“unfortunately, when you live out here, all you see is the details”
listening with wind in a garage
11/8/25
fictions of sameness
The ordinary is mediated through fictions of sameness.
Everydayness is a refrain measured against discernible patterns of change.
Like air, or gravity, one both belongs to its orbit and becomes imbued with its qualities.
This infra-material contiguity forms the “consolidation of experience that we call “I”’ (Manning 2019).
An image flickers. “I” sees or hears a ghost – it hovers over there or in a dream yet is felt in close up, “lived in folds of locality” (Connor).
Like the sound of speaking into a fan is “an event [that] unfolds from perception and its duration” (Deleuze).
I imagine a squat, oscillating fan, and a child mouthing into it as air “unites and disperses a word (an event) and objects (an éventail) when it swirls the atmosphere.”
In West Texas, the ordinariness of wind is the constant among variables of the everyday.
At the dog park, “the wind blows like hell.”
But wind is not ‘a’ sound or energy so much as a sensation, felt in and through how vibrations penetrate skin, ear, cilia.
Its molecular entanglements appear to collapse the distance between self and other, yet amplify differences by magnitude and intensity.
At this scale, sensation may “dissolve the distinction between matter and form" (Simonetti).
A dream – it’s just a quality of everydayness, “his repeating of beginning middle living…” (Stein).
A self diffuses into the oscillations of air or the repetitions of returning to the park the next day; there’s no fixed “I,” it’s a murmuration (as ‘of’ starlings—) particularities that move together as a tendency, seeming fluid at a distance.
I becomes itself in the process of perceiving phenomena: a recording device, a tape deck body. I is not the wind, or an electromagnetic impulse, but I builds a house for the wind and extends out into an electromagnetic field.
What is the precise measure of that. What is the smallest unit of a situation.
The diurnal, a habit of the sun setting or rising, and sleep.
Every day for a month I made a cyanotype at the dog park to mark impressions across domains of exposure.
Suggesting multiple skies and scales of aerial mattering.
Each shapes a duration, a practice of measuring heat and time and particulate as iterative patterns.
I want to write the atmospheric with this precision, or rather, with transparency—not to clarify, but to disappear into the subject, to become its air and shadow.
As it modulates the voice, wind reveals the fiction of coherence.
Auricle, tongue, lung, and inner ear are shaped like sandstone.
It is not only weather but the topologies and textures by which everyday life is felt and understood, or becomes cliché: a tumbleweed rolls across a highway.
the middle
Everydayness turns the Dairy Queen into a site for thinking about fluid dynamics.
After the dog park, M and I go there to study for our ham radio licenses.
The border patrol is also there, eating chicken strips.
We learn about sequences and repeaters and voltage, GIS and frequency bands, electromagnetic spectrum use and governance.
Listening is infrastructural – a system that shapes relation and enables matter’s movement.
Later, I drive around to remote coordinates with the hams, holding homemade antennae in the air.
Or, another day, we swim in the pool with rubber ducks while we wait for others to say hello.
Hello is all we say, and our call numbers. The repetition is the form.
It’s a sparse, relational circuitry that opens through refrain, or the everydayness of tuning in.
Later, or another day, M helps me hang my fiber sculptures for a sound installation. I wanted to think about fluid dynamics as the scene of hydraulic physics that models flows.
Its equations create fiction of sameness across disparate phenomena, and scales.
Some solutions to hydrological problems are borrowed from heat transfer literature. It describes how, listening to the radio, I make sculptures and breathe and interference patterns form.
A sound occurs in air as it might in a pipeline, though it would ‘sound’ differently.
I tied thousands of long threads to mesquite thorns or rusted objects I sourced from various oil sites, in the ditches, and a foreclosed print shop.
Then, I knotted artificial flowers and lottery tickets that had been blown up against barbed wire. Little green army men from Family Dollar and receipts from the parking lots of Dairy Queens. Heavy pieces and parts of machinery, nails from near Pecos underneath that billboard next to a frak water tank that says “Thou Shalt Not Make Unto Thee Any Grave.”
They ‘say’ nothing. A ‘no’ composed of forgotten everydayness. The weight of each sounding line traces wind in vortices, the contact of objects against a wall or itself.
Or, they move imperceptibly. I recorded the sounds anyway.
“An event is a site of occurrences” (Waldorp).
Like another day, I learn to draw and to be drawn. “It’s about lines,” an artist says she learned to draw a line "like a flea," crawling up the page in barely perceptible gestures.
Later, or another day, a water dowser says she knows where to find things by the auric ruffle: an electric field around her body. Her nervous system “just connects” to ley lines underground.
