A home made of distance
Morar is to dwell, to inhabit, to stay. It refers to a place of belonging, a house, a refuge. Demorar is to be late. It refers to the action of not arriving, postponing, suspending, deferring. But it also entails a sense of pleasure: pausing, slowing down, distending, staying longer, enjoying. De-morar can be said to constitute the negation of morar—a negation that involves both a spatial and temporal dimension. The one who performs the action of demorar refuses to arrive, to appear, to be on time, as well as to dwell, to stay, to inhabit a stable place. This is the conversation I’ve been having with my friend: it is impossible to inhabit a stable place. When we say this, we’re both suspended in very different territories: I’m in Chile, he’s in France, even though we’re both supposed to be somewhere else. To be permanently in transit, he says, and yet unable to move. How is our movement supposed to happen in these conditions of confinement? And yet we’re moving, faster than ever, millions of fugitive lines traversing our bodies at the speed of light, while our bodies remain still, trapped in interchangeable, sanitary houses that we don’t own, that we never imagined. This is, I presume, our place.
It is no surprise, then, that my dreams have been compulsively showing me a place. Last night, for example, I dreamt that I was staying in a futuristic hotel—a tall, thin, white building that looked like a tower in the middle of nowhere. The room was small and everything was white. There was a tiny window that looked like an airplane window and the landscape I could see through it was incredible: tall, shiny and strikingly beautiful red and yellow steel structures that looked like rollercoasters against a bright, blue sky. It was an amusement park in the dessert. It was empty. From the window, my eyes traveled across the park, floating around, pausing, almost touching the steel structures—everything seemed uncannily clear, brilliant, hyperreal. I was able to see in high definition—I told him when I woke up—I had drone vision. We were supposed to meet for the first time in that place, and we did. He arrived two hours early and I was late. I was wearing my usual quarantine outfit, I didn’t have time to take a shower. I felt ugly, I wasn’t ready. We sat around what we thought was a typical amusement park table—with a washed-out Fanta logo in the center (like a Fantasilandia table, he said afterwards). And then I saw him, for the first time, and I could still see in high definition. My eyes had the ability to zoom in and out of his face, I could see every single pore with such clarity that his face didn’t feel like a face. It was more like a recollection of pixels, a figure made of fragments and layers of the many images of him I had seen on social media. Like when he told me he saw someone at the metro in Paris that looked exactly like the image he has of me. What image? —I asked. The one that I have from your videos on Instagram. Haven’t you considered that the white hotel in the middle of the amusement park is a crashed airplane?
It was exactly that—I thought. My eyes were moving as if I were on an airplane—they floated above the landscape, they followed a certain movement across the territory. And yet the airplane had crashed, its trajectory was forcefully interrupted. My dream was full of structures made for movement turned into static, monumental cadavers. My body in the dream nevertheless insisted in the movement. Like when you are on an airplane and the airplane hasn’t taken off yet and you look outside the window and you feel it’s moving but it was actually the airplane next to it. The feeling of movement that completely takes over your body, however briefly, and the instant in which you realize it was an illusion. The tension, the sudden vertigo, the dizziness, and the need to verify the actual stillness of it all—that’s exactly it, we said. That’s our place.
When Julia Kristeva writes about the distinctions between the genotext and the phenotext in The Revolution of Poetic Language, I like to imagine she’s somehow referring to this place: “The phenotext is a structure; it obeys rules of communication and presupposes a subject of enunciation and an addressee. The genotext, on the other hand, is a process; it moves through zones that have relative and transitory borders and constitutes a path that is not restricted to the two poles of univocal information between two fully fledged subjects.”[1] (When we talk, from this asynchronous distance, can we say to have the consistency of two fully fledged subjects?). The phenotext, says Kristeva, is what obliterates the infinity of the process, as it is traversed with multiple socio-political forces that are condensed in the symbolic order. Here, the signifying process becomes knotted and locked “into a given surface or structure; discard[ing] practice under fixed, fragmentary, symbolic matrices.”[2] The seemingly fixed structures of the symbolic order obliterate the possibilities for movement. They seclude the very process under which they are erected, providing stability to an otherwise ephemeral, unstable, and constantly changing field of signification. But the structures that today hold my body together, the places for inhabitation, the channels for communication, aren’t they precisely providing the sort of ephemerality, instability and movement that previously seemed so completely inaccessible? Or is this dwelling in precariousness a different kind of movement?
