Hello again! This is a piece that I wrote and photographed for the Journal of the Anthropology of North America in 2020. It is difficult to see unless you have the journal so please find it here:
Touch the Day, Alone
Quiet time falling outwards. But isn’t this what we all are: busy for one another? Bowed by reckoning with ourselves, from sitting alone or with the same ones too many times to distinguish ourselves. But you are different, if you are still alive. And if there is a way of feeling this calendar it is with your hands. And really this is all an invitation to touch the day, alone. Or the night. Count empty windows from where you stand and wonder where we all will go. This really takes apart going, don’t you see?
Arizona in January, people still sit together but the hills are a patchwork of hiding places. I can’t tell you when things emerge, but we can sit back and between us imagine the thresholds. In the quiet, things pass between inner and outer worlds, between what is seen and what is imagined, between what is for ourselves and what is for others.
Others. You can see their eyes, these days, but not their mouths. Come too close and a quilted face might just be off kilter, spun out of range. And the freedom of looking out is where we all become in. Steadied by the gaze, we sort ourselves in feet and fingers. There is something more to be said about what is touched, even when we can’t.
But still there are networks down there that we will never follow with our eyes. In the hills things gather terrestrial, dirty fingernails tapping into small stones that hold us up right now. We find ways to sort ourselves even when the networks start to crumble. Even when your eyes get shit in them. Sort it out, as if you needed to be in another order. Or just hide inside and keep your touch to yourself.