I promised there’d be more today on silica gravel and its significance for markmaking, so let’s not waste time. Consider this image, from a 2021 paper entitled “Self-care tooling innovation in a disabled kea (Nestor notabilis),” by Amalia Bastos and colleagues at the University of Auckland. Now consider Figure 6 (apologies, direct link is wonky) from a 2015 paper entitled “New Archaeological Evidence for an Early Human Presence at Monte Verde, Chile” by archaeologist Tom Dillehay and colleagues — Dillehay’s history with the site in question, which lies outside Puerto Montt in the Los Lagos region of Chile, goes back fifty years. While you’re at it, consider this correction to the Dillehay paper, which highlights a pair of accompanying figures. The format — stone artifacts knolled out[*] — is common in the archaeological literature, less so (perhaps unknown?) in avian ethology.

In the case of Bruce, a kea who was discovered having lost his maxilla or upper bill, the artifacts in question are pebbles from the floor of Bruce’s enclosure that the parrot used to preen himself for want of a bill (he appears to look for pebbles with a suitable wedge or conic shape, secures the broad end between the inferior side of his tongue and his lower bill, and uses the tip in lieu of a bill tip to comb his coat for nits and debris).

So it appears the Zebra G does in fact break in, i.e., it gets more flexible (the tines spread more under equivalent pressure), not to say more elastic (rate of relaxation under release from pressure) the more you use it, at least to a point. Our Pachira aquatica has no doubt reaped the gains. In the sketch above, I was seated on the floor such that my eyes were about 40cm below the lip of the vessel, and if you’re familiar with P. aquatica you might spot the foreshortening this yielded: the canopy appears modestly compressed — admittedly, could be partly an effect of the edge of the paper — while the stems and especially the pot appear elongated, the latter evoking a dramatic volume it lacks in life despite my having left it incomplete.

I was going to open by saying I don’t know why I take such pleasure drawing this particular plant — rather, this particular kind of plant — but in fact I think I do. It’s not that it’s easier than other kinds of vegetation — the ovoid leaves are perhaps a bit more legible than those of its neighbor the poor dying-back sedum, or the dense herbaceous stems of the lavender visible, if you’re sitting at the foot of the P. aquatica, by turning your head in the other direction, through the window that gives on the balcony.

I had high hopes for this week’s edition, but we’re going start slow, and in lieu of anything approaching meaningful commentary I offer you these undeveloped efforts with a Zebra G Manga nib and Kakimori Toppuri ink (the paper is Traveler’s watercolor, simply because it was handy — for a sense of scale, the above comes from a B6 notebook).

Pigment inks lack the delicate shading you get with better dye inks, but they’re preferable for working with dip nibs as the greater viscosity lends itself to relying on the surface of the nib itself to serve in lieu of an ink reservoir. I must say, I’ve found myself nonplussed by the Zebra G, which has a reputation for flexibility — to my hand it feels a touch stiff, though it’s possible it’ll break in with use.

Greetings from a rainy south-facing coast. From where I stand at the kitchen counter I can see the sea. Over the past two months I’ve spent more time drawing than writing, and I sense this marks the point of departure for a new project, perhaps two. So today, by way of a new departure, I offer three poorly photographed drawings.^*

With luck you’ll hear from me again next Friday and regularly thereafter. If this note gave you any solace, please share it with others.

———

^* Pen: Sailor “long-short,” c.1971, no. 2 or 3 nib in 21k. Ink: Sailor Shikiori Kasasagi (鵲、“Magpies”) — the blue sheen does not show up in these photos. Markers: Copic Sketch BG78 and BG72, from the “Sea & Sky” pack.

Forgive the abruptness of this announcement. STUFF will be going on hiatus for a while, that I might recover a bit from the cumulative strain of six years’ continuous application of pressure. Six years? That feels absurd, but it is about that long since I last had a week when I felt nothing hanging over me. That was on the Isle of Eigg, in the Hebrides, and Eigg remains among the most moving places I have ever been. So I offer you, in token of my thanks for your reading this nonsense the past ten months, a photo of the cows departing from our garden, our last morning on Eigg, July 21, 2018.

With luck you’ll hear from me again in a matter of months. Many thanks to you all.

Without boring you with the details, in the not quite three weeks since I returned from a four-day trip to New York(•) I have been beset in body and spirit, so in lieu of an edition of STUFF I offer you the following lines of Masaoka Shiki’s (1867–1902). Masaoka — Shiki was his style or pen name — contracted tuberculosis in his early twenties and spent much of his life in bed, convalescing. His work is full of sounds overheard, out of view: dusk chorus, people returning from a New Year’s party, a baseball game.(°)

ibiki ari
sara mo tokuri mo
kaya no soto

there is snoring
plate, sake bottle
outside the mosquito net(°°)

(Summer 1893)

Today, alas, I must be brief, with a desultory promise to bore you at length as we get into summer and the responsibilities associated with the final month of my tenure at the Wissenschaftskolleg ebb. As some of you know, the past year I’ve been going through a Trouser Emergency®. I am pleased to report it’s under control, thanks to the acquisition of a lovely pair of used 3sixteens in a 12oz Kuroki Mills left-hand twill, courtesy another of the anonymous kind souls on the far side of the planet who send me things. Alas, my relief was marred by the discovery, when they arrived, that the fly buttons are of horn, which, in view of other things I’ve said, would be off brand.

Naturally I turned to the best trim shop on the planet, only to find that they do not — yet? — stock fasteners. How can this be? Thread, fusing, binding, elastic, even surplus size tags of rPET — but no buttons. This turned out to be another blessing in disguise, else how should I have discovered there’s a thriving trade in vintage tagua nut buttons on Etsy? In the past I’ve used this forum to disparage archive fetishism in fashion, but faced with the choice of purchasing buttons machined last week in Hong Kong and buttons manufactured in Edwardian England, I was quick to see the appeal of wearing pants with fly fasteners from a time of gutta percha–insulated telegraph cables and strategic maneuvering over guano reserves (read Lord Jim). Perhaps it helped that last week, fighting jet lag on a brief trip to New York, I found myself flipping through Mrs Dalloway. This truly was the Golden Age of STUFF, save, as we’ve discussed, when it comes to writing instruments, when the Golden Age of STUFF was the early 1970s.

My frustration was not yet at an end, for it turned out I was unable to purchase the c.1900 tagua nut buttons for delivery to Germany, which has lately implemented a packaging waste reduction law that requires vendors to take responsibility for the final disposition of any packaging used to send stuff through the mail. A good idea in principle, but in practice burdensome to small vendors unprepared to deal with the regulatory overhead, including registration with a bespoke packaging registry, LUCID. From the LUCID Registration Frequently Asked Questions:

I thought this week I would turn away from material things, and then I heard splint (the soul of wood), new out with the Brisbane-based ambient label Room 40. splint is perhaps the final recording from Steve Roden, the Los Angeles–based painter, sculptor, and musician known for the genre of music he called “lowercase”, who died last year at fifty-nine, having been diagnosed, six years earlier, with Alzheimer’s disease. He described his method on splint thus:

every sound on this recording was generated by rubbing, bowing, plucking, and scratching a 1943 moulded plywood leg splint designed by charles eames. some of the sounds were recorded directly to tape, others were manipulated and processed electronically. … i used my hands, mallets, brushes, and a violin bow.

