churn the foam and make the disparate bodies (who sink to the underwater bench and prop themselves above it periodically, to avoid overheating) appear dynamic in their stasis.

And— now that the bartender has turned on the pool lights— its turbidity turns their bodies into cloudy blobs, like nebulas seen through amateur telescopes.

We are in the “mezzanine – where chemical, flux states of matter interact indistinguishable from the social bubbling and frothing…” (Szerszynski 2021). Or we are heat, “becoming thermotropic - energies moving across entwined modalities: electromagnetic waves and radiation, charged affective atmospheres, vibrating bodies” (McHugh and Kitson 2018).

I looks to one corner of the large pool, visible from the hot tub, and remembers the woman wore a stunning red dress at the bar over a week ago; it’s hard to say if she’s a tourist because they don’t usually stay this long, at least not without introducing themselves, especially at the pool, where the substance of relation is felt in a way that’s inevitable, chlorinated and often scummy: and so everyone says something to draw attention away from this.

What do you think? A man asks his mother, who is visiting from California: 94? 98?

And he launches into some comparison of California hot tubs, where they like it hot, at least 104.

But the mother doesn’t agree—she dips her toes without enthusiasm.

I thinks about offering a tidbit of knowledge about the hot springs she’d visited in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, where one tub boasted 115 degrees.

She had spent two hours in it, caught in a conversation so banal as to keep her there past her body’s limitations, a mushroom in the sun.

A mushroom or other nonmammalian fruit; it was too sad to think about dehydrated animals suffering in the heat.

The specificities of the conversation are less than the scene of its expression.

“Everyday life” is variable as a concept, and its significance indeterminate, flitting from person to person as sensations in a moment or a field.

A red dress adds something to it, even though it does not appear to the senses in that moment.

In the moments between her waving the foam from side to side, looking to the woman in the red dress, and the conversation about temperature, a group of white people with tattoos and children in innertubes enter the hot tub.

Now there is hardly a place to fit.

A woman dips her foot gently on the edge, where kids seem more likely to make space and they do; their father—or someone—brings them some red liquid in plastic cups with tops.

One innertube child brushes wet hair away from her face and opens the top to pick out the maraschino, then leaves the cup opened on the hot tub rim.

With more people in the pool there is a sense of being a bunch of cold crawfish that have been dumped into a boiling pot.

In the hot tub they are not enveloped so much as disaggregated by chemical composition; flesh affected not through emotional responses or even sensory stimulus—but irradiation, the texture of water—the unknowingness of intensities which become events in perception: a woman lifts herself to the edge because she’s begun to itch, or sweat; someone offers to buy a round of drinks; a child chooses to cool off in the pool.

Figures move through viscosities in excess of their form.

A breath is one kind of viscous gesture—a conversation is another.

So that the parameters of space or time, figure or form matter less, are multiple in their contingencies or modulation.

As if a person could be painted into a place, a variable, the strokes visible or thick and touching no gap and revealing no canvas.

Foam is active against the “unloosening of the eye,” that Johnathan Crary notes as modernity’s segregation of the senses via its technologies.

The foam is relation without form—a physicality that shifts form—becomes part of another—moves with it—becomes a rhythm and refrain.

Not separable, then: unable to be itself without the other: bread and yeast; molecule and water; yellow and sunflower, dark and stars, human and air.

As the water bubbles and sprays and splashes the ledge of the tub, I wonders Is the heat separable from heat? Is hot tub water separable from bubbles? Is dust from air? Is social media? Is a tone of voice or a gesture of tucking up wet hair? Is a red dress? Can air be distinguished from its airiness? Is foam the water or its wateriness?

Is the topic of sunflowers, and the water bill, that the mother states is much too high and yet she’s responsible to (she makes a space for the word babies, but avoids it) caring, and others in the tub seem supportive of that effort, they nod.

She tells a story of when A, as a 3-year old, was caught with 3/4 of a chocolate bunny in his mouth, and had to be dangled by the feet to prevent the ‘Tasmanian devil’ from running around his mother in circles.

