Testing

I am curious about how traffic moves on the web–and to whom am I speaking other than myself. Here are some words, feline, spirit, garbage, bacterium, evolution, creationism, Obama, Clinton, McCain, Robbe-Grillet, Wertheim, DiBlasi, Lane and Hall, recycling, green tea, Amanda Knox, investigation, concept, conceptual, conceptual writing, molecular, I extracted DNA using the expired Purgene kit, ethanol, prana, shantih shantih shantih, Pokemon, too much Pokemon for one person to stand, Princess, too many princesses oozing from Disney for one person to stand, Princess Mononoke, Manu Chao, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, PJ Harvey, Belly, Poe and Poe, House of Leaves, Descent of Alette, the sequencer is done so it’s time to put my pcr products on, California quail, Shearwater, those naughty little elegant quail I want so much to see, platypus, bees…what brings you where you are?

Little Bits

I burned myself on the beach this morning. First my skin, muscles and organs burned away and became ash, though I will admit that the bones were not clean of flesh when they started to smolder. But no matter—the heart finally gave itself up, though the brain, ensconced in its palace, boiled before it burned. When the bones became ash—that chunky sort of stony ash that bones become—I felt better. The waves touched the sand, moving back and up, breaking with more force on the black rocks surrounding the beach. I blew away by bits and the pieces of me too heavy for the wind to lift became part of the sand, then part of the sea. After this I lost track of them, those bits of me were gone.

Proposal

Here is a proposal for a project. I suspect that I will only have time to propose it, I cannot seem to get lifted off the ground. But.

Along the border between the United States and Mexico, is the detritus of immigration and counter immigration attempts. Plastic bottles and tin cans, a hat and a shoe, rope and stone. In the deserts, these items are degraded quickly by the sun. A plastic bottle becomes brittle and broken, leaving faintly cloudy shards; a cotton sock becomes unraveled and becomes threads, some of which, perhaps, are picked up by local birds and woven into nests.

I see these items collected and documented—photographed in-situ, localized by GPS, mapped onto a wall-size figure. I see the items suspended in a room and I see you and I walking through the lace like curtains of clothing, staring at the empty bottles of water.

Where is my relationship to these items. I grew up in San Diego, when the Mexican-American border was more porous than it is now. The relationships among caucasians, individuals of Mexican-descent, Mexicans, and individuals from countries further south (Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, to name a few, remember, this was the time of Iran-Contra and the death squads) was complicated when I was growing up. In high school, I entered into the bilingual program. I am of German, Welsh, English and Irish descent—cold countries for the most part—cold and fairly puritanical (apart from my one Irish-Catholic lineage).

I do not know my relationship, only that I want you to see these items, and I want you to see these items in a place where it is harder to ignore them, or to file them away under the “littering” place mark.