The splint in question is one of these. It was intended, I imagine, to facilitate the evacuation of soldiers with fractures of the femur. I was unaware of the Eames splint until I heard Roden’s performance with it. When I then looked it up I made the following note:

to imagine a time when medical appliances were made of mahogany plywood … when you’d want them to be objects of beauty, when the designer gave thought (perhaps I’m projecting) to how the appearance or feel of it would enter into the mindset of a wounded soldier … Look at the chirality of it

My notes to myself for this newsletter advise me to write it off the top of your head, but as I’ve just finished polishing a book, the top of my head is something of a waste sensu “broad and empty expanse” — which is kind of great from the inside, but perhaps not so interesting for readers. This book was a particular slog. For most of four years I’d been in the habit of starting over every five weeks or so, convinced that this time I’d found the way in. In January I decided it was ride or die. February, March, and April were, let’s say, pressured, so it was something of a surprise to find, rereading what I’d come up with, that perhaps it works. And I do sense I’ve freed whatever blockage (to continue the hydraulic metaphor) I’d been facing. Already I have a next book in view, on which more anon.

But first! To cheap behaviorist props aka rewards for grinding diligence, and what better reward for completing a writing project than … a pen! I’d promised myself a new pen (or new to me, it need not be newly made) when I completed this thing, and having got through the first polish with no sense it’d be better consigned to the filter bag of bad life choices I’ve felt a mounting pressure to make good on this promise. The problem, of course, is that this promise runs headlong into my well-advertised abhorrence of STUFF and particularly the acquisition of STUFF, so the past few weeks have had me in a state of fixation that has tested the patience of my long-suffering, overly charitable partner, as I’ve lost more hours than we really need to reckon on r/fountainpens, pen YouTube, and pen eBay, weighing the cons of acquiring a tube of machined acrylic produced in Hiroshima sometime around 1970 with a sectioned cone of 21-karat gold affixed to the end. High-karat pocket pens manufactured in quantity and marketed to school children fifty-plus years ago for a cool ¥1,500 have become the object of a strange … I don’t want to call it fetishism, because the appeal of these pens lies in the fact that they were in fact remarkably well made, and the Sailors in particular are loved for the way the nib tips are tuned — with an edge rather than rounded, so you get a pencil-like feedback. So really it’s the promise of that feedback, that tactile experience, that has me curious. Every now and then you’ll find a Sailor from that era with a nib content as high as 23k — not on their posh presentation pens, on pocket pens of the sort you imagine being packaged in cellophane with a paperboard insert and displayed on spinners in neighborhood stationery stores (though in fact, it’s possible that one, though similar in form factor to the cheap pocket pens, was sold in a satin-lined leatherette box (background).

If my mind were not a broad and empty expanse there are many directions we could take this: the way pedestrian commodities, recontextualized, become objects of veneration, the lock-in that obliges Sailor to continue manufacturing cartridges that fit the feeds on pens made fifty years ago. But I’ll leave these for another day.

At this point I should probably spare myself the agony of acquiring something that will stick around and simply get myself some tea.

Monday I finished a book — finished it modulo light polishing, finished what has to be the final structural draft — so I spent the balance of the week absent in spirit, if not consistently in body. I thought I would use my spiritual absence to catch up on reading, not least a stack of papers on senescence in non-avian reptiles. The weather was cold, the news dismal, and it was a relief to sit around drinking tea and nudging forward various Time Kitchen–related nonsense. Alas, I got less reading done than I’d hoped, for I got sucked into a search for a new interval timer.

A while back I gave a workshop for the design team at a maker of posh loudspeakers. I had them all make one-minute recordings on their phones and then we sat around their studio on a rainy afternoon at the start of autumn when they were fresh off a product launch and exhausted and listening to their recordings on an eighteen-driver sound bar, which— as a monaural hearer, my grasp of “soundstage”, as audiophiles use the term, is limited, but I had never encountered a PA with the detail in the imaging that this thing had. Of course we were limited by the source material, which, again, they’d recorded with their phones—but most if not all of them were using Apple phones, which come with pretty good ADCs and microphones onboard, so these recordings of the automated announcements on the municipal transit bus, a neighborhood street fair, the rain outside a kitchen window, and so on had an uncanny popout quality to them. That evening at dinner we got to talking about the implications of the kind of work they did for the design of products that deal but peripherally with sound—washers, for instance. If you’re investing in a high-end washer (because maybe you want to wash your c.2016 Evan Kinori lounge shirt at home), you’d like to think that whoever designed and manufactured the thing gave thought to how it sounds—not just the “audio display”, the signals to indicate that the selected cycle has begun or completed, that the door’s been left open, etc, but the way the drum sounds when it’s churning. This example carries special significance for me, for two years ago I went through a period of weeks when, for reasons still unclear, the systole in (I suspect) one of my carotid arteries was audible to me in the evenings and mornings—and the first time I heard it I assumed it was because my partner was running the washer in the next room.

And yet, sometimes we acquiesce in sounds whose principle design considerations seem to have been ease of manufacturing rather than sonic properties. Don’t get me wrong—ease of manufacturing is a serious design consideration, and it can lend itself to remarkably elegant solutions. In the auditory display category, perhaps the best example is the Casio F-91W—or any Casio wristwatch from before the advent of the kinds of driver miniaturization we take for granted today. The Casio F-91W has no driver per se. Rather, the piezoelectric crystal is soldered directly to the steel backplate, which is secured to the resin housing at the corners but not across the surface. The backplate is thin enough that under the acoustic stimulus of the piezo it resonates like the head of a drum, producing a characteristic chirping timbre. By varying the frequency of the piezo vibration, you can, in fact, generate a range of pitches from the F-91W, and if you start writing complications for the F-91W module upgrade SensorWatch you can play with this, as the SensorWatch API includes affordances for audio signals at a range of pitches (of course, if you’ve installed the replacement module, you’ll have to solder the backplate to the new onboard piezo if you want to get any sound out of the thing … I kind of like the idea of a watch that makes no sound and gives signals in the visual channel, and as the SensorWatch features not one but two LEDs, one red, one green, you can actually do quite a bit more in the luminous channel than with Casio’s stock Module 593). (Full disclosure: I wrote the first alarm complication for SensorWatch — it’s since been bumped from the repo by a better one.)

These days, between tinnitus (~10,000 Hz, varying in quality but consistent in fundamental frequency) in my hearing ear and a notch in my hearing at round 5,000 Hz, I can barely hear the F-91W, especially if I’ve managed to roll over onto my hearing ear in my sleep. Occasionally I’ll hear it if the backplate is set on a stiff surface, which serves as a further amplifier.