V says her nickname as a kid was Thundercloud, for all the tantrums she threw.

I relates that as kids she and her brother often threw crying tantrums, from sensory difficulties— too hot, too cold, too itchy— the difficulty of an itchy, wooly world.

V says she used to cry if her underwear gave her wedgies, and the women in the pool reach consensus about this except for I, who wonders about the ubiquity of thongs.

L comments on the chlorine and insists on showering before and after to avoid pruning, to which V expresses an insincere shame that she only showers once a week.

There’s an assumption that once something is described its meaning is evident, which makes the ends of sentences feel like they’re hanging in mid-air, when actually it’s just what’s happening.

What actually happens is an attention moving in and out of seeing, hearing, feeling, so that what is described is the action of attunement, rather than analysis or retreat into a meaningful plot or narrative.

Nothing happens—although something happens in the failures to settle into thought—to breathe its air—realizing the happening is imperceptible at the speed you have been thinking it.

A theory is made from these accumulations of detail and corroborated against a shape of conversation.

The banalities of small talk take on the texture of foam, become an event of minor sociality, world-making statements exchanged for relational objects of things heard and responded to.

Relations are sensed as refrains —returns to still or slow objects, pausing in moments— for listeners— its “fragile condition of regularities” —shifting along a continuum of attention (Serres).

A woman starts a conversation with the guy she sat next to when she parted the innertube children with her foot.

She asks a question that seems obvious, whether he was visiting from elsewhere, and where that elsewhere was.

West Virginia, we’re on a road trip, living out of a FourRunner we outfitted with a half bed in the back.

He gestures at his girlfriend and her two braids.

And then the question is Are you an artist? No but my girlfriend… who is talking to a man wearing a cowboy hat, who turns with a straw in her mouth… I do dance, choreography, poetry and to pay the bills I blog for Medium.

He is a software engineer.

Things begin to reverberate in the pool and louden, the jets on high and the temperature evening out with the foam.

A woman is staring at the backside of the man wearing a cowboy hat.

She speaks to him; she’s surprised he’s still in town; she’d heard he’d been run out for pulling a gun on someone that was something between a water gun and a 9mm, no one knew for sure.

And that’s fine, everything is fine, the cowboy performs a gesture of how fine it is and everyone is laughing or not considering the rumor of the man with a gun and whether he pulled it on someone or was run out of town.

A man standing in the middle of the tub cups the foam as he describes the town as a Purgatory, as if no place has ever been described as such, as if purgatory itself is not the descriptor of all places in which waiting, a slow brew of uncertainty, becomes the feeling for being caught between two circuits, one of predictable repetition and the other of possible refrain.

He does not seem so interested in the weather as he is in describing his theories about it, except that no one knows what weather he is talking about, and those looks of bewilderment or boredom signal to him to slow down the speech even more, as if the whole tub is full of toddlers.

There is a technics to waiting; observing the weather to see what it will do.

A train goes by.

The kids look at each other before covering their ears and giggling, which the Software Engineer points out is so cute, the decision they’d made in that instant like, Should we do this? Ok!

Her idea of time or space is measured by how much fits in the constraint of a hot tub.

Events over multiple days blur into a single day, a single event due to the stasis of its staging, and the unvaried quality of things happening in it.

The specificities of bodies become entropic and rearrange themselves in neon, sag, cellulite, hairiness, equipment against the sun.

The man rumored to pull a gun on someone sinks into the hot tub bench and now is sitting next to her.

She asks about his hat, his half-nakedness.

She gets him to say he is only a cowboy from the waist up.

She feels satisfied by this, like she had felt satisfied for yelling at a small crowd at the pool bar for staring at her as she walked from the pool to the bar.

And it is because he has a reputation.

Among many who share the reputation but, in a small town, is subject to its amplification by the (in)frequency in which things happen, among people who know how to circulate the news.

The Half Cowboy is there to create content for the gram.

He photographs an open bag of truffle chips and an open tub of Hot Jalapeño salsa.

He raves about the salsa.

He remarks at the entry of a group of French artists that they are his “ticket to France,” and begins to network, tipping his Stetson at their shaved heads.