To fly, today, is a very complicated matter. I write this while my friend is at the airport in Paris, waiting to take a flight home. His flight has been cancelled and rescheduled several times. He needs to have his PCR tests taken on time, each time—he cannot carry the virus across borders. To fly like a bird, to be like a bird, to live in flight—this is the gesture Hélène Cixous invokes when she proposes an écriture feminine: “Flying is woman's gesture—flying in language and making it fly. We have all learned the art of flying and its numerous techniques; for centuries we've been able to possess anything only by flying; we've lived in flight, stealing away, finding, when desired, narrow passageways, hidden crossovers.”[3] A writing that is constituted as a form of escape, a way out, an opening of unexpected paths, an activation of a kind of fertility, an affirmation of life and its unknowable potentials; “we’re not going to repress something so simple as the desire for life.”[4] But also as an act of (dis)possession: “It’s no accident that voler has a double meaning, that it plays on each of them and thus throws off the agents of sense. It's no accident: women take after birds and robbers just as robbers take after women and birds. They (illes) go by, fly the coop, take pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures and turning propriety upside down.”[5] To dwell without taking possession. To build a house without owning it. To detach the sense of property from the act of inhabiting. To generate, deliberately, the conditions for disorientation—isn’t this precisely the scenario that we’ve been thrown into? Haven’t we been forced into dispossession?
And yet the masters of property, the owners of the world, and the relationships of ownership and exploitation persist, perhaps stronger and more elusive than ever. The urgency remains: “To break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project.”[6] A type of destruction that has nothing to do, I suspect, with the mechanisms of death and dispossession, precarity and fragmentation of this, the globalized, neoliberal world that we live in and its necropolitical logics. A form of volcanic subversion: “A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments.”[7] And also: “If there is a ‘property of woman,’ it is paradoxically her capacity to depropriate unselfishly; body without end, without principal ‘parts’.”[8] To become a body without end and yet a body, a singular body, that is able to resist and fight: “A woman without a body, dumb, blind, can’t possibly be a good fighter.”[9] What is this volcanic body Cixous is suggesting?
I don’t exactly know how volcanoes work. I only know that I grew up in a volcanic country—“the second most active string of volcanoes, only surpassed by Indonesia.” Unlike an earthquake or an explosion, the eruption of a volcano seems to respond to a different logic; there is a slowness in the way lava moves, a kind of movement that arrives rather expectedly. There is a weight, a consistency that is as liquid and abrasive as it is solid and persistent. There is also the brightness, the ardent luminosity, the beauty of matter in transition. It is an unstoppable, destroying substance that at the same time has the capacity to become structure, to solidify, to give rise to an entirely new landscape. That landscape will always contain, visibly and tangibly, the memories of heat and intensity, the traces of movement and falling and destroying within it. It will contain, moreover, the promise of other potential eruptions and transformations, announcing unpredictable futures. This announcement, almost prophetic, relies on sound: “When the wind is calm, you might be able to hear the sounds of gas bubbles bursting and lava splashing […] What you hear is only part of a rich chorus of sounds emitted from many processes near the surface of an active lava lake.”[10] A sound that is produced by the movement and collapsing of the many layers of lava and time and ground and history that generate an imperceptible infrasonic chorus: “Imagine all the layers of old lava flows off which a seismic wave echoes as it travels through the ground. Each of those echoes arrives at the seismometer at a different time and may result in a complex signal even if the source is simple.”[11]
The belated, arrhythmic arrival of multiple echoes. An interplay of delayed sounds and resonances prefiguring a complex and ever-changing body. Is this the volcanic body Cixous is suggesting? “She lets the other language speak—the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death. To life she refuses nothing. Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible.”[12] And further: “In women's speech, as in their writing, that element which never stops resonating, which, once we've been permeated by it, profoundly and imperceptibly touched by it, retains the power of moving us—that element is the song.”[13] To touch and be touched, to move and be moved—this seems to be the ultimate affective response of this writing; “touch me, caress me, you the living no-name, give me my self as myself.”[14] A writing that far from being detached from speech invites the many voices, the many echoes, to inhabit it. A writing that is a body—the emergence of a body, the rehearsal of a body, the transition of a body into other bodies; and hence the body is conceived as practice, as movement, as lava—an indeterminate state of matter, slowly falling, destructive, generative, impossible to fix. And a relational, resonating body: a body that sounds, a body with a thousand voices, a body that is constituted in an interplay of infinite murmurs and echoes.