There are not many of you: still, I feel a responsibility, and it pains me when two weeks have gone by — this morning it is 15 days — and I have not written. The trouble is, I’ve been finishing a book that, while it will end up being on the short side — to its credit — has been abusing me, in one fashion or another, for the better part of four years. We’re in the final weeks, modulo polishing — it was only mid March when I understood, finally, what it wanted to be about — and that’s absorbing whatever verbal capacities I might otherwise bring to bear on STUFF. Not to say the beautiful weather: the overcast this morning makes me long for a monsoon and, more particularly, for an excuse to lie on a cool floor making up the sleep I missed the previous night for the damp heat and insects coming in a tear in the screen. It strikes me, not for the first time, how much of my writing life consists in an effort to evoke the character and logic of hypnopompic states, states of coming-to. This character is not oneiric, exactly, but it shares with oneiric and hypnogogic states a loosening of the constraints on bodily behavior and the causal dispositions of matter more broadly that we infer from waking experience. It’s a state of porousness, receptivity, and no doubt it is a fool’s game to try to evoke it in words — but on screen! I think of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking (歩いても歩いても), with its scenes of domestic tension blanketed by the heat of Obon, or Mo Scarpelli’s El Father como sí mismo, which, if you have not seen, what have you been doing with your time? Go watch it, now, today, so we can discuss it. I think too of Tsai Ming-liang’s Days（日子), or really of Tsai’s entire œuvre, since even when his protagonist Hsiao Kang, the indomitable Lee Kang-sheng, is not contending with flooded holes or selling real estate in the monsoon, he exudes a certain just-out-of-bed dazedness — save, of course, in the Walker films, where his slowness acquires the aspect of full realization. But Days in particular has a monsoon languidity to it, far more than Stray Dogs, though the latter unfolds over the course of a monsoon, and the protagonists’ search for shelter is a key motif.

Anyway, I was planning to write about Khruangbin’s new LP, A la Sala, and to observe that they’ve made an acid cumbia record without the organ and bandoneón, which, I don’t know about you, but the plangent harmonics of the organ and accordion have always grated on me. They’re a hair’s breadth from acid surf, which, I suppose, is where they started fourteen years ago, and I hope their next move is an EP with Gustavo Yashimura.

I’m overdue for this edition, but the “something coming on” I alluded to two weeks ago turned out to be a prostrating fatigue–type bug of epic proportions. Yesterday was the first day in ten I felt confident enough to walk to the store without packing a hammock, bug bivy, and space blanket lest I feel the need to stop en route for a nap, and while today, thus far, I’ve been more or less vertical in body, my mind has decided to take the week ahead off. Among the tasks I’d set myself this morning was the repair of noragi-type jacket (ok, it was a Kinori, but from 2016 or so, pre–Field Shirt–palooza, purchased used from one of the many pseudonymous kind souls whose help I require to get dressed). It is, I must say, well-made, with French seams and all the rest, though marred by the fact that the patch pockets are insufficiently broad to accommodate a Midori A6 notebook — then again, the material, a c.300gsm linen plain weave, lacks the structure to accommodate a Midori A6, so perhaps it’s just as well. Anyway, I’d been looking for something to wear over a t-shirt in overcast 19-degree weather of the sort we have today in Berlin, and it fits the bill perfectly save that, like every entrant in the hybrid noragi category, it has tape closures that serve no purpose other than to get in your way. I have yet to see a designer solve the noragi closure problem. Hiroki Nakamura at Visvim solves it by declining to include closures at all. Takuji Suzuki solves it with ingenious asymmetric inside-outside paired tapes that kind of work but feel fussy. Oil & Lumber opts for traditional mid-placket tapes … Prospective Flow, who knows, though if you’re not yet watching their boroboro handstitch videos, my god, what have you been doing with your time?

Anyway. Kinori’s solution is by far the strangest: bathrobe (‘dressing gown’)–style tapes sewn into the side seams. I had no idea what to do with these and resolved to take them off. This, with the help of my partner’s seam ripper and modest guidance, I proceeded to do — in the process, creating a gap in the exterior face of the aforementioned French seam on one side. The jacket looks much better without the tapes, and the seam is hardly in danger of coming undone. Still, this morning I thought I’d repair the damage. This should be a one-minute job. Instead, owing either to my aforementioned clumsiness or the shadow of prostrating fatigue (I feel something coming on …) it took some 20 minutes. But I was reminded how good it feels to draw a needle through fabric.

I will share that I improved my prostration reading an oral history of the San Francisco Tape Music Center and was consoled to learn that many of the early innovators in sample-based procedural music felt they had no facility with the actual splicing of tape, so perhaps there’s hope.

I had wanted to offer a follow-up to my note of last week — my thought was to start with the image of RiffRaff, the galah outside Brisbane who gets CBD oil by way of palliative care for pancreative cancer, taking the eyedropper in her beak and use that as point of entry into tooling, the relationship we enter into with a prosthesis via ongoing contact, so that the tool serves to create an altered interface between body and world. See, I am putting this poorly — I can feel my powers at an ebb on this undeservedly mild late-winter morning, and I am simply not feeling, as the anthropologist Dell Hymes put it many years ago, the “breakthrough into performance” that characterizes oral narrative, including something written to be heard as if it had been spoken.

(One man who is feeling the breakthrough into performance this morning is Bill Callahan, whose 2022 LP YTI⅃AƎЯ I’m listening to at the moment—

I feel something coming on
A disease or a song

In my case it’s definitely not a song, though in view of the weather we’ve been having there’d be no excuse for its being a disease. Anyway, I urge you to give YTI⅃AƎЯ a listen at your earliest convenience.)

This edition is overdue, but I must confess I’m feeling a bit stumped for a theme. Spring has come early to Berlin — rather, we kind of skipped the second half of winter and went to spring sometime in the last week of January, and while everyone’s been holding their breath, waiting for the hammer to fall, I must say, I’m convinced we’re going to get off without more cold weather. For the first time in I don’t know how long, this week finds me free of late-winter depletion. Even in Los Angeles, the second week of March 2019, I recall feeling shot, not just by virtue of professional exertion but from the weather. When I’d arrived, the previous August, southern California was in the seventh year of a drought, and mature pines that had survived a number of yearslong droughts could be seen lodging, their roots lifted out of the dry earth. But that winter brought heavy rain — I recall driving I-10, the Santa Monica Freeway, east from the 110 junction to meet a friend in Culver City in a typhoon that all but idled drivers accustomed to desert weather.

And this brings me back to RiffRaff, the forty-eight-year-old galah who takes CBD oil for late-stage pancreatic cancer. Here, for the uninitiated, is RiffRaff at medicine time. RiffRaff’s caretaker, Leah Jigalin, interprets RiffRaff’s foot tapping as an expression of joy, and this seems reasonable. Birds of the order Psittaciformes — parrots and cockatoos — exhibit a tendency to rhythmic entrainment to a beat similar to our own, and, as in our own case, when birds groove it seems to represent both an expression and a source of pleasure. Grooving, in turn, appears to coöccur with a constellation of superficially unrelated tendencies: altriciality, for one, the tendency, common to humans and cockatoos, to experience a prolonged postgestational period of development — to be physically immature, and unable to take care of themselves, at birth. Other elements of the complex include object play, social play, and tool use.