In the hot tub, things are only ever matter of fact, like a meatloaf. A food that is mashed up into a composite that spreads to fit the shape of a breadpan. This is how a collective subject emerges.

A man making a film about a rigpig who lost his job sits across from her now in the tub, asking her about sulfur and HS2 and explaining the sites where there is some good frak sand.

The film is about being in the world, he explains.

As he speaks, he squints to avoid drops of chlorine sprayed in his face, and he modulates his volume to account for kids’ shrieking and drunken laughter.

It is darker now and the night would be spectacular if the pool lights did not obscure the stars, but likely no one in the pool is thinking about this and no one complains.

He had made a radio documentary about the Observatory’s project to study dark energy and its encroachment by 24/7 drilling operations, their menacing LED lights: a metaphor for thick, subterranean goo—oil—how it got into everything—how it competes with the moon for the sky.

Have you heard people in the Permian say - the beauty here is all underground? - he asks.

The bartenders bring hot dogs tubside.

The sharability of the dish is relative to the stability of the dish—like the color that might not be red for you.

It seems plausible to assume people live in the sewers underground, like in Las Vegas, that their presence there suggests an injustice above ground.

I thinks back to the couple she’d talked to in the pool on another occasion, how she was from Appalachia and her dad was a “hillbilly,” and sometimes she said “hisself” as she was talking, without knowing it was regional, like V didn’t know she said “grandpawl” and then pointed out that I too, said some words funny, like “burried” instead of “berried.”

A man is talking to the foam about how he doesn’t believe anyone went to the moon and thinks that only Russians are employed at Blue Origin.

He doesn’t say “Blue Moon” out loud because he thinks his phone will hear him, and he’d be breaching the NDA he’d signed when he was just four people under Bezos.
He orders another kind of beer.

Things got ugly there and one day he looked around at the ten or so executives and asked himself what he was doing as an engineer among the most brilliant minds in the world, despite himself having walked out on the first day of first grade to pursue a life as an autodidact.

A life where he believes in twin flames probably more than anything.

It happens often, he says, and she says, what happens often. What got ugly.

Another man says he would absolutely not go into space, he doesn’t trust the guys making the engines.

He trusts the guys making Ferraris and Porches, though.

He shrugs at the scientific—for its promise to totalize experience into namable parts, but it is imperative to uphold it.

He says now he is trying to make a life that is sustainable and easy, since he’d figured out before what wasn’t sustainable and hard, or sustainable and hard, or unsustainable and easy.

He aims to do this by turning his one apartment into three and so the other two he could Airbnb, and the rest of the time he would work at the gas station.

Previously, he’d taken people climbing using a van he’d outfitted with some bus seats he’d found dumped on the sidewalk years and years ago, which were haunting him now, as they’d shown up here, where V was sitting now, high as fuck on an edible, taking a red bandana and tying it around her head, talking to the air about a business plan she’d just hatched about making holograms out of characters from Melrose Place, who would sit next to you at social gatherings and hold your hand.

Moon Man smokes in the tub, then drifts to the large pool where the French women are smoking and where he can smoke with impunity, not suffering the subtleties of people waving hands at their noses or turning away.

He perches on the edge, keeping the cig there as he crosses his knees, looking in her direction, as if considering when to make the move to rejoin, or waiting for permission in a smile or wave of invitation.

D is there too, wearing a purple jersey he’d gotten somehow from the highschool.

He launches into matters of cultural history near Rochester and lists figures who had transcended the place to become something, and he repeats them in a litany twice: Fredrick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, The Wright Brothers; figures that both in their individuality and their repetition seemed to flatten the tone of his enthusiasm so that it has an opposite effect on her attention, as if radical celebrity were an acid wash on the denim of America.

The good thing is that nothing “out here” cares if you appreciate it or not, which she supposed was a kind of privilege of isolation.

I thinks about the wild boar she almost hit on the road—several months ago.

A black bundle with some speed.

She’d never seen a wild boar before—and it was nighttime—so she’d said to herself in the car is that a feral hog?