There is no echo without a distance. When I look for it on the internet, the searching engine shows me: What is the minimum distance of the reflecting surface to hear an echo? How can you measure the distance of a distant wall by hearing the echo?—these are all question people have asked. According to Wikipedia, “an echo is a reflection of sound that arrives at the listener with a delay after the direct sound. The delay is directly proportional to the distance of the reflecting surface from the source and the listener.”[15] The echo is the confirmation of the tactile capacities of sound—the sensible manifestation of a sound touching the surface of a distant object. And it is also a return: a return that happens with and through the distant other, the materialization, in other words, of that distance. Speaking is touching from a distance—it is a way of rehearsing and experiencing a body, outside the physical confines of the body.
When Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describe their collaborative writing as a mode of “musical correspondence,” they are radically invested, I think, in an understanding of both writing and body in terms of echoes, rhythms, resonances and sounds. They are invested in a relational phonics of writing: “we want to make sure our writing sounds like something where sounding like something is sounding like something broken or cracked or dubbed or overdubbed.”[16] An overpopulation of sounds and gestures and layers of life and affect that assume the writing, relational body as already multiple, inhabited by “not only our parents, our families, our partners, and the various children in our lives, but also all these other people that we’re always working with and talking with and thinking with and reading with. There’s always a lot of sound in our head, and in our hands, too.”[17] The palpable impact of those other bodies continues to resonate, as a memory, an echo, a delay, in their bodies. And hence they are inevitably concerned with the question of distance and absence. The normal rhythm of ‘taking fours,’ they say, “is predicated on proximate presence, on being there with the person with whom you’re trading. And most of the time we’re not there together in the same place and we’re not playing at the same time. There’s all these time lags and rhythmic irregularities that come into play—a sort of involuntary sync of patience.”[18] Learning to negotiate the distance, from a distance, has thus been for them a way to activate a field of sound, a field of echoes, while being apart. The sound of being apart: to make the interruptions, pauses, asynchronies, and absences sound, both enabling distance to become a mode of proximity, as well as providing a kind of return, a sonorous return in which the distant other is suddenly able to make an appearance, to touch, in the form of an echo.
What if the distant other, that object that is touched by a faraway voice, producing a delayed return of sound, is a place that one would call home? And what if the distance between a body and a home is not only spatial but also temporal? For Saidiya Hartman, the African diaspora entails the wound of an impossible and always belated return home: “one has come too late to recuperate an authentic identity or to establish one’s kinship with a place or people. Ultimately these encounters or journeys occur too late, far too long after the event, to be considered a return.”[19] Moreover, she asserts, “this belatedness might be considered an essential feature of the diasporic in that, as James Clifford notes, diasporas usually presuppose ‘a constitutive taboo on return,’ so that the homeland is that which is always already lost.”[20] It is not coincidence, I presume, that Hartman recurs to sound and particularly the figure of the echo in its ghostly, rhythmical persistence in her attempt to produce an impossible writing that would bring those disappearing, erased bodies back to life: “it is an impossible writing which attempts to say that which resists being said (since dead girls are unable to speak). It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive.”[21]
In her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Hartman embarks upon the project of writing a history of “the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved” through “recreat[ing] the voices and us[ing] the words of these young women when possible and inhabit[ing] the intimate dimensions of their lives.”[22] In so doing, she employs “a mode of close narration, a style which places the voice of narrator and character in inseparable relation, so that the vision, language, and rhythms of the wayward shape and arrange the text. The italicized phrases and lines are utterances from the chorus.”[23] Hartman conceives her project in terms of assembling a chorus—a chorus of multiple, fugitive black lives that despite their movement towards disappearance remain uttering: remember me. Like the story of Mabel Hampton in the chapter titled “The Beauty of the Chorus,” and the ways in which Hartman imagines the role of music in her coping with her mother’s death: “Music became Mabel’s passion. It transformed every heartbreak, every terrible thing she had experienced into something magnificent and arresting. It took hold of her, it laid her low, it restored her, as if every lament was her mother speaking to her, every betrayed and abandoned lover a replay of her affairs, every dying and defeated heroine the girl child trapped in the coal bin. Music conveyed and echoed all the stories she never told anyone, the secrets she would never disclose, the cruel things she had endured, everyone she had lost.”[24] Music as an echo of that which hasn’t been said and is no longer there—an echo which, unlike the archive, enables those lives to be remembered in their waywardness, in their secrecy and opacity, in their flying. Like music, Hartman’s writing enables those absent bodies to speak and reverberate through hers. She assumes, like Moten and Harney, the inevitable coexistence of multiple bodies—lost, wandering, always escaping and disappearing—and the possibility of making them sound. In this amalgam of irrecuperable, distant voices, she prefigures a place of belonging. A home that is as distant and absent as it is suddenly there, excessive, elusive, incommensurable, offering an impossible return.
A resonant mode of wounded belonging can be traced in Houria Bouteldja’s manifesto Whites, Jews, and Us: Towards a Politics of Revolutionary Love, and specifically in the chapter “We, Indigenous Women.” Coming from a different history of colonial displacement and diaspora—the French imperialism and colonization of North Africa—Bouteldja polemically refuses to take possession of her body—to reclaim her body as her own. She chooses instead to position her body back into a complex site of collective belonging, as an urgent gesture of decolonial resistance: “My body does not belong to me. No moral magisterium will make me endorse a law conceived by and for white feminists. Recite! “Ana khitt ou oueld ennass hitt.” On my left thigh, three marks made with a razor blade and covered in kohl to dry up the blood. It’s a patriarchal rite that overtakes your body, chains it to a lineage of ancestors. My paternal grandmother approves. I belong to her. My maternal grandmother approves. I belong to her. My grandfathers, fallen martyrs, approve. I belong to them. My father approves, I belong to him. As for my mother, let’s not even go there; she’s the one who put the cuffs around my wrists. I belong to her. The blood has dried. The scar will be indelible. I belong to my family, my clan, my neighborhood, my race; I belong to Algeria, to Islam. I belong to my history and God willing, I belong to my descendants. ‘When you are married, in cha Allah, you will say: Ana khitt ou oueld ennass hitt. Then, you will belong to your husband’. The voice: It’s awful.”[25] The repetitive, almost confessional use of ‘I belong’ presents the paradoxical site from which she writes—a site that openly asserts the place of injury and oppression (the scars, the chains, the cuffs), and yet contains the histories of resistance and survival (the fallen martyrs) that have made her life possible. The impact of multiple bodies coexisting in Bouteldja’s body entail contradictory relationships of love and injury. By asserting the place of her lineage and ancestors, by naming and reclaiming her belonging to them without negating the injuries and wounds of that belonging—by affirming them, indeed, as the conditions of possibility for her resistance—she is able to shift the locus of oppression from the Arab culture to the western, French colonizer. By invoking the voice—France’s voice—affirming “it’s awful,” Bouteldja challenges the western judgment regarding the oppressive, barbaric, and awful nature of muslim culture, particularly towards women, positing that it is this very judgment that functions as a primary oppressive, civilizing, and colonizing force towards those bodies.