Playfulness could figure in the development pathway for tool use by encouraging object exploration and the acquisition of a repertoire of flexible motor sequences adaptable to the different kinds of objects — proto-stuff, in the technical usage of this newsletter — that come to hand. As for why grooving should coöccur with an elongated developmental pathway tuned for the acquisition of tool-using skills, there we must be more speculative. But there’s no question that in humans grooving functions as a kind of episodic social glue, facilitating joint attention and coordinate action, as in the acoustic “taskscapes” that musicologist Gary Tomlinson, building on the work of evolutionary anthropologist Clive Gamble, has imagined for scenes of hominin butchery and tool making c. 1 Ma (million years ago). In an elegant study of ten years ago, my colleague Melissa Ellamil asked which factors, in a dance club setting, conduced to social grooving in a dance club setting. This was just one study, of course, and there’s a reason — multiple reasons — you don’t see more efforts at “cognitive ethology”, taking the methods of functional imaging science out of the scanner and into the world: it is difficult to do it well. But for what it’s worth: Melissa found that the strongest predictor of “group synchrony” was how well known the track was (her proxy for track reputation was number of scrobbles on Last.fm). And the strongest signal of group synchrony was reciprocating movement through the z-axis (i.e., forward and backward along a fixed sagittal plane).

Of course, a hundred twelve years ago Émile Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, proposed that spontaneous social grooving — “collective effervescence”, as he put it — served more than an episodic function: that it was the basis for a longer-lived sense of group membership. But back to RiffRaff, and late-winter depletion.

The past two weeks, I’ve had two things on my mind, or two things that warrant comment. I ask your forgiveness, for both come from the New York Times. The first is RiffRaff, a forty-eight-year-old galah or rose-breasted cockatoo who lives near Brisbane, has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and takes CBD oil to mitigate the cancer’s inflammatory effects. Perhaps you’ve seen the video of RiffRaff tapping rhythmically with her right leg when she sees the syringe approaching. Part of what holds my attention about RiffRaff’s display is how it drives home the relationship between play and the kind of exploratory manipulation of objects—stuff, in the technical sense of this newsletter—that gives rise, over developmental and perhaps evolutionary horizons, to tool use.

The relationship between play and tooling is something I want to come back to, but it’ll have to wait, because today we have more pressing business, namely, investment banker cum speculative urbanist Jan Sramek’s Evan Kinori field shirt, and omfg would you look at this bro walking the tracks in his $800 kakishibu-dyed lambswool-and-cashmere “field shirt” and, erm, maybe a pair of 501s and some kind of nubuck boot (Viberg Waxy Commander, perhaps? looks like he bought the whole Starter Pack).

Just get a load of my homeboy, with his steely thousand-mile gaze! This photo was made in December 2023 or January 2024 by one Aaron Wojack on the occasion of one of Mr Sramek’s recurring visits to Rio Vista, in Solano County, California, where, since 2016 or 2017, he’s been assiduously buying up farms and ranches with the intent of securing a zoning conversion and developing a city for 400,000, at one fell stroke solving the Bay Area’s housing crisis and providing a place to live for all the service personnel Sramek and his buds would prefer not live in the Bay Area per se. Of course he’s had help: early investors in Flannery Associates, the special-purpose vehicle spun up to manage the land acquisition phase of the adventure, not to say the bullying of holdouts, have included Marc Andreesen, Reid Hoffman, and the Collison Bros®. There is so much we could say about this, but this month we probably won’t get past Sramek’s Evan Kinori field shirt, and to explain why, let’s go to Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, named for a fictitious Lost Coast county that sits somewhere between Humboldt and Del Norte.

Today, because I’ve been at the end of my tether and this note is eight days overdue, once more we’re going to try something new. I’m writing this off the top of my head, and if it proves undeserving of your attention I’d be grateful for feedback to that effect.

I’ve been at the end of my tether not just the past week but the past eight months, with periodic reprieves. The causes need not detain us today. Suffice it to say I’ve been more than a bit disgusted with myself and my working life, such as it is.

Amid this disgust I’ve sought refuge, like so many, in shopping for Frivolous Stuff®, and while my widely rehearsed horror of stuff (if you have not yet got round to a second or third reading of my 2021 The Human Scaffold, what are you waiting for?) makes it borderline impossible for me to take pleasure in acquiring new things save consumables like tea, woodcase pencils, notebooks, and 6/1 botanical-dyed needlework thread yall,(°) I seem to have created a loophole for old stuff, so long as it is not so old or in such good condition as to be really exciting — it has to have a certain junk quality to get past my Stuff-Induced Self-Hatred® filters. Toward the end of calendar 2023, staring down a pair of books that had been leering at me for too long, I decided that the path to absolution ran through better writing implements.

One morning early in our acquaintance I came out to find Taslan Poplar in t-shirt and drawstring trousers, practicing a kata in the clearing in front of the house, moving with a fluidity I would not have expected. I squatted down with my tea to watch. After about twenty minutes he mounted the engawa and squatted down beside me. We talked about how good it was to be there: the quiet, the cool, clean air, how humbling it was—this was Taslan’s word—they’d been able to regrow the forest, or grow a new one, since in the old days you’d never find cypress and gum in the same place, something about mycorrhizal diversity, and how it was essential, at this stage, to bring everyone together in a place like this. I asked him was this place his and he said no, just a place he borrowed from time to time.

We went in to find the others getting up: making coffee, negotiating an unfamiliar space with unfamiliar bodies. We were there that weekend to plan a raise for an early-stage venture Taslan was backing in lab-grown regenerative skin care. The first thing we did, that morning, when everyone had seen to their needs, for stimulants or spinal twists or quiet time watching the day fill in, was watch a film of sea slugs regrowing their bodies from the head, the founder narrating excitedly over the music—oddly jaunty, like some unreleased cut from the Synergetic Voice Orchestra—pointing out how the heart lay on the far side of the breakage plane from the head, as did the digestive system, explaining how, by tying the neck with a loop of nylon thread, you could induce the slug to jettison its body. We watched in time-lapse as the tissue surrounding the nylon loop decomposed, turning cloudy, like spun sugar. At twenty-two hours, he said, jumping up and gesturing at the wall where we’d projected the image, the head separates from the body. We watched the head drag itself off, a tremor in the antenna-like rhinophores.

Takes about a day for the wound to heal, he continued, another week for the heart and parapodia to start coming back. Nine days post-intervention you could see the new heart beating. The image dissolved. We saw a half-slug, just the head and neck, capped off, at the rear, by a small loop of parapodium edged in black. At the anterior end the rhinophores were intact, the orange tips offering a pleasing contrast to the desaturated green of the head, and at first I thought it was using them to get around, but no: it was dragging itself forward by the mouth and ventral surface, same as any other of its kind. The body was covered in the dark flecks, not chlorophyll but some kind of autologous pigmentation, characteristic of its kind. It did not appear to be in distress.