And thought of the meme she’d never quite understood—probably because it was an urban joke—to equate the rural with their concerns about animals, where everything is either a pest or a pet.

She did not hit the hog—and is unsure why she’s thinking of it now.

Moon Man recedes into shadows; shadows recede into the bar, where a petrified cat is perched on the wall, a testament to what they’d found when they were cleaning out the place, same as that old piano.

Some moments pass during which tubgoers dip in and out, bring back drinks from the bar, or shake the drops from their necks, like inverted dogs.

Now, coming back, Moon Man parts some bubbles on his way to her.

He says I have two pieces of information for you: one is that Joe Rogan was on a podcast with an anarchist talking about the Unabomber.

The other is that the water dowser I’d wanted to apprentice with lost his job as Water Commissioner and that might explain why he wasn’t calling back or answering emails.

When he finishes delivering the information he parts the bubbles again and walks to the other side of the pool, says some words to no one in particular and gets out, puts pants on but not a shirt, and joins some girls who have begun to dance at the bar.

I drifts to something happening on her other side.

A man who is here everyday sits on the hot tub edge without getting in.

The music shifts from “Gangnam Style,” to “Whoop There is Is,” to three songs in a row by the Cranberries.

K laments that E told the bartenders to not play reggaeton anymore, given the demographic tendencies of the pool clientele.

V wonders if the bartender knows how the lead Cranberry died: she drowned in a bathtub.

Do you think he plays Cranberries at closing time for a reason? She asks him.

He knows. He does. They all laugh about this.

They laugh about hot tub water like impressionist painters laughed about qualities of light and how that changed throughout the day—affected how you saw things—paintbrush as an instrument of measuring atmospheric qualities and its effect on the figures.

Against “realism,” which aimed to trap human features in crisp strokes and colors of exactness.

There was a real outcry of injustice to form among the painterly elite at the time, citing sloppiness—a lack of skill—rather than a way of attending to the figure’s relationship to the ground—the background—the field of wheat or the blue overchair or the apparition of a man sitting at the table in the shadows.

There is a woman blurring into her atmosphere—a slow settling into the circadian contingencies of time of day and humidity and barometric pressure—and season—and proximity—and etc.

Something is loud in the air—the jets, a drunk couple, the nightclub music playing favorites from the early 00s, the too-bright lights— the burnt out conversations from the previous events and spaces that had been more obstacular to her hot tub endeavor than enabling of a social feeling; the invitation to Zumba, the reference to bad impressionist landscapes, some hiddenness of eroticism playing itself out across ignoring and being ignored.

She and V discuss the dancing girls as a phenomenon of species behavior, triggered by the sounds of a nightclub, who giggle and sway while sipping their drinks with straws.

Whose attention do they desire, or is it that they are so accustomed to drawing or desiring attention that their movements —sway, giggle, sip— seem dictated by some button beyond the event, an activation of their person, as composites of a desirability that feels easy and common, and therefore worthwhile?

They become the subject of conversation even though no man is looking at them, which might also be the point.

One half of a drunk couple is wearing two swimsuits; no one knows what she is talking about, but tubgoers smile and nod as if they do.

Next to them are two young men who might be the target audience of the dancing girls, but they have not looked in their direction.

Now Moon Man is standing in the doorway and the rest of them are shifting around to make themselves comfortable; most unrecognizable tourists, reminding them this is a Where where things happen, an epicenter from which a felt zone of various densities expresses itself as sensation, movement, or shift in phase through the way it appears anomalous in a landscape: a high-end Prada shoestore along the Western horizon; a stylish pair of hot pink sunglasses worn in Instagrammed composition with cacti and tumbleweeds, a cartoonish moustache and a “darlin’” or a “ma’am” spoken by men who everyone knows are not really ranchers, but derive their appearance from John Wayne movies.

There’s a crowd, and they are not wearing cowboy hats, they are wearing short brimmed canvas versions of those, which are very in right now, somewhere, maybe even here.

She can describe the light in detail as it changes throughout the day.

