collisions

I read the Karen Barad article about quantum entanglements, leave it out on my desk for days. I have not been reading much except for teaching but yesterday, I pick up My Meteorite, by Harry Dodge, which I bought several months ago. I knew some of his video work, and I knew, of course, he is Maggie Nelson's partner, but did not know, came to soon find out in the second chapter of My Meteorite, that he is adopted. And in the next chapter, he references Karen Barad. And in the chapter after that, he writes, as if in direct response to my astonishment:

Coincidences are not coincidences per se, they are simply flows of events in which every other possible event is simultaneously happening in infinite other worlds.

And later, he talks about particles and matter and how they assemble to manifest in people. Not as the result of minerals alone but rather the sum and effect of an interlinked variety of bodies and forces behaving as a kind of agentic assemblage. This web of pressures, situations, and collisions saturates (and produces) the cosmos, along these lines we're able to reconfigure our understanding of self as something that is not unitary, but as being made each moment by uncountable collisions in a complex, open system. In other words, all things including bodies are perpetually changing, being formed and affected by the force of every legible and illegible collision...so it might be correct to say that this thing I call my self is actually much more fluid (and much larger) than I have been schooled to believe.

“We exceed our skins,” he says. “And this — if you really think about it — changes everything.”

I can't help but remember Robin Wall Kimmerer when she writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, that in indigenous languages, pronouns do not distinguish between people and things. The distinction is between the living and the manufactured. The same pronouns refer to all that is animate — humans and animals, but also stones and trees and insects — and it's breathtaking to think about how that orientation to the world would change the way we live.

I think too of CA Conrad, when they spoke about vibrations. They were referring to species that had gone extinct. How every creature has its own vibrations and sounds that it emits and when the creature is gone, it is not only the body that is gone, but the vibrations too — gone forever.

All the violence we are continually enacting on this unimaginably complex, fragile, and beautiful world.

To consider all this, to hold it in mind — time, space, particle, collision, breath, aliveness, assemblage — is a way to fall back in love with the world.