At seventeen days, regeneration was more or less complete. The film ended with a still of an intact specimen of Elysia viridis. Our hero stood in the projector beam, so that the slug’s body was projected partly on his body, partly on the wall, calling our attention to the green speckling that marked the presence of chloroplasts in the tubule cells of the digestive epithelium, distributed, in this species, over the whole of the body, from the tips of the rhinophores to the edges of the parapodia. The slugs were said to be solar-powered, because it seemed, though the evidence was inconsistent, they could subsist, for a time, on energy generated by photosynthesis in plastids extracted from the algae they ate. It’s more prominent, he said, stroking his handlebar mustaches, in the fed state. The image dissolved into a panel of three stills, side by side, E. viridis, E. marginata, E. chlorotica, the lasta vibrant green. We listened, rapt, as he explained what made it so remarkable that the plastids should survive in the cells of the new host, in some species for weeks, much less that they should continue to function. Endosymbiosis, he said, is not like swapping a battery, the chloroplast genome has long since lost many of the genes essential to its own upkeep, including some of those implicated in photosynthesis itself. These are encoded in the nucleus of the endosymbiotic host—the alga—their expression mediated by signals from the plastid. In fact, signaling between plastid and host is bidirectional, the maintenance of plastid structure and its acclimation to changes in photoenvironment a product of ongoing coordination between the two. Selection, he added, operates on the plastid–host ensemble. We nodded thoughtfully.

How Many Kinds of Persons Are There? This course, convened via seminar and intended for students who have had at least one previous course in anthropology, the history of medicine, or the philosophy of mind, introduces a theme foundational to all three: personhood. As it turns out, the answer to the question, How many kinds of persons are there? varies depending on whom you ask, when, and in what context. In some times and places it has been unremarkable to treat animals—or certain animals—as beings possessed of an interiority not unlike our own. In our own day, we have come to see it as unremarkable to ascribe personhood to corporations—in the United States, corporations have a legally sanctioned right of free speech. Should we treat automata that lack interiority—a something-it-is-like-ness—but exhibit qualities of speech similar to our own (e.g., large language models) as persons? What about biological chimerae? Should we ascribe personhood to rivers, as courts in Aotearoa New Zealand, in acknowledgment of Māori legal tradition, have done? To mountains? We’ll devote special attention to the challenge of bridging the hermeneutic gap between our own theories of personhood and those of some of the communities we’ll be discussing. Does it make it less difficult to imagine that Thunder, say, could be a person when we think about how we (some of us, anyway) talk to our favorite shirts? How should we interpret grammatical evidence that our working theory of personhood is not as tidy as we sometimes imagine—e.g., in 「車がいる。」, does the use of the animate verb show that we’re treating the (moving) car as a metonym for its driver? Or are we ascribing animacy to the car itself?

「車がいる。」kuruma ga iru, ‘There’s a car [moving].’

Again, it all sounds so easy.

Spec course description, January 2022:

Eating, Drinking, and Smoking: The Anthropology of Food and Medicine. Ingestion—the introduction of foreign matter into the body cavity via the mouth—is among the most intimate things we do as animals, yet we do it all the time. It is also evolutionarily deep—internal digestion appears early on in the history of the Metazoa, and there are no clades where it subsequently disappeared. In this course, convened via a combination of lectures and discussions, we take these observations as starting points for a wide-ranging discussion of the history and anthropology of food and medicine. The fact that taking things into the body is both intimate and ordinary makes it a good starting point for considering how culture mediates our experience of our bodies and the other-than-self world—thus, this course represents, among other things, an introduction to anthropology as a discipline for interested students with no prior exposure to it. Case studies will be drawn from across the histories of food and medicine, with an emphasis on making the familiar strange and the strange familiar via comparisons between historical cases and the habits of eating and drug-taking familiar from our own lives. We will devote special attention to the ingestion of mind-altering substances, including sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco, along with more specialized substances such as pituri and ayahuasca. Working as individuals or in pairs students will be expected to formulate a manageable field-based research project of their own—Tokyo is perhaps the best city in the world for street food, not to say coffee, and opportunities to observe people consuming food and drugs “in the wild” abound. This project, together with participation in discussions, will serve as the basis for evaluation.

It all sounds so easy.

In July 2022 I gave a seminar on the theme “ignorance as a political strategy”—topical enough. Among the things we read was Yōko Tawada’s novel The Emissary, because it is short and accessible and because I had not liked it when I’d read it previously and wanted to see how others found it. The Emissary (2014; English translation 2018) describes life in a near-future Tokyo where the young are feeble while older people, those seventy and above, say, are no longer subject to bodily decline—some seem to grow more vital as they age. There has been some kind of environmental catastrophe, the nature of which has not been made clear to the people of Japan. The government seems to know more than it is letting on: those who vocally question official policy find themselves menaced. But then, it is not clear that the government is still the government—administrative functions appear to have been privatized. Japan has reverted to a state of sakoku, closure to the outside world—the protagonist, Yoshirō, laments the loss of the plush foreign towels, now banned, that he used to use—but withdrawal, apparently, is the condition everywhere, whence the need for emissaries, chosen from among the young.

I chose the book, as I said, for how it thematizes the cultivation of ignorance as a political strategy, be it one of control (keeping the populace in the dark) or resistance (separating one’s life from the public drama). But in the discussion, what drew our attention was how Tawada evokes her characters’ inability to imagine a future. Yoshirō, observed one of the participants, may be immortal. His great grandson and ward Mumei (“No name”) shows promise as an emissary but could die before he gets to go overseas. Neither of them seems able to form a picture of the world as it will be more than ten years out. In this respect, their situation resembles our own.

The uncanny allure of therianthropes, as the Hohlenstein–Stadel Löwenmensch (Lion-person), discovered in some two hundred fragments in a limestone cave in the Hohlenstein cliffs of Bade-Wurtemberg, southwest Germany. Unearthed in 1939, it was not until 1969 that they were found to form a figure. A restoration was undertaken in 1987; systematic excavation between 2008 and 2013 uncovered additional fragments, and a second restoration was undertaken. The figure was carved from the tusk of a mammoth and stands 296mm tall. It has been dated to 40–39 ka.

The Löwenmensch is unmistakably jaunty in posture and expression: standing arms akimbo, as if the hands were searching for trouser pockets, a relaxed grin spreading across their face.

Perhaps what gets us is not the having a body but the having just one.