And measure—through digressions—the light in certain windows in LA—compared with San Francisco—in Texas—and the rhythm of the spire touching the door of the grocery store at evening—and the flood of orange light in her own windows—whether they are heavily curtained.

Now an artist is calling them earthlings and asking them to respond while she waves the foam around in the tub.

She calls them itsy bitsy earthlings and asks them to talk about how they swim in a sea of air, and two people walking along the edge of the pool demonstrate this, with their arms swishing through a space bedecked in desires to be seen, to belong—not a viscous underwater after all, but a transparency marked by those movements—now I am a fish!

In my fish-ness I exaggerates what is human by walking on two legs, wearing jeans and a crop top.

I pokes a hole in a moment by doing as Simon Says, while everyone is sitting still, filming the swimmers with their phones.

Simon asks What is an aggressive air?

How many fish are in the sea?

And the fish and the earthlings and their filmers then Google the answer.

With their little earth ears underwater.

Don’t eat….don’t eat, Simon Says, we are going to grow trees together with our tears and a theremin, we are going to listen to the sounds around us—coyotes, a Topo Chico truck passing by, someone’s car door slamming, a nervous cough, a sigh, maybe of boredom.

Now she is sitting next to a practical man.

He is sitting next to some hecklers.

He is whispering about goats and chickens during a drum solo over the speakers, about knowing a thing or two about drum solos, being a Dead Head many years ago.

She laughs and says Oh but this is Art, to mean that she had felt entranced by it, had ignored the bubbles and the drunks with her eyes closed, so that no one could touch her.

Along the wall is a man she wants to avoid, because of an altercation in which she felt trapped in the bubble of his chronicity, a timing that didn’t match with hers, an exactness and hers was not, which made her feel that any contact whatsoever was a zone of proximity in which she was in danger of spaghettifying, like the edge around a black hole.

She was late once, then imprecise with her measurements of the sky, then wishy-washy about picking up some plates she had agreed to buy.

That collision of rhythms was fatal to the something they were trying to be—friends, likely—and she remained caught in its consequence.

Away from a thing she didn’t understand, the vibes she couldn’t read, the indeterminate expressions on the faces of folks who may have been innocuous were it not for this collision, became namable parts to its fold, as allies or enemies.

Better to be among strangers, momentary and renewable in the tub.

She would allow herself to “reach the ultra-sonorous,” a place where the senses do not converge around the figure called “I” but spread across that felt zone, a listening zone, a depersonalized zone of reference where figures come and go as dense expressions in a field, folded along seams of contact.

“It’s a “she” that speaks in me.”

A figure might be the cottonwoods planted along the pool building, the way the wind took to them.

Or the man who decries their existence as invasive, but for the same reason tolerates their presence: The only good thing about a cottonwood is the sound of the wind blowing through it.

3/28

Imaginary friends come to the tub, where the jets are on. It’s only 35 degrees outside, so it’s empty, the light seems to touch the surface of the swimming pool like a finger making various diffractive patterns in the water, which appear as shadows at the bottom of the pool.

Really the finger is a breeze or a bug, landing briefly, a moment of imbalance in temperature, in pressure.

Periodically, the jet will be hotter for a minute or two, then return to homeostasis. It would be nice if it stayed hot, I think, a desire expressed by a man who enters the tub later. He turns up the jets as if to increase the temperature by pressure, which causes chlorinated water to spray up into her face and obscure any other sound. But for now it’s just her in the water, watching the smaller bubbles become bigger and then disappear in paisley patterns, rounded out by pressure underneath and air above.

The bartender comes over to ask if she wants a cold one. She feels kind of bad; he speaks to her from his employment, a smile is a way of eliciting gratuity, chitchat a means of filling the air confined by the time a shift begins and ends. He seems like a restless worker – deciding to clean the pool of leaves or other debris, despite an absence of swimmers.

In the time between her entry into the tub and the entry of another, she reads on her phone. This is difficult; the sun is in the way, she is not wearing her glasses. But needs to occupy her thought out of shame for staring into the water without task, as if it might draw attention to herself as strange or sad, the pool-cleaning worker whose restlessness would be measured by her inertia, her ability to relax and to be served.

