This is the kind of thing you might
come across,
suddenly, magically, and you can see
how much care has been made in the making of a circle of (im)perfectly
placed pinecones and a pile of stones
and in the center, two feathers,
one of them is blue, from a bluebird.
But from this view, the feather is indistinguishable, a secret.
I go back to the wounded tree who weeps clears sap
down her trunk.
When things accumulate
in these piles,
they become
homes for beings, they become habitats
and domains.
The homes
are many chambered.
They offer some protection.
They follow the architecture
of chance enabled by the constraints of the arroyo walls.
These homes are not built
to impress.
These homes are very beautiful.
I can imagine living in one of these homes.
When you stay still, things gather around you.
These old fallen trees in the arroyo
have gathered many branches and other debris.
Today I turned back into the smaller arroyo.
I've been sick for a week.
Time is different here— two weeks since I was last here,
but I haven't really left.
Looking more intently at the arroyo banks in the layers and strata and
how there is an archive
of how things naturally accumulate.
a systematic investigation
development, testing, evaluation
planned in advance
uses data collection and analysis to answer a question
An open system
Generated/regenerated through intra-action
Ongoing, returning in wonder
mycelial, mycorrhizal, rhizomatic
Transdisciplinary Philosophy of uncertainty
This alternative brings with it uncertainty, the unknown, and openness
as a condition and form of knowledge. It leads to understanding, dislodging and undertaking research as a rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988 [1980]) that moves in ever-changing directions, without beginning or end and causing frequent disorientation. Research is interpreted and narrated as an entanglement of dynamics, relationships and movements that relocate and displace researchers as well [16] (Aberasturi-Apraiz et al., 2020, p. 6).
As the prefix “trans” indicates, transdisciplinarity concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all disciplines (Nicolescu, 2005, p.7).
Deleuze and Guattari “What is Philosophy” page 7 re-write:
Many problems (solutions) hurry (slow) before (after) the hallucinating (reality sensing) eyes (ears) of an old (middle-aged) man (woman) who sees all sorts of philosophical concepts (beings) and conceptual personae (imaginariums) confronting (intra-acting) one another.
Today it is said that systems are bankrupt, but it is only the concept of system that has changed. So long as there is a time and a place for creating concepts, the operation that undertakes this will always be called philosophy, or will be indistinguishable from philosophy even if it is called something else (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p.9).
Some rocks and wood in the drizzle.
The rain sprinkled the objects in the arroyo, including herself, with moisture. They all deepened in their colors. The rain coated the molecules. She imagined air exchanging in her lungs— the rain-air displacing the sick-air, the sick-air bathed by rain outside of her, bathed and returned.
And of course these pieces of objects are also elegiac, also about holding on to the feeling of something slipping away, being faithful, being true, but knowing that you are losing something (Morton, 2013, p.15).
She gives herself an impossible task: write through this (condition).
Condition= drone depression:
When words are objects of derision because they simply can’t. The word is the object she can’t hold and turn around in her fingers, slipping her gaze to changing facets. The word is surface that can’t be rained on to deepen its colors. Enchantment slips off the word. The word is another fucking drone in the air. It’s J.D. Vance in Greenland.
***
She remembers to read in the dark with a lantern, with a dim candle, and some of the words are in shadow, like the whole surface of the moon that looks out at the earth-less galaxy. She thinks about writing stories that are themselves ghosts. There is deep time in the as-yet apprehended, like how you can never touch anything and always touch everything. She questions all this deepness and the wisdom of extracting from herself, too, and exhales a gift to the distance. Her beloved stirs in a niche in the arroyo walls.
After an illness, herself seeks the unself of herself, follows the grooves inward to the pause of the song, the textured uncenter of the pluriverse. Who knows if it is textured. The needle picks up and returns to the margin.
Every tune becomes an elegy for the disappearance, that is, the fundamental ontological secrecy, of an object or objects (Morton, 2013, p.23).
In the morning, the thrasher can be heard roughing a call from the cholla that grows prickly in the lower angle of her yard. She sits in her studio and tries to mimic the song in her head, drawing it out with an imaginary pencil to hear the length of it. She hears graphite meet the ridges and valleys. She can’t see the thrasher and suddenly the call is gone, too. So, she sits with a slowly unraveling memory of the roughened thrasher call and there is no mark to be read on paper.
Prompt:
Write without a mark to be left on paper.
References
Aberasturi-Apraiz, E., Correa Gorospe, J. M., & Martínez-Arbelaiz, A. (2020). Researcher vulnerability in doing collaborative autoethnography: Moving to a post-qualitative stance. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, Vol 21, No 3 (2020). https://doi.org/10.17169/FQS-21.3.3397
Deleuze, G., Guattari, F.( 1994). What is philosophy? (Tomlinson, J., & Burchell, G., Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1991)
Morton, T. (2013). Realist magic: Objects, ontology, causality. Open Humanities Press.
Nicolescu, B. (2005). Towards transdisciplinary education. The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa, 1. https://doi.org/10.4102/td.v1i1.300