In 2015 I purchased a pair of pants, cut with a five-pocket dungaree-style pattern in the upper block, close-fitting, made of a texturized high-tenacity polyamide knit with elastane. I’ve worn them at least a thousand days. The elastane has lone since blown out, and they fit so loosely now I’ve had to get them rehemmed. For years the material refused to develop signs of age, then, quickly, it started wearing through. These days I treat them as track pants—they are good for running, in cold weather, and for wearing around the house in the evenings. Barring fire or innovation in fabric recycling, the stuff they’re made of is eternal. This fabric will remain intact long after the fabric of my body has been redistributed through the bodies of other living things. The best I can hope for is to cut it up and use it to patch other garments. When I do this, the thread I use will likely be five-gram (no. 25 1/6) cotton sashiko thread, perhaps dyed with chestnut skin for the contrast with the grayish blue of the nylon. The seam will fail long before the patch.

When I think about how I’ve invoked empirical findings in this text—about evolutionary transitions in individuality, neural crest development in jawless vertebrates, central pattern generation, gravity sensing in vascular plants, etc—I feel a similar mix of fondness and concern to what I feel when I imagine patching squares of fabric cut from the nylon dungarees into some other thing. On the one hand, this material is familiar to me, and the thought of carrying it around a bit longer, finding new uses for it, etc, gives me pleasure. On the other hand, the patched-in material feels out of place.

Of course there is a difference between, say, McShea’s comments on evolutionary transitions in individuality and the nylon fabric, which is that empirical findings, at least in principle, degrade gracefully over time. They are superseded by new findings or come under new scrutiny when implicit assumptions are made explicit. (Some findings prove dismayingly durable. So much of The Meat Question and The Human Scaffold consists in trying to persuade readers to look critically on assumptions common in the literature on nutrition physiology, the dynamics of social learning etc.)

Habits of thought, like clothing, houses, and kitchen furnishings, should be made to patina with use and, at length, return to the earth.

just as, in the experience of gravity, range of motion, the contractile activity of the heart and gut, and the distensive pressure of ingesta on the gut wall, we enter into a tactile relationship with the body.

Contrast this earlier passage:

… appeals to the conceit that when it comes to our explorations of the world our body is something we have a privileged relationship with. The body represents, as it were, well-surveyed country. This is a view I do not share.

Was I wrong earlier? Is the body known country?

“But you’re not really ascribing interiority to a shirt or a bottle of vinegar—these are interactional gambits” —say, in the case of the shirt, a compliment that skirts the potential awkwardness of a more direct approach. Often characterization does serve a deflective role—it introduces a buffer between the “animator” of an assertion, request, etc and its recipients. In Nozawa’s survey, characters play an advisory role, raising the salience and softening the imperative force of notices, warnings, and injunctions—announcing disruptions to public transit, exhorting viewers to conserve energy (a lightbulb with closed eyelids).

My own view is that while often characterization represents an interactional gambit, this is not all it does. Characters are not simply puppets. Within the circle of conversation, just for a moment, they have a perspective, they look out on the world. They are present.

In characterizing things, in representing them as present to themselves, we make them more present, perceptually and conceptually, to ourselves and our interlocutors.

Consider the salience of verbs of contact in the foregoing. I want to say: to make something present is to enter into a kind of tactile relationship with it—just as, in the experience of gravity, range of motion, the contractile activity of the heart and gut, and the distensive pressure of ingesta on the gut wall, you enter into a tactile relationship with your body.

22. (a)  I was delayed by the rain.
    (b)  I was made late by the rain.
    (c)  We were delayed by the rain.

23. (a)  The village was destroyed by the fire.
    (b)  The village was destroyed by fire.

With the arguments swapped, the light verb (22b) comes to sound a bit marked, to me anyway. Is this because the light verb invites an intentional interpretation, and when we defer the agent to a complement—by the rain—we confound this invitation? Strangely, even the lexical version, (22a), feels a bit marked in a side-by-side comparison with the plural patient. Somehow we sounds more apt as the patient of rain delay than I.

In (23) the difference is even subtler. In a sense there’s no comparison to be made, because the choice of (23a) or (b) is wholly determined by whether the fire in question was previously introduced as a topic of discourse. If it was, you’d have to go with (23a), if not with (23b). Even so, with the arguments swapped, (23a) tugs at me just a bit: if you’ve gone so far as to attribute agency to the fire, if you’ve issued the invitation to an intentional interpretation, why confound that invitation by swapping the arguments?

Part of what makes (1c) and (5c) interesting is how characterization serves as an invitation to play. The speaker is practically obliging their interlocutor to participate in the ascription of interiority (to the shirt, to the bottle of rice vinegar). Consider again

   5. (a)  Where do you live?
      (b)  That pardalotte out back—where do they live?
      (c)  Where does the rice vinegar live?

In (1) we observed predicates of action. In (5), by contrast, we observe predicates of experiencing—specifically, the experience of dwelling.

(5c) is distinguished by a mismatch between our semantic template for experiencers of dwelling and the semantic profile of a bottle of rice vinegar. But we would hardly call this expression awkward, unless, perhaps, the speaker were new to our shared language and we suspected they lacked the resources to formulate the question in a more conventional way, e.g.,

Let us call what we’re doing in (1c) above (see “Killing it, pt 1”) characterization—here I am borrowing from the linguistic anthropologist Shunsuke Nozawa. (1a) has a touch of it: in English, where lexical causatives are common, it is difficult not to hear light verb causatives as conveying intention, or at least this is how I hear them (compare the use of make as a coercive auxiliary, as in They made us line up to have our photo taken). Perhaps even (1b) is tinged with characterization, depending on your history with the verb destroy. And perhaps part of why the force of characterization feels so much stronger in (1c) than in (1a–b) has to do not with the semantics of the verbs in question but with those of the agents: rain and fire, even when made denumerable with the definite article the, feel topologically less apt for characterization than that shirt. Both shirtness and the demonstrative that contribute to the sense that we are dealing here with a particular individual. Compare:

   3. (a)  That rain made me late.
      (b)  That fire destroyed the village.

Here the use of the demonstrative that imbues the agent with greater individuality, and the sense of characterization is correspondingly stronger—at least to my ear.

Further examples of characterization:

Consider the following:

    1. (a)  The rain made me late.
       (b)  The fire destroyed the village.
       (c)  That shirt is just killing it.

The expressions in (1) are causatives in the sense outlined earlier. At least, (a) and (b) are causatives. (c) is a bit trickier—but whether or not we’d call that shirt an agonist in Talmy’s sense, we can recognize it as an agent: the shirt is doing something.

The three expressions differ in verb semantics. (a) is a transitive light verb causative, the verb formed of a generic action (*make*) plus an adverb in a fixed position (following the object, preceding any complements, as in You’ll make me late for my call) and with a sense fixed by convention. (b) is a transitive lexical causative—the morph destroy conveys, on its own, the sense that the agent, the fire, has effected change in the world through its action on a patient, the village. (c) represents what functional syntacticists call an unergative construction: though that shirt is clearly an agent, there is no corresponding patient, nothing—at least, on the surface—that the shirt is acting on in virtue of killing it. The it is either an expletive object in the same sense that the it in It rained yesterday is an expletive subject—or perhaps you could construe the it as part of the verb and posit a distinct entry in our lexicon for kill it.