And to alleviate the crush of boredom that is not enough to get her out of the pool and somewhere else, where there are others; she’d heard on the radio something about inflammatory diets causing a tendency to socially withdraw, loneliness – so she asks the worker about food.

He says he’s on a keto diet and can’t enjoy the imported breads from Italy that are drawing crowds to a small restaurant nearby, nor the beer she’s got on a coaster. These foods are processed – but chicken, pork, bacon, that’s all okay. She’s vegan so she thinks about the incompatibility of eating for health or for love or pity.

The artist she’d overheard at a bonfire some weeks before who bought goats off of Craigslist, named them all, then systematically shot them in the head with a pistol in the name of being a more conscious consumer of meat. Everyone was laughing like no big deal.

Perhaps it was okay to withdraw from this, to keep her inflammatory states to herself in commitment to bondage with the animal under the thoughtlessness of human hunters. She swiped left on a man who “liked” her, inexplicably, as all his photos showed him posing with an exotic beast he’d killed, then put in a position of repose as if to sleep. The sleeping made her cry.

And so she turns away from the keto man whose smile is fake. The vapor rises from the tub which is not hot enough. If it were Iceland, the vapor would blur the lines of bodies which would be naked and stark against the snow. E said everyone goes during lunch – imagine – the breakup to the workday.

A molecular process happens. Blood vessels widen to circulate more oxygen through the body and to cool off – where sweating is offset in water. The water makes flesh buoyant and lessens a gravitational pull. The heartbeat accelerates to compensate.

She imagines a cartoon of a boneless man with three curlicues of hair on his pink chest, sinking into himself in a tub like a fallen cake whose mouth is drawn out almost the width of it. The mouth suggests satisfaction, the eyes are looking somewhere with the ends pointed downward, as if to be relaxed means your features are drawn toward the earth, to melt into it, becoming soft in the soil.

To cease to be human at all, where the word has become intractable as a schedule.

Are you there, in the ether?

She is thinking while her hands float above her knees that the intractability of others may be due to their rhythms – which she prefers in the reggaeton playing over the speakers.

Whereas a crowd seemed to gather at the sandwich shop, forcing activity that would linger on in her memory all afternoon as she thought about what so-and-so was wearing or gesticulating about or how he treated his dog, and what prompted his asking her when she’d arrived and whether that earned her a notch in the conveyor belt of his daily relations, that cycled everyone through like miniature cereal boxes, briefly filling and stopping then starting again, resembling the other boxes, to be forgotten in their sameness and dismissed.

What use are you? She would ask the other boxes, to see if they had some insight. But usually the rhythm was perfunctory, of no use, and no reason to dwell on.

Too long in the tub and a moment of a breeze felt divine – she draws her leg up to the ledge to let her foot experience the air. An absurd posture that is perfectly acceptable under water.

Perhaps the pool was her thinking, an extension of her electrochemical processes, an electromagnetic field churning and folding in and through itself.

Water and air as varied temperatures and the nonconductive sheath of skin allowing an experience that is not electric, merely chemical.

09/2018

Can I suggest that touch, as a movement of desire toward an other, is also a violent writing of the relationship between self and other?…The question of political qualification—who can be a political subject?—is simplified to: who will risk the touch of another?

—Erin Manning, Politics of Touch

An object’s elusivity follows the logic of a body in movement. Trying to think through an object—”color,” “touch,” “mining,” “infrastructure,”—leads to its impossibility to ground the orbit of objects and ideas that come next. I settled on “energy” yesterday, to both describe the phenomenon at the center of touching, of light, of technology, of the process of mining things like cobalt, the color blue—and to outline a kind of methodology implied by a grid. The griddedness of relation is an elusive infrastructure. “Energy” holds while also pointing to the material stakes in its allocation and use as a natural resource. Even vitality risks political scrutiny. Manning offers “touch” which eludes “the body,” its allocations or borders. “Without a stable body there can be no body-politic, and without a body-politic, bodies will not conform, proclaims the state” (57). The unconforming body risks becoming unsensed—legally illegible—or insensible: knocked unconscious by someone unaware or indifferent to a thing too small to be seen.