And hence Bouteldja introduces the figure of France as the primary oppressor, whose colonizing strategies consist precisely in the erasure, disregarding and dissolution of her kinship and belonging—in the dismantling of home and of the multiple body as home: “France is very strong. It has declared war on my parents. The battle is arduous. France wants to tear my body away from them, colonize it. France is voracious. It wants me all to itself. ‘They are barbarians!’ France yells and yells. I hear this everywhere. ‘They are barbarians!’ But the scar doesn’t wear off. My ancestors won the game.”[26] It is interesting how France is presented here as a phagocytic, voracious force that tears the colonized body apart by means of disrupting and cutting off its collective belonging to a family, a territory and a culture, under the binary rubric of barbaric versus civilized. In this sense, the white feminist articulation of body-belonging in opposition to institutions such as the state or the family—in its liberal, individualistic iteration—might work, Boutledja suggests, by further reaffirming the colonizing forces that aim to disrupt these collective modes of belonging, thus further obliterating the colonized subjects. And because this colonizing force operates in phagocytic terms, as she puts it, its promise of individuation is a trap; it results in the subsumption of the colonized body, now disconnected from a place of collective belonging, into the digestive system of the colonizer—into the very core of its organism.
What does this organism look like? “The world today: an infinite ocean, agitated by furious waves. Variable flows without possible totalization in definable territories, lacking of stable frontiers, in continuous reconfiguration.”[27] Movement, flows, lack of stability, continuous reconfiguration—has this colonizing organism taken the shapes and vocabularies of what Kristeva, Cixous and others once imagined in terms of fertile destruction and rupture of the symbolic order and its many oppressions? Or is it a different type of movement—a type of mobile yet largely stable symbolic order? A type of movement, furthermore, that would make us flexible, light, disoriented and pliant—that would turn us into edible citizens, as Bouteldja puts it, of the globalized world?
(While I write this, hundreds of Israeli settlers, sponsored by state and private occupation forces, are shamelessly breaking in and stealing Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah, with complete impunity. In one of the many videos circulating on social media, we see Jacob, a middle-aged Israeli settler from Brooklyn, inside a Palestinian woman’s house, attempting to steal it. Confronting him from the patio the woman says: “Jacob, you know, this is not your house.” And he responds: “Yes, but if I go, you don’t go back. So what’s the problem? Why are you yelling at me? I didn’t do this. I didn’t do this. It’s easy to yell at me, but I didn’t do this.” She insists: “You are stealing my house!” And he replies: “And if I don’t steal it, someone else is gonna steal it.” And she responds, as if she were stating, desperately, the obvious: “No! No one is allowed to steal it, ya ‘ammi.” Palestinian resistance, as so many other resistances in those territories and communities that are being colonized, militarized, teared apart, taken away, can suddenly be summarized in the simple utterance: we are not moving; we will stay).
“Never again the feet will rest in the stable landscape of a firm ground: getting used to navigating on this tumultuous and mobile surface, without a particular direction, without a general point of view, is mandatory.”[28] When Suely Rolnik describes ‘the world today,’ she specifically refers to a crisis regarding the sense of home: “Estrangement owns the scene, impossible to domesticate: destabilized, uncomfortable, shelterless, disoriented, lost in time and space as if we were all homeless, without a home. Not without an actual home (that zero degree of survival in which an increasingly larger amount of humans inhabit), but without the ‘at home’ provided by a ‘sense’ of oneself, that is, without the consistency of a palpable subjectivity, without the familiarity of certain relations with the world, of certain modes of being, of certain shared senses, of certain beliefs. It is of this invisible—but not less real—‘home’ that globalized humanity is lacking.”[29]
What would it mean then to navigate this ocean-like world without becoming bodiless and homeless—without falling, once again, in that oppressive trap that Cixous described as “a woman without a body, dumb, blind” and hence unable to fight? What would it mean, in other words, to fly, to move, to jumble the order of space and disorient it, in a world in which flying, moving and disorienting seem to be the very mechanisms of subjection? Moreover, how to establish a place for dwelling, a refuge—a home—that would impede the forces of displacement, extraction, precarity, and dispossession to completely overtake our bodies in their multiple, communal, and collective configurations and belongings?
I have lived in so many different houses and geographies—always moving, always leaving, always late—that I have lost any sense of return. I have become, unknowingly, a bird—one whose instinctual knowledge of any particular trajectory seems nevertheless blurred. I am, in other words, an exemplary citizen of this globalized world—a citizen without a permanent address, a citizen in continuous transition—has it ever been any different? To live from a distance, to be distant, to be always invested in generating some sort of distance; a kind of space between bodies, but also within the body. My presence dispersed over so many places, over some many homes and histories and platforms. I experience my body as a fragmented body—my nose, my hands, my pixels, my simultaneous geolocations—barely sustained by something. This is my own, private mourning, my own private calling for a return home that presents itself as already impossible. And hence I encounter, in this impossibility, in this complex interplay of absences and distances in which my body is prefigured, the possibility of an echo. Since the consistency of the echo is directly proportional to the distance between my voice and you, the many distant others with whom I talk to and read and love, the assemblage of echoes that constitute my body is immense. It is, indeed, an overpopulation of sounds and gestures and layers of life and affect and loss and scars that assume this writing, relational body as already multiple, inhabited by large intervals and distances through which a complex, atemporal, and asynchronous chorus of sounds and murmurs traverse. This multitude of sounds must be intensified.
Demorar is to create a distance, and to insist on that distance. The necessary distance for an echo to emerge. A distance between the point of departure and the point of arrival—between the time of departure and the time of arrival. It is challenging the expectations of arrival and appearance, synchronicity and proximity, intensifying instead the interval. Desire, Luce Irigaray suggests, “occupies or designates the place of the interval. […] Desire requires a sense of attraction: a change in the interval or the relations of nearness or distance between subject and object.”[30] And hence demorar, in its capacity to generate and insist on a distance, enables desire to have a place. Enables the type of attraction towards proximity that can only exist in the materialization of distance—in its becoming voice, sound, echo, and lava. In its becoming a common territory, a common ground made of movement, in which traveling, multiple, delayed and vocalic bodies are able to touch and be touched, to move and be moved. Demorar prefigures, in this sense, a home—una morada—made of distances. A belated home—una casa demorada—that consequently entails a belated body—un cuerpo demorado—and, to follow Cixous, a belated writing—una escritura demorada. A home, a body, and a writing that are never yet there, that refuse to arrive, that in the action of suspending, deferring, pausing, and staying longer, find a place for dwelling. To dwell in the never yet there. To make it sound.
In her novel Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson writes: “‘How does distance look?’ is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved.”[31] It is no coincidence, I believe, that underlying all these words and texts and resonances there is the question of love, as if it was inseparable from the question of distance. “To love—Cixous writes—to watch-think-seek the other in the other, to despecularize, to unhoard. Does this seem difficult? It’s not impossible, and this is what nourishes life—a love that has no commerce with the apprehensive desire that provides against the lack and stultifies the strange; a love that rejoices in the exchange that multiplies.”[32] A love based on the intensification of the lack instead of its resolution—can this lack be understood in terms of distance? A hollow, endless, unfulfilled space, an open scar, an interval: the extension from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved. Carson’s ‘simple direct question’—How does distance look?—might also be the question: How are we looked by distance? Unsurprisingly, she is also writing about volcanoes:
“Now listen to me Geryon,
Ancash was saying,
There’s a village in the mountains north of Huaraz called Jucu and in Jucu
they believe some strange things.
It’s a volcanic region. Not active now. In ancient times they worshiped
the volcano as a god and even
threw people into it. For sacrifice? asked Geryon whose head had come out
of the blanket.
Not exactly. More like a testing procedure. They were looking for people
from the inside. Wise ones.