Precision in sensing does not amount to a shared reality. It offers a shaky line by which to understand how something coheres, finds consensus, or spirals off into conspiracy.
At the Dairy Queen, people warn us about chameleons, mosquito drones, bugs in walls, or microchips in vaccines.
Sometimes I cannot help what I hear.
A transmission seems to come from nowhere. It reminds me that there is no ‘sound of’ or sound ‘in itself,’ only sounds that immediate other forms of matter, through rock and air or a spoonful of oreo blizzard.
This, too, is a refrain, an equation.
Later, I decipher the satellite time-images of a NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association) hurricane with the hams, to mark our hellos at an atmospheric scale.
A spectrogram does not distinguish the signature of a nuclear bomb or the acoustic shadow of a mountain valley. The numbers become fuzzy.
“A matter of philosophy,” says a geophysicist when I ask when the seismic becomes sound.
It is imperative to be precise in pattern-making, since as poet Rosemarie Waldrop notes “it takes very little to turn the euphonious “murmuring of innumerable bees” into the “murdering of innumerable bees.” (2009).
The frequency band that distinguishes light and sound is distinguished almost arbitrarily.
The air affects timbre, and shadow. Air is not empty space, it is the middle whose observability is indirect: of calculations, probabilities, tendencies.
The equation is a fiction of sameness but its everydayness matters in sensations and glimpses.
To apprehend patterns that resist legibility is to describe differences in the earth’s vibrating, shaking or trembling, “the giddy effects of partial things,” such as the mylar sheath of a telescope lifted into the air during a hamfest, watching its operator chase it down.
getting used to and getting over it
I don’t know how to write from experience.
Everydayness is remembered as impressions and sensations that don’t always belong to me.
What is measurable establishes patterns that belong to no one.
In an energy sacrifice zone, time is weaponized as refrains of getting used to and getting over it.
You don’t drive hwy 285 because it’s death highway. A bar on the way to Midland is called I Don’t Care. People don’t turn their brights off, driving at night.
What goes unnoticed is part of a machine of thoughtlessness: emissions, frackquakes that occur far from and long after the frack, or the sinkhole.
This is how I learn about the butterfly decline: in its traces on the windshield, or in the grooves of the tires.
“Nightmares cannot be statistically treated, but they can be very precisely described” (Nabokov).
Does a butterfly sleep? They cling to certain trees in clusters in a state of torpor.
Does the butterfly fly if it’s wet? C points out that that oilfield used to be a melon farm.
All I can see is virga, a deep gray sky bleeding ‘into’ distance – rain.
A sunset is “methane pink.”
How he strained the coffee he made with mesquite seeds – from the ditch that used to be milkweed – with a cut off piece of pantyhose.
Our proximities are mediated by the vastness of air out here.
To sit in the sand attuned us to the shadow made by a single grass stalk, and the wind taking up a few grains along the road.
A solitude that crushed, he said, he spent his afternoons at the B & B Gas Stop, where he was working part time, there being no other business in town.
The tow service was also popular – if you’re rolling into Imperial, Texas, from anywhere you’ve likely run out of gas.
On Google maps you can take a tour of what seems to be mostly clouds.
“We just want them to be good neighbors,” says P about oil and gas. At 2:38a on Jan 21, 2020, she woke up to “a new sound that [she’d] never heard before.”
Just beyond the trailer, a fracking operation went wrong. “Grabbed my jacket, grabbed my clothes, then I could see it shooting off from the telephone pole out there,” says her partner, “then raining down on us.”
The fire department said no need to evacuate - “it’s not explosive, it’s flammable.” But it smelled - “a horrible odor,” burning skin as she shooed the chickens into the coop.
They had to euthanize all 18 anyway - plus the dog and the goat. For days after the spill, bulldozers pushed the dirt around the acid. They are still sick and had to move.
Out here, a vocabulary emerges for the indefinite: shadow-flicker, infrasound, frackquake, sour wind, airglow, transuranic waste, telluric currents, proppant, zombie wells, produced water, sinkholes.
Ordinary people become experts in parts per million or billion and the names of chemical compositions in the air.
details in the air
The diffuse complicates a sense of stability.
Reality coheres around sound and shadow as structures of feeling.
A syntax forms around hesitations and interference patterns.
Anti-winders complain of shadow-flicker – the repetitions of a strobe effect – and infrasonic vibrations caused by wind turbine blades.
Infrasound, which is more sensation than sound, is sometimes called the “ghost frequency” and may cause hallucinations.