Because the object of thought itself keeps moving, making a target of claims becomes a matter of cartography: where might we find associated claims for the invisible undergirding of ordinary life? Visible things accumulate to reassure one of its density. Risking this touch means risking the viable link between body and world, self and other, self and thing, mind and thought-thing. If, as Manning suggests, body is touch, the what that I touch become matters of a political relation that I know by its unknowability. The insensible, the unknowable does not cooperate and thus cannot conform to my inevitable political arrangement, the one I form in my head as a fantasy of how I wish the world would be, if only. It is this desire to arrange from the insensible that makes the “violent writing” of the other possible: their unconformity meets my desire. I con-form them, or de-form them, in my desire for an object of thought that will remain analyzable in the aftermath of a conversation, a text, a look, or touch. Here Manning offers choreography, specifically of the Argentinian tango, to suggest that this relational politics might move in terms of both desire and improvisation. Rather than offer a conciliatory biopolitical model where bodies become atomized, cyborgian, unrecognizably human within the terms of its absorption into the nation-state, a politics of touch rests on the “infra(sensual)language our reciprocal touch will create” (57). Because this politics derives from movement, choreography and improvisation contend with the pre-formed objects that have materialized from other desires to order, to have circulate or to flow. In practice, the object of infrastructure or energy meets the political subject of the sensing body—to those whom infrastructure is highly visible or an obstacle to flows, for whom energy is largely invisible or inaccessible, or who somatizes the subterranean space of a cobalt mine or anxieties of a 5G gridded smart city or “mirrorworld” which makes cyborgs of even the plants (*). Within the spatio-temporal staging of a fragile global ecosystem, this touch-politics becomes necessary to think—where blackouts, climate refugees and algorithmic-determinations threaten movement and borders write others violently. “This is democracy-to-come, a politics of sensing bodies in movement” (48).

Looking at making personhood, and what qualifies as personhood—the operative form in which this choreographed attunement has legal or political consequences, Hannah White suggests that “earth rights can be successfully created and enforced given the correct political climate and widespread social awareness…” (143), which has been demonstrated in Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile, but that the status quo in the US “is too deeply ingrained in our government and citizens to make this type of change” (163). Comparing this with the Latourian model, under which the “flat ontological” democracy appears to end at a firm liberal humanism, attention to the sensory and somatic dimensions of “life” urges for a kind of politics where personhood does not come with representatives in a parliament of things.

Instead, to attend to soma is to attend to sense, where expressing it—sounding the body—builds on principles of touch (in Manning’s use of the term), and her tracing this through Agamben to Aristotle. The insensible or unsensed is made synonymous with bare life. Bare life extends here to the infrasonic dimensions of an (in)corporeal subject, the zoē that was distinguished in classical thought from the realms of bios, life that took form and thus could seek political representation. The animal with a capacity for politics rather than a politics designed to incorporate the animal. Because language created the dimensions around an animal’s untelligible voice, the polis was designed around it. Bare life, a voice unarticulated by words, a murmur or a scream, a sound. Diagnosing Western metaphysics with this condition of politicizing bare life, Agamben refers to Aristotle: “It is not by chance, then, that a passage of the Politics situates the proper place of the polis in the transition from voice to language. The link between bare life and politics is the same link that the metaphysical definition of man as “the living being who has language” seeks in the relation between phonos and logos:

Among living beings, only man has language. The voice is the sign of pain and pleasure, and this is why it belongs to other living beings (since their nature has developed to the point of having the sensations of pain and pleasure and of signifying the two).” (Agamben, 1998:7).

