HEIDI ANDREA RESTREPO RHODES
What if neither skin nor self were the starting point for the complex interrelational matrix of being and worlding? Being and worlding depend on the activity of reaching-toward. Reaching-toward foregrounds the relationality inherent in experience, a kind of feeling-with the world. This tending-toward is a sensing-with that does not occur strictly at the level of the sensory-motor. It happens across strata, both actual and virtual. A looking becomes a touching, a feeling becomes a hearing. But not on the skin or in the body. Across strata, both concrete and abstract, that constitute an assemblage. This assemblage is a sensing body in movement, a body-world that is always tending, attending to the world.
—Erin Manning, Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke University Press, 2012).
All this withness of body-worlding & I am neither skin nor self when I weave. A diffraction & interference pattern, light bending over the razor’s edge. the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses.
Synesthetic orchestration.
Yes, hearing is a looking is a touching & a scent. Yes, loving (let’s remember) is a knowing, sensing, tending, tuning. & seeing you feelingly near & far, all distance is mere illusion. Though theories of locality will tell you that our senses contain. Everywhere & all around a subatomic oceaning abyss. Whatever electron perversity sings of heretical & miscreant substance is us. Is with.
The self, estranged, an antique thing
still cogging in the happiness machine.
Listen: beyond the lonely field there is no object, only motion, the roll
of cresting waves alive in every point in space & time. A coordinate music
of bodies in gravitation. All tendency between us, a reaching-toward
& reaching-toward. What appears to be surface, a manifold topology of instants.
My therapist tells me I am too much infinity. A sensate chaos needing
the intervention of centripetal force. To take a rule & find where I begin
& others end so I can distinguish need. Cure myself into distinction. Either/Or.
But the verse heating up my hands says who
homes themselves in taxonomy
will never wholly kiss the world. Oh, I swear
by all the stars there is home in the galactic filament.
The thing is, events too distant in space & close in time are not always born by the signals we expect. & so I tomorrow tend chosen family
from the orbits of last year. Today from next century, see? I do not know your name yet, but I’m feeling with you the sun’s warmth. I unfold toward you by that transport. Spooky action always.
I can supposedly you only find by the fetish of psychiatric progress
that punishes me into one. The atomized individual entity, cruel myth
of modernity serving brutal extraction. Apotheosis of asymptote, Copernican metaphysics, Newtonian causation. Paradigms of pathology & concrete moral code. The loneliest world ever known.
We wonder into water. As the tree is me, & all the bees. Entanglement, mycorrhizal expanse. Prismatic & nourished by uncertainty. All my brains
a mingling. All my bodies a cohabitation. Not now & never knowing who
we are. Every fission & mitosis, every gathering in the Planck lengths, ephemeral & reaching-toward. To the scattering & the stuttering.
O particles, O poets. O marigolds & bears.
O Jupiter, O hyphae telephoning in the soil.
O assemblage of time-leaping universes birthing us recurrently mid-flight.