Conversation with the editor of Waking Paralysis in the comments on what was to be the final pre-copyedit draft: he suggests I consider cutting a line that describes roadside sellers of grilled maize as “squatt[ing]”. “[I]f the corn is grilled near the ground, perhaps it’s accurate”—even so it might strike some readers as pejorative.

I try to make life easy for editors. But in this instance—perhaps it was the end of a long day—my response was a bit combative.

I’ve given this thought, and I’d like to keep squatted. To change it would be to whitewash the scene. In much of the world, squatting remains the modal posture of static wakefulness. When I was teaching in Shanghai, in 2018, one day I had the students working in small groups and I was circulating. At one point I squatted down next to one of the groups. One of my students expressed surprise that I could hold a squatted posture. She associated an inability to squat with whiteness. This was an educated urban 20-year-old. Anyone who takes offense at the suggestion that people squat needs to ask themselves why they consider it derogatory.

Forms of the verb squat appear, I see, twenty-two times in the 79,000-word text.

Almost anything was possible except, of course, the actual.

Murnane again, from “Land Deal” (1978).

[W]e had always clearly distinguished between the possible and the actual. Almost anything was possible. Any god might reside behind the thundercloud or the waterfall, any faery race inhabit the land below the ocean’s edge; any new day might bring us such a miracle as an axe of steel or a blanket of wool. The almost boundless scope of the possible was limited only by the occurrence of the actual. And it went without saying that what existed in the one sense could never exist in the other. Almost anything was possible except, of course, the actual.

Forty-four years later, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, in an interview with Bloomberg’s podcast series Odd Lots, described crypto yield farming in remarkably similar terms:

Fragment of a note to a friend, late 2022, after we’d been speaking about the future of breakfast cereal—this was for a proposed project for one of the major cereal vendors. I had been describing the amateur YouTuber “SassESnacks”, whose carefully-mic’d recordings of herself eating chocolate cake, spicy salmon role, mochi, pizza, noodles, and a variety of “healthy snacks” have millions of views. Years after her death, in 2019, of pancreatic cancer, viewers continued to address SassE in the comments, telling her how much they missed her, how much her videos had helped them.

In this case I suspect watching and listening to someone eat has become a proxy for sharing food with them—perhaps being fed by them. In some of her posts a lot of the action consists in her preparing the meal first—this enhances my sense that what at least some devotees are getting from meokbang [Korean: “eating show”] is an experience of being cared for, of being securely held. Most of those who find their way into this scene, I suspect, have a pronounced ASMR [autonomous sensory meridian response]—they experience an evoked rheotactic sensation up the cervical spine and caudorostrally over the occiput in response to quiet reciprocating impulsive sounds (crackling, crunching, mixers, washers, muffled heartbeats). Whether you think this is a vestigial reward for crunching through charred long bones to get at the marrow or simply an epiphenomenon of neural crest ontogenesis and the evolutionary history of rheotactic mechanosensing inherited from teleosts, the effect is to feel as if someone were stroking you up the back of the neck while you watch them prepare something (for you?) to eat. That meets a deep need, especially if you’ve just come home at the end of a long day of building slide decks in a cubicle CAFO …

Of course the obverse of ASMR is misophonia. Do you really want to live in a world where you’re constantly surrounded by the sounds of people crunching cereal? Does cereal become a food of intimacy, a test of trust? The first time you eat cereal in front of someone without worrying about how they’re going to respond to the sound of your crunching—that’s a test.

In a sensory ecology of ubiquitous anosmia and declining taste buds, mouthfeel moves to the center of the pleasure of eating. The future is crunchy.

I wish I could say I’d punched up the diction to satirical effect. Alas, this is how I talk when no one is listening.

A month before the thing with my hands I had an unusual experience sitting one morning:

2020-5-21

Awakening to not being awake … sitting, I feel myself pushing against something plastic. Like scrubbing copper that has oxidized or blackened—a vessel, say … what you see when you first start to scrub is not the original state of the copper, but the difference is stark enough to recall to mind what it looked like in its original state, the way it gleamed … is this an image that came to me sitting, or did I see it in a dream, or drifting off to sleep last night?

It’s not clear from this entry, but the experience I’m describing was one in which I felt as if my face were being erased. This is a rough approximation. It would be more exact, though perhaps less useful to the reader, to say that a cooking vessel, a saucepan say, had assumed the place of my face, and what I felt was that vessel being scrubbed, a layer of carbonization being removed.

The experience recurs twice in my journal from that year:

I’m not kidding, each of them looked like they had 10 or 20 parent-hours in them. They looked like architectural models. Without exception, they looked exactly like the houses that were already in this suburb, except they had a chicken coop, a solar cell and an electric vehicle. And I took a lot away from that. It was absolutely, abundantly clear that they wanted a green future, but they wanted that green future to be very familiar.

Thus decarbonization consultant Saul Griffith, describing an exercise in speculative architecture he observed in Wollongong, New South Wales, in 2021, when his son’s year 6 (eleven-year-olds) class was asked to design a “sustainable” home. The they who wanted a green future but wanted it to be familiar is the parents.

Is it fair to say they wanted a green future that was familiar? Or simply that they were unable to imagine a green future—perhaps any future—that was unfamiliar? Is this a question of desire or of a limit to the speculative impulse?

I would go further than Griffith and say that what many people desire—certainly the inhabitants of an affluent place such as Wollongong—is timelessness. Or perhaps desire is too strong, for what I have in mind is not a reflexively articulated desire but an inclination, a basin of attraction. We (“we”) value continuity in our habits, above all in our habits of relating to others. Of course we value novelty too. But the desire for novelty tends to be satisfied with novelties of a superficial character—styles of dress and adornment, music, the flavors and textures of the condiments we use to vary our food—whereas the inclination toward continuity demands continuities of a more abiding kind: of relationships, perhaps of ways of getting a living.

One evening early on in this project I looked down to find my hands were no longer attached to my body. From my journal:

2020-6-23

Yesterday evening around 9, sitting at the counter after eating, my hands resting on my stacked ankles, regarding them, the unaccustomed veinedness of the backs of the hands—an impression they were not part of me. Mild but clear, and unbidden: these were alien features of the world. It is not that I experienced revulsion for them or a desire to have them removed or destroyed … just a neutral dissociation. Looking at them now, on the keyboard, I can summon it again, even as they move under my command. An abiding awareness of the distinction between self and milieu …

The experience continued for a period of weeks. It came and went. At times, as I recall—though I do not see a record of this in my journal—it extended to encompass the entirety of the arms, the right arm in particular. At no point was it disturbing—often, in fact, it was distinctly pleasurable. It was less a tactile or proprioceptive experience than a visual one. Looking at my hands I experienced a recurrent alternation in the visual impression they made: now my hands appeared parts of a whole that I identified as my self, now they appeared separate. Soon I could flip my perspective at will and, again, there was something distinctly pleasurable in this. It was the same kind of pleasure as that of autonomous sensory meridian response, the tingling up the back of the skull some people experience when they hear certain impulsive sounds—crackling, crunching, the stridulation of orthopterans. It has since abated: looking down at my hands, once again on the keyboard, I can summon the dissociative sensation but faintly. But the memory of how pleasurable it was remains, as does the insight, if the term is warranted, that even the most settled-seeming of relationships, such as that of one’s hands to one’s body, is something that is continually being remade, with greater or lesser success.