Holy men I guess you would say. The word in Quechua is Yazcol Yazcamac it means
the Ones Who Went and Saw and Came Back—
I think the anthropologists say eyewitnesses. These people did exist.
Eyewitnesses, said Geryon.
Yes. People who saw the inside of the volcano.
[…]
The town is build into the slope
of the volcano—there are holes in the wall you can look through and see the fire.
They use them to bake bread.
I don’t believe you, says Herakles. The soldier shrugs. Ancash’s mother looks up.
No, it’s true, she says. Lava bread.
Makes you passionate.”[33]
My friend tells me he has been thinking about the relationships between morar and demorar. We haven’t had the chance to really talk about it—I don’t know exactly what he’s thinking. When he shared this initial thought with me, however, something resonated. This essay is, in many ways, the reverberation of that resonance and its proliferation in my multiple bodies. While I write this, he must be on his last airplane, crossing the Andes and the many volcanoes that can be seen from above. Perhaps, at this very moment, he’s flying above Huaraz and Jucu and he’s able to see the winged people that live inside the volcano. Or perhaps they are looking at him. To fly above the Andes is always the most turbulent part of the flight; the soft, almost imperceptible movement of the airplane becomes bumpy and abrupt, disrupted by unexpected currents of air, pulled by the many forces emanating from the mountain peaks. He will arrive, soon, to the sanitary hotel in which he is required to quarantine for fifteen days. He will be, for the first time, as proximate as he has ever been from my own, temporary location. Like in my dream, we might see each other for the first time and we might feel the weight of time and speed and movement suddenly collapsing—the amalgam of sounds, delays, time lags and absences coming together, crushing. We might (un)recognize our bodies and faces as a complicated assemblage of the many images we’ve seen of each other on zoom, facebook, instagram, and dreams, conflating with the equally elusive and irreconcilable shapes of what we’re used to call reality. The distance, however, will never be resolved.
NOTES
[1] Julia Kristeva, “Revolution in Poetic Language,” Translated by Margaret Waller, The Kristeva Reader, Edited by Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 121.
[2] Ibid, 122.
[3] Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1.4 (1976), 887.
[4] Ibid, 891.
[5] Ibid, 887.
[6] Ibid, 875.
[7] Ibid, 888.
[8] Ibid, 889.
[9] Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 880.
[10] U.S. Geological Survey, “Volcano Watch — Sounds we can't hear teach us about lava lakes,” USGS: Science for a Changing World, (February, 2018).
[11] Ibid.
[12] Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 889.
[13] Ibid, 881.
[14] Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 882.
[15] Wikipedia, ‘Echo,’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo (accessed May, 2021).
[16] Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and Stevphen Shukaitis, “Refusing Completion: A Conversation,” e-flux, Journal 116, March 2021. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/116/379446/refusing-completion-a-conversation/
[17]Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and Stevphen Shukaitis, “Refusing Completion: A Conversation”…
[18] Ibid.
[19] Saidiya Hartman, “The Time of Slavery,” South Atlantic Quarterly. 101. 4 (2002), 762.
[20] Ibid, 762.
[21] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12.2 (2008), 12.
[22] Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 7.
[23] Ibid, 7.
[24] Ibid, 398
[25] Houria Bouteldja, “We, Indigenous Women,” in Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love, Translated by Rachel Valinsky (South Pasadena, CA: Smiotex(e), 2016), 73–4.
[26] Houria Bouteldja, “We, Indigenous Women,” 74.
[27] Suely Rolnik, “Más allá del principio de identidad: la vacuna antropofágica,” in Cartografía Sentimental, 2018. (My translation) http://www.medicinayarte.com/libros-digitales/oficina/biblioteca/cartografia_sentimental.htm
[28] Suely Rolnik, “Más allá del principio de identidad”…
[29] Ibid.
[30] Luce Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” Translated by Seán Hand, French Feminist Thought: A Reader, Edited by Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1987), 120.
[31] Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red, (London: Random House Group, 1998), 43.
[32] Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 893.
[33] Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red, 128, 139.
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