If the sensible determines the dimensions of public feeling, what is a world in the shape of a shared sensibility, a common sense? Manning writes, “To think democracy through touch is to begin to reconsider the role of sense, the senses, and making sense” (128). Making sense is an active process. It requires acting outside “the grids of intelligibility of statecraft, [where] we are left with a more productive idea of the political that speaks of aporias, of sensation, of movement…” (128). A notion of the political that Manning admits is “difficult to grasp” (128). Whose sense determines these dimensions? A world the shape of whose common sense? So that the world’s edge begins to fray, dissolve into something or someone other than itself, a softening. Across the restaurant, a group of four older women are arguing over an absent fifth. The gossip—her son was about to, and then—wow—they click their tongues—I just don’t even know these days—murmurs along with looks of consternation—he did it in the most brutal way.

Touch expands the political subject to one that senses, rather than speaks. Manning again, “…if we allow ourselves to re-place making sense as an event in and of the body, it soon becomes apparent that making sense need not stand apart from sensing” (128). A sensing something includes the mimosa pudica, the touch-me-not plant whose leaves fold in and shake when touched, and can include the unsensed, seismic activity of a volcano, or the echolocative communications of swiftlet colonies in Myanmar. For Manning, it does not extend to sense-as-signification, “…but according to a whole new series of paradoxes, experiments, and events, toward a thinking of the incorporeal” (130).

However, this rhetoric can also include the sensing capacities of an unborn fetus, include corporations as political actors, and possibly include AI or algorithms. Touch as a category itself falls short in considering debility, although Manning addresses this complication in The Minor Gesture, expanding on the Spinozan assertion that “we do not yet know what a body can do.”

This does not solve the absent’s issue; but to discuss it alleviates something. Confronting the insensible, a politics develops from concern for the possible. To be in the world tolerably, without canceling yourself out from it, without denying yourself the sounds of others means making room for ecologies of time and patience for a hinge. There is a sound for the soft something that exists at the edge of the body’s knowability: infrasound. Sounds below 20hz, the threshold of human audibility, might be heard by elephants and bats. Humans might know infrasound as feelings – of fear, anxiety, dread – as the sounds are said to produce these feelings, or even the shapes of apparitions in the eye. Also called the “ghost frequency,” infrasound might produce a shadow, or the perception of one. The eye can see this sound. It offers the possibility that these physical thresholds might be understood with technological extension. This extension has been theorized among theorists of feminist technoscience (Haraway ; Barad; etc.) deriving from the Deleuzian body without organs, tracing itself to Artaud’s theater of cruelty, during which the boundaries between theater and audience are viscerally challenged.

In Sensorium, which “hopes to historicize the techno-human,” technological extension of the human capacity to sense is expressed along lines of both science and art “to produce an amplified, connected, expanded but also disequilibreated corporeality” (2). Along with historicizing sense in art and theory, Sensorium makes an argument for the human body itself as first mediated and second technologized, with sense being the operative in either. Here, art does not just use technology, but is technology, with its ability to create forms, deepen registers, and attune to sensory categories and modes of relation. Rather than hone in on phenomenological objects, the art curated here attends to the experiential and participatory. A certain concern for undoing an ocularcentric hegemony and/or allowing the visual to also mean touching, Caroline A. Jones suggests that visuality is a rather recently-acquired sense given the evolution to trichromatic vision of homo sapiens, when hominids “had to reclaim color vision from an evolutionary past in which our retinal apparatus had devolved from color sensitivity to black-and-white mammalian mastery of the night” (11). Jones measures this against nonhuman sensitivities, of which the human sensoria “literally pales” against those of certain birds or reef-dwellers. Following this line of thought, from Politics of Touch to the legal parameters of personhood of nonhuman life to the capacities of art (or artists?) to render life sensible, I think about Jakob von Uexkull, and the scalar or multi-dimensional as a way of thinking subjectivity-in-world, or Marisol de la Cadena’s “(un)commoning,” which suggests a heterogeneous, ontologically-dissimilar formulation of political subjects divisible by the ecosystems they inhabit. “What is expressed through a politics of touch is the incommensurability of sense,” writes Manning, “to touch is to become posthuman” (156). This also suggests that the body (without organs, in movement) evades systems of sovereign power, which “refer back, always, to the stratification of the grid.” Bodies are gridded (by something), “they do not emerge from it” (131).

megan jeanne gette