As those with inner ear disorders sometimes experience “feelings of unreality,” as if in a dream, or watching oneself in a dream, which “can be hard to put into words” (Minor 1998).
They make home videos to show what the turbine does.
In one, an elderly couple sits on a recliner and a couch, looking at a spectral cameraperson while the light strobes across the room, between the thick floor-length blinds.
The woman explains how her husband goes into the basement to avoid the flicker in the mornings. “As you can see,” she says, “the flicker fills the house, it’s in every room.”
The videos linger on slow repetitions of shadows on the wall.
I like the way the camera attunes to corners, where there is a small TV turned into a laundry basket, or a rooftop, or a spot of snow where a cow is standing.
The flicker is how days are measured, how one moves around the house, when the dishes get washed or the garden weeded.
But after the wind turbines are built, a man laments the disappearance of earthworms, saying “unfortunately, when you live out here, all you see is the details.”
An oil worker says life on the rig was like being a detail in the air.
Flesh and technologies mediate elemental exposures: “how wind becomes shivering, sun becomes warmth, gas becomes death” (McCormack cf Serres).
I wonder whether my attachments to the shadows people are filming – as a complaint – or making the cyanotypes – allow me to look away.
Rei Terada defines looking away as a "practice of phenomenophilia – in which the most transient perceptual objects come to be loved because only they seem capable of noncoercive relation" (Terada 2009:7).
Looking away is an effort of composure amid incoherence, attuning to interference patterns beyond measures that fail to contain.
It is a politics of waiting and hesitation, a withdrawal from thoughtlessness, how people want their ability to daydream back, and also to be left alone.
Or something like “all sound is resistance,” writes poet Cole Swensen, describing the wind passing over and through her ear.
Airy and ambiguous enemies emerge in a superhero ethos that inspires environmentalism as tiny groups of “dark sky defenders,” “methane hunters,” “anti-winders,” and “climate cowboys.”
Among workers loosely calling themselves “oilfield trash.”
One oilfield boss, frustrated that the workers preferred not to opt-in to the health insurance he offered them, instead spending the money, he said, on lifted trucks and playstations, said They are like the half-life warboys in Mad Max; the leukemia makes them mean.
Or, it makes them dreamers.
A YouTube channel of a prepper follows storms: the cameraphone shakes, zooming in and out of dark clouds falling into the horizon, in and out of focus. The wind overpowers his voice.
He stammers, interrupts himself mid-story, then answers a call as he narrates the slow oncoming of clouds, debating whether to get out of its way - hi. Hello?
“What looked like it was a dirt storm for someone else turned into a dirt storm for us. Gee, thanks. Funny how the weather changes all the sudden like that.”
10/5/24
The wind is coming through a garage with a half-open door propped open by an oil barrel only the barrel is empty. As the wind swirls in I sense it briefly on a couch waiting for some show to come out where the wind is not what matters.
The wind swirls in and is obstructed by the promise of the door to keep out air and keep in sound but being half-open is doing neither.
As the wind swirls in it pauses so that there are long moments where air is not sensed at all.
Rather, it’s a rise in temperature, it’s getting sweaty, that’s why the door is open presumably.
As the wind swirls in I am thinking and I am waiting with others who are waiting for a sound to happen but in the meantime other sounds are happening and the wind is not one of them.
The breeze is brief. It is noticed because of the rise in temperature.
It’s a kind of thought that only matters.
That’s what I mean when I say I’m talking about fluidity, it's not the object of water or the viscosity of oil or darkness or the way wind swirls in but the way they matter in time, become interlocking and delicate like a sink full of suds.
I’m sorry but the suds are the best metonymic object I have. A thought is coextensive in it.
As I’m sitting on some furniture in a garage waiting for the sound to happen with others waiting while the wind swirls in I’m thinking and I’m remaining separate from it yet in it.
I’m on my phone writing thoughts about wind swirling in and whether thought is coextensive with it or whether the thought is happening separately yet in it.
And that's what I'm thinking about with regard to co-laboring, a technique of remaining whole while also connecting with a whole and bounded thing; it's not porous, nor generative (both things disqualified for their habits of erasure, of assimilating, of moving in, of intrusion) rather more like wind shears or tidal vortices that retain a center of gravity and thus remain plural without denying one.
They are fuzzy, vague, “life that thrives with human disturbance” (Tsing 2012, 506).
A wind shear is less obstructed by a garage door than made perceptible because of it, we enter into relation though my sensation of it, because of the rise in temperature.
The point is between precision and vagueness.
A habit of multiplicity isn't othering but it is saying fuck off, politely. It is fascinating to me how or why political thought seems obvious to anyone, when it labors to find an edge.