(The experience I’ve described could be construed as a mild form of somatoparaphrenia. Reports of a sensation of limbs or extremities “floating free” are uncommon, though this may be mainly because experiences of this sort do not cause the distress and practical difficulties that lead sufferers of typical forms of hemispatial neglect to seek help. It is notable that the experience, in my case, was distinctly bilateral.)

When I lived in Los Angeles I often went running on the ridge above our neighborhood, and my route included a fire trail that faced west toward the sea. Some of the trees I used to pass on the fire trail came to feel like friends.

My thoughts turn often to those trees and others I used to see in LA. Lately I have come to feel that friend does not do justice to the relationship I had with them. The word that surfaces in my mind when I recall reaching up to touch the limb of a bishop pine as I went past, or smelling the peppery-sweet scent of gum oil and looking up to see a spotted gum looming above, is familiar. These trees were my familiars.

Perhaps one thing I mean by familiar is that, in regarding the gum at the western end of Sea View Lane Trail in Mount Washington, Los Angeles—it is possible I have transposed this gum, in memory, from some other location—I understood the two of us as playing coordinate roles in some common undertaking. I understood us as being parts of something.

The idea for this book came to me at the end of August 2017, halfway through an artist’s residency at Shiro Oni Studio, Onishi, Gunma prefecture. The monsoon had come late, and the heat and humidity militated against vigorous activity of any sort. I spent much of my time lying on the cool tatami floor of my room, trying to recapture the sleep that had eluded me the night before. In the late afternoons I’d go around the corner to my studio, where I’d listen to a processed field recording I’d made in the local elementary school. I’d procedurally split the recording into overlapping 500ms segments that I then resequenced according to their spectral features and concatenated to make something new. The outcome was repetitive, shot through with the school attention chime that sounded halfway through the recording — the effect was like a cross between kulintang drumming and the stridulation of the kirigirisu or long-horned katydids that sang in the grass all night. I seemed to have stepped out of the timeline of my ordinary life and into an oppressively humid waking dream.

The foregoing (“The idea for this book ...”) is something I wrote as publicity copy for a different book, Waking Paralysis. But it could apply equally to this one. That makes three books to have come, in one fashion or another, from that six-week residency: The Human Scaffold (2021), Waking Paralysis, and this. If you pressed me for an account of what this one is “about” I might say: Sound, posture, time. Dissociation. Touch.

Those are things this book could be said to be about in the sense that they are things I have in mind as I work on it. But there’s a second kind of aboutness that attaches to made things, an aboutness of process. If you pressed me for an account of what this book is about in this second sense I might say:

[Amazonian worldviews] have a strong “constructional” dimension. Amerindian constructivism is particularly salient in mythical accounts narrating the creation of the world and the different life forms that populate it. It conceives of all living beings as composite entities, made up of the bodies and parts of bodies of a diversity of life forms, among which artifacts occupy a prominent place. According to these cosmologies, at the beginning there were only people and their artifacts — and sometimes, only artifacts. These artifacts are conceived of as the primordial building blocks out of which the bodies of people, and even gods, were first created. In this Amerindian view, artifacts fall on the side of the “natural” or the given — they were the first divine creations — whereas humans, animals, and plants fall on the side of the “cultural” or the constructed.

Thus anthropologist Fernando Santos-Granero, introducing a volume of essays on the role played by made things — variously, masks and flutes, baby slings, headdresses and other bodily ornaments, identity cards, bibles, and airplanes — in the cultural life of the societies of the Amazon basin. Santos-Granero and his colleagues are responding not just to the intrinsic interest of the topic but to a broadly cited view, associated in particular with the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola, that the distinguishing feature of the Amazonian worldview is its “perspectival” quality. Here perspectival refers to a tendency, widespread in the hunting societies of the Americas and the boreal taiga and tundra of North America and Eurasia, to view certain animals — generally those significant to the hunt — as possessed of a quality of sociality comparable to our own. These animals have a perspective, they look out on the world, as we do — and see us, variously, as predators, prey, and junior partners in an ongoing effort of worldbuilding. This is so, Santos-Granero says — the worldview of the peoples of the Amazon is perspectival — but that is not the whole story.

In fact we can go further. Not only do material artifacts play a distinguished role in the theory of personhood common to the peoples of the Amazon: we observe something similar practically anywhere we look. Consider, by way of maximal contrast, the words of legal scholar Margaret Radin, from 1982.

Most people possess certain objects they feel are almost part of themselves. These objects are closely bound up with personhood because they are part of the way we constitute ourselves as continuing personal entities in the world. They may be as different as people are different, but some common examples might be a wedding ring, a portrait, an heirloom, or a house.

One may gauge the strength or significance of someone’s relationship with an object by the kind of pain that would be occasioned by its loss.

Is it surprising that a people who could use against stubborn wood and pliant grass and bloody flesh nothing more serviceable than stone — is it surprising that such a people should have become so familiar with the idea of metal? Each one of us, in his dreams, had felled tall trees with blades that lodged deep in the pale pulp beneath the bark. Any of us could have enacted the sweeping of honed metal through a stand of seeded grass or described the precise parting of fat or muscle beneath a tapered knife. We knew the strength and sheen of steel and the trueness of its edge from having so often called it into possible existence.

In “Land Deal” (1978), the novelist Gerald Murnane imagines the colonization of Australia as the dreamed encounter of two “race[s] of men”, the narrators and the “men from overseas”, those who propose — preposterously, in the narrators’ view — to exchange implements of steel and glass, wool blankets, and quantities of flour for use of the narrators’ land. That they, or someone, must be dreaming is confirmed for the narrators by the fact that they recognize their counterparts’ trade goods from past dreams — and by the dreamlike abstractness of the men from overseas themselves.

The dreamer … had invented a race of men among whom possible objects passed as actual. And these men had been moved to offer us the ownership of their prizes in return for something that was itself not real.

… The pallor of the men we had met that day, the lack of purpose in much of their behaviour, the vagueness of their explanations — these may well have been the flaws of men dreamed of in haste. And, perhaps paradoxically, the nearly perfect properties of the stuffs offered to us seemed the work of a dreamer, someone who lavished on the central items of his dream all those desirable qualities that are never found in actual objects.

… In any case, we had been fairly sure that the foreigners failed to see our land. From their awkwardness and unease as they stood on the soil, we judged that they did not recognise the support it provided or the respect it demanded. When they moved even a short distance across it, stepping aside from places that invited passage and treading on places that were plainly not to be intruded on, we knew that they would lose themselves before they found the real land.

The question remains of who is dreaming. At first the narrators assume it is they themselves. Later they are forced to consider the possibility that it is the men from overseas: