Imagine, briefly, that you are dancing. You lift your arms and sway. You leap. You twirl twice, sidestep, and bend. You stop and shake like a dog emerging from water. Now. Pause. Look around. What if for every dance move, you grew in size? What if you left behind a shimmering flesh-trace of yourself? What if your “dance” was the very extension of your body in space? You see a fan-like petal structure where your arm curved up then down. A fractal pattern of chevrons where your hair whipped back and forth, drawing a luminescent pattern in the air. You are gerund. Verbing. Streaming through yourself, into yourself.
Maybe this is what it is like to be a photon bouncing off of surfaces: an elementary particle, responsible for light, that is better described as a wave than it is as a discrete object. What does it feel like to be the entire dance, rather than one gestural snapshot? Feel yourself rippling with the photon’s dispersed version of being. Imagine that your imperative is movement. You do not pool or statically muse. When uninterrupted, you move straight, maniacally linear with condensed desire. You seek to strike. And when you touch the glossy, wet surface of sight, you transform. Feel the crisp tension and give as you dive into the corneal layer of an eye.
Light seems so immaterial that we often forget that sight is a version of elemental synesthesia. Vision is only vision through touch. A photon touches your eye. It penetrates your lens, your cornea, and triggers photoreceptors on a sheet of tissue called the retina. Like dominos falling, the retina cascades into electric signals, each one “touching” the next, until electrons “press” into the visual apparatus of your brain. It is only after a long chain of collisions, a long chain of touch, that sight is finally born.
The same is true of smell. When you smell a rose, you touch a rose – or rather, imperceptible rose odor molecules penetrate your nose, hitting the sensitive olfactory cleft at the top of the nostrils. Odor molecules melt into the thin layer of mucus in the olfactory epithelium, catching a ride with proteins that carry them to the hairy cilia. Rooted to receptor cells, the cilia help the odor molecules to create a signal: a bundle of electrons that will, like the photon, send a perfumed message up through nerve-fibred axons until they finally collide with your brain’s olfactory bulb. Smell is touch. Sight is touch. Taste is touch.
We are tactile beings, constituted interstitially by particles that seek, on some elemental level, to interact sensually. Philosopher Andreas Weber notes, “All life, from its beginning, is made up of mutual transformations…The self emerges through perceptions and through being touched”. The self is a mixing bowl of molecules that create perceptions through collision. Through erotic interaction.
For me, I find the fact that even a word, received visually on the page, or heard through a series of vibrations that “touch” my ear drum, isn’t truly abstract. Life isn’t composed of invisible ideal forms that hover beyond the realm of messy, generative embodiment. Life is haptic. Haptic is defined as “pertaining and constituted by the sense of touch”. It is derived from the Greek word “haptikos” which means to come into contact and to fasten. I like that haptic doesn’t feel slippery. When we come into contact, we “fasten”. It is generative. It “fastens” one touch, one molecule, to another, and creates a chain.
This is, in fact, how our bodies were built. Touch that was so deep and curious it couldn’t help but “fasten”. Several billion years ago, prokaryotic plastids and mitochondria and organelles literally “bumped” into each other. No amount of material reductionist jargon is able to remove the marvel of Symbiogenesis. Our very cells are the haptic dance of these single-celled organisms that blended to form eukaryotic building blocks. Symbiogenesis means “becoming by living together”. We become by living together. And by touching together.
A self then, is a desire to fasten. To touch. Every time we inhale, we somatically affirm our desire to transform through contact: with scent molecules, oxygen, carbon-dioxide, viruses, bacteria, fungal spores.
Touch is the seed of sight, smell, music, even the written word. Touch is the alchemy of your cells. Touch is the wave of photons that erotically, haptically, ties your eye to the very sun.
My mother’s book Take Back the Magic just came out. It’s brilliant. You can read more and order it here.
My first novel The Madonna Secret arrived August 15th. The responses have been overwhelming and deeply meaningful. Thank you to everyone who has reached out and written a review. You can read more about the book here and order it from any online bookseller.
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I am overwhelmed with gratitude by how many of you have showed up here (and throughout the past year across platforms). As someone struggling to balance chronic illness (and just how expensive it is to be sick in America) with writing, know that you are very practically keeping me alive, keeping me afloat. Thank you deeply. I love you all so much.
I just shared this via email with the Center for Ecozoic Studies group I’m working with this year. CES will soon be publishing an issue of their journal (that will also be available in print as it’s a special issue), that focuses on Brian Swimme’s new book, Cosmogenesis. I have a piece in it and it’s such an honor to be included with the other contributors. I shared this piece because I sense that your way of describing how humans came to be will resonate with Brian’s articulation of cosmogenesis, how all of us came to be - gifts from dying stars as the ever expanding cosmos continues to create life even while we face such devastation and losses. I find this extraordinarily hopeful on the one hand, and on the other simply miraculous.
Yes!
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