A neighbor violates - stomps, screams. He thinks he is alone though the walls he shares are thin.
Why did I go here. When I could've been going somewhere else.
All this time I wanted to know what the thought was, or rather, how one felt, what a thought felt like and how to write it.
And there was something wrong about getting the thought from all these angles when the angles weren't my own, when I could've been thinking somewhere else or bring someone else too. It's better when the technology fails. More human, or more animal.
When the sound happens it’s almost that I wish it wasn’t happening, because when the technology fails that’s when I feel most engaged, that’s when the artist or figure engages with the audience, “sometimes things don’t work” and the sound ends and we go back to waiting.
It's better when the human loses control. Is confused.
Because now I'm rustier than before. Or something has more friction.
As I’m writing on my phone and waiting while the sound is happening or not and I am thinking self-consciously that it must be annoying, that girl with the light on her phone writing instead of listening or waiting for the sound to happen like the rest of us.
I watch someone without these veils on, feeling the thought and. Feeling around these angles but feeling they aren't mine.
Is that what it means to be performing? Where the theory is. Forgotten. I didn't think she was sincere and that was a problem.
Not convincing in the performance of the thinking as if she wasn't performing and I could see that, we all could. And that was a problem.
There was no authentic hole or channel and so it was clear the thought had edges and the edges weren't her own whatever that meant, as if a thought could be owned or pieced together by someone just by looking at it.
Theory was always trying to improve itself and they were trying to improve it by thinking about it as if thinking could be improved or controlled.
That’s why, when the wind swirls in it forms an interference pattern, multiple interference patterns, with the heat or the door or the technology and the sound that ends it except for the wish for it not to, because of the rise in temperature.
But thought was not a technology it was merely something happening, thought was always on the way to becoming something, which you couldn't know until you had a sense of it from the other side, once it had already materialized and belonged elsewise to someone or something else, had an attribute or form.
So it didn't make sense to trap it or think that it was possible to make it do anything than what it already did, which was think and thinking without object or form.
Once an object existed it was all over. Calling it anything made it disappear.
Listening as intensity, thinking unravels with its particularities as residue of form and unattributed, so it is not possible to have ownership of it or contain it in thinking even though most of us could say, at any time, at least, what we thought we heard.
And we could react to it like a form of thinking about it as if the encounter was a thought in itself or had the contours of a thought and left itself out in a place to dry out or dust off.
Some attribute the intensity to noise and describe the sensation of being bombarded by it, how it’s best to make noise with friends, when it doesn’t feel like noise anymore.
Someone calls it “biophony,” as if this is a concept one ought to know, like the territorializations of birdsongs all happening at once simultaneously and only for each other and yet we don’t call it noise until we have quieted down.
And that residue, the dust, was in excess of the common or the consensus, behaving only approximately, to the source or object of the sound but not as it were indirectly, even though that's how we wanted it to behave, as ambient, as waves.
An ambience exceeded the forms we had to contain it but it also exceeded the grasp of what was sensing, so that wind was already an object whereas atmosphere was not.
When you think about it, humidity or wind or earthquake are just attributes of heat, the seismic, and air, which are not sensed or are barely sensed or are just externalizations of sensation and even then not thought about even collectively until it becomes obstructive to thinking.
So one cannot breathe encased in ice, like always when we are thinking about glaciation as a form of history, or how it might be in the future, with its representation being that of the uncontainable mammoth in the ice, the monster enframed in the ambient, ephemeral form which has nonetheless encased it forever.
The slow increase of electricity to one's body, or heat in the tub, and measures of intensity and magnitude in degrees of sensitivity.
The thinking is apparent only in its terms of distance from entropy, otherwise a daydream would be the theory or a schizophrenic thought would be the norm.
I imagine a thought refusing to even out.
It was the evening out of thinking that separated a disciplined theory from a poem, how I understood either, and it was the evening out that my thinking wouldn't do, or I couldn't catch up to it, or see the necessary edge.
It was when the edge went missing that I began to write again and it couldn't be called ethnographic but there was an exterior.
It came out of anger, a feeling that was necessary to exist in refusal of entropy, or the seizure and appropriation of my thought by others.
Was how I experienced it. Needing a sense of ownership to stay contained, uneven, autonomous to matter apart from and yet speaking to with a sense of direction at.
The preposition was necessary to making a hinge of anything, and so I became directional, a weathervane.
Whereas the weather was more of an extension of the thought that had become external.
There wasn't a pattern for that that was repeatable, and thus it couldn't be considered in scientific frames or with markers for hypothesis or evidence.
