HOW WE MAKE IT: Disability Justice, Autoimmunity, Community

Ice Coats Branches

Ice has formed around the tree branches. A magical collaboration making the clear coating appear as an object unto itself, within which the thin branch is suspended as if “stretched tight” (Nikita Simpson). Drips have become icicles, solid as long as the cold lasts. This is a Chicago phenomenon, unusual for Texas. I’m surprised to see it today, during a winter storm in which a statewide grid failure amplified the stress of the ongoing pandemic that kept us all at home, confined, sequestered, and now very cold. Shock therapy keeps coming up. Eleni Stecopoulos mentioned Artaud’s, and his subsequent transformation, a transformation of language—not as loss, but an opening into other possibilities of sound and form. The unformed (“l’informe”) as something to experiment with, play with. 

A nervous system diagnosis brings a body into an atmosphere crackling with electrical currents. Or humming with an electromagnetic field. Human bodies resonate at the frequency of global lightning—the 0–50 Hz range of Schumann resonances is also that of brain waves as tracked by an EEG. This is the electromagnetic “background noise” of Earth’s atmosphere, created largely by lightning storms, thousands of which are happening at any given time, and which might be said to extend into the distributed “frequency of tension” (Nikita Simpson). These are infra sounds, beyond human audibility, but, like electromagnetic pulses, might cause instabilities or illness to those who are highly sensitive (Rachel Lee).

The ice coated branches tinkle gently in the wind. I record it with my phone (making little videos), only to discover the wind that moved the branches also touched the microphone, such that “wind noise” was the only audible sound. For the first time, I feel the need for a windscreen in order to shield the pops of the microphone so that it might instead “hear” the tree branches brushing lightly against each other, leaves and seed pods sounding like delicate bells. Attuning toward these sounds above me, I listen attentively with ears that block out wind as “noise,” following Cynthia Ling Lee's directions to “Let the sound enter your body. Breathe deeply and steadily as you dance to the sound, exploring its texture, rhythm and timbre.”
 

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