Its empiricism ended with temperature.
At that point thought was only measured as intensity or irritation, as an oyster "must cover its itch with a pearl."
You could see evidence of this however in a sad song drawn out to capture an insecurity about the present and an inability to contain it in a way that makes sense, for example when the song begins to resemble others in tone or when it becomes too slow to enjoy.
The listening becomes uneven with it, what people like to call wavelength or frequency and until then just various modes of experience, yawning, jiggling one's leg against the beat as if to speed up the song to match the vibe of thought or to anchor deeper in it.
That needed variation like unpredictable variation, a cause or strike of difference around the untapped refrains of whatever was happening but became cloudy and unreal, a possibility of what might happen if only, or as if, or whether or at all.
Thought was stretching out into nothing like night or static in the air.
It was insensible until it was made up and then it had substance.
You know what I am talking about.
I realized I had been doing myself a disservice for many years while others tried to get ahead of me. I took pills to even things out and thought I was winning when actually I had slowed down so much that I was unrecognizable, an event horizon.
The slowing down was good for perceiving but it was not thinking which was already coextensive with the world and only needed to listen to it.
And there was something the intuitives already knew because they shared that soup or its suds and it made sense to them why should sound and poetry come from the same place.
Say more about coextensive, well it's obvious when say you're in a snowstorm or a heatwave and you become puny, thinged, whereas the attempt to matter depended who was there to catch you or listen when you complained and subsequently became very protective of the thinking as if it was a resource to be stolen or arranged in a way that mattered, could have identity.
All dogs have temporality and communicate by it, just try leaving one an extra hour and see what develops from his habits or attention.
They communicate through rhythms thinking yours are definite and therefore thoughts begin and end by the hour you come home and the smell that trails off in the waiting.
A dream has a curfew.
It can be a source of irritation, then, to recognize a similar coextensive thought in someone whose wind swirling in may have been similar or wasn't at all and it was performing as if.
reference:
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “On Nonscalability: The Living World is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales.” Common Knowledge 18, no. 3 (2012): 505–24. DOI: 10.1215/0961754X-1630424.
thermophilia
“Everyday life subsides into insignificance even while we attend to it constantly.” - Lyn Hejinian
The yellow belonged to the same plants (in Ohio) that I thought I'd left in the desert (of West Texas). Goldenrod (solidago) is not a daffodil, little bluestem (schizachyrium scoparium), switchgrass (panicum virgatum), etc. It made me sad to know I already knew their names. I expected something else. That does not also thrive in the heat. However, I felt less alone. The sun radiates white heat, but the sky scatters light at the blue end of the spectrum, so it appears yellow. Scattering is an effect of the chemical composition of the atmosphere. The heat of yellow begins at 2000F. Thermophiles thrive in extreme heat. As bacteria and fungi in hot springs or the deep sea. They need water but not the sun. Instead of photosynthesis, chemosynthesis. As what breathes methane or diffuses it. Like the daffodil, which has been proposed as an antidote to cows and the methane of their burps. Can the daffodil resent how it becomes useful? It needs the sun. "When a thing acts on me...I am ~thinged" (Coleridge). I struggle to write clearly, or to write at all. The thought is content to live without the sun. “Wordlessly over time, the ice retreated into liquid puddles of itself” (Warren). I make the sentences shorter, as if more punctuation might slow things down, like the theory of speed bumps that in practice are just obstructions to an otherwise smooth ride. I use simple words. I parse through the thought as if there’s a concept worth pulling out of it, to make it useful. "He makes a toy of thought to imagine or remember himself at a size susceptible to being toyed with" (Terada). In the sun, the thought insists I write it, but when I begin to write, another thought takes its place. It is usurped by tone, some low sound, that is gloomy, like in the story “All Summer in a Day,” (Bradbury) it rains on Venus all the time. School is a practice of standing in front of a scrim of light, a fake sun. Kids prepare for the sun to come out for an hour before it disappears for years again. One remembers the sun on earth. The other children lock her in a dark room. Because it’s a story, the sun appears. The sun makes them forget her. They pick flowers. It passes and the rain starts again. They give the girl their bouquets to apologize. In the prairie, thought is not a bouquet, but density. Sound completes the sense of this density, being imbued-with something, the color yellow, a chemical, of air, the buzz of millions of insects, the accumulations and motions of leaves even in death, roots that don’t let go. I take shitty photos with my phone and apply filters to it. A bad image remembers like a bouquet. The thought becomes technicolor, a point on the electromagnetic spectrum with the power to matter.