My dad had high hopes for me to become a professional golfer. In my early teens, I could out-drive his golfing buddies, who would gape at my easy swing and hand–eye–body precision. This would pump up my father’s determination to groom my natural ability. He entered me in summer tournaments throughout the Pacific Northwest. But I lacked the cutthroat drive necessary to win sudden-death playoffs. What I enjoyed was nailing the sweet spot of the golf ball: the clean crack that sent the ball soaring high and long, and carried with it the effortless feeling that the ball and I were inseparable.

The technical term for “sweet spot,” according to the science of physics, is “the center of percussion.” However, the impact point that feels best is usually the node of the fundamental vibration mode, not the center of percussion.

That is, the sweetest sweet spot is in the vibration, just off center.

Early on in acupuncture school—the late 1980s in Boston—one of my teachers paused during his lecture and made an offhand comment. Looking back, it was a timely comment that seeded a radical shift in the way that I perceive the world, and how I orient to experience.

He said, as a casual aside: “You know, acupuncture is all about the multiplicity of phenomena occurring simultaneously.” He then relocated his place in his lecture notes, and turned to the blackboard.

As I rushed to scribble down the pithy sentence, the ontological ground beneath me began to quake: to think like an acupuncturist means I need to learn to place myself within the multiplicity of phenomena occurring simultaneously. As I began to digest the sentence, and consider the complexity of its implication, I got my first semiconscious glimpse of pluralism. A major trajectory shift was in motion. I could never fully return to the comfortable habits of binary thinking: this or that. From now on, I realized, I’ll attempt to make pluralism my ontological operative and try to place it at the nexus of my everyday experience. To do so, I’ll need to learn how to keep one perceptual foot grounded in the plurals, in the multiplicity of the fluxes. And somehow learn to move, with puny acupuncture needles, this elusive stuff called qi—considered to be both energy and matter at once—which travels amidst the multiplicities.

In that pivotal moment, the teacher’s comment spoke to a long-standing intuition: that it is impossible to step into the same place in a river twice. Change is constant. Nothing is certain, and there are certainly no Experts, except maybe the body in its immediate experience. The comment also supported my ongoing sense of the human body as unfathomably complex: all the thousands of systems, trillions of cells, busy going about their businesses, whether we know it or not. And this intuition extends to the infinitude of ineffable activities—mostly non-conscious—that are within the affective field of bodying experience.

So began my mission to disrupt and trouble binaries. Undermine “experts” obsessed with the dichotomy of true or false. With it comes the ongoing practice of resisting the exclusivity of reductive thinking; its tendency to cut off everything in the dynamic field of relation. Dizzying in its demands, the multiplicity of phenomena occurring simultaneously became my new orientation.

As she rattles off wedding plans, my hand explores the dent on the inside of her lower leg, just below her left calf. She does Irish dancing so her calf muscles are particularly meaty. Around the dent's edges I locate a few possible spots that I can use to find my way in. I can fit three knuckles into the hollow space. The scar, though well older than a decade, still has a surprised look about it. Flushed with iridescent pinks and purples like the inside of an abalone shell, the middle of the scar retains the shock of the wounding moment. Of disbelief.

Motorbike accident? She told me on the first visit but I forget and don't bother checking my notes. Anaesthetized with ouzo as she crashed into a tree, I think. Happened in Cyprus; that I do remember. Or maybe it was Sicily.

At the other end of the table she's preoccupied with everything that needs to be done in the next few weeks. She's oblivious to my prodding fingers. I'm careful to stay along the scar's bank and not go directly into the old wound. But the most important aim of the treatment isn't working on the scar. It's just a local means of generating flow upstream to her abdomen, in her core, where the deeper wounding lies. Restoring circulation around the scar is sort of like removing a logjam.

“I've picked out the dress. It's a hot pink! Very 70s.”

I can imagine it: her trailing train of flamboyant pink, defiant.

“Where are you having it again?” I ask, and sneak in a needle without her noticing.

“On the beach. At Eggs and Bacon Bay, down past Cygnet. You know, last time you said you'd been there.”

Cygnet, Cyprus, Sicily.

“Yes, of course. Magical spot.” As I head back to the cart for more needles, I circle above her and tweak the one on top of her head, sending her down into parasympathetic bliss. She goes silent. I return to her leg and quietly open up a couple of spots around the old scar.

I explored the area around her upcoming wedding site a few months before she first arrived for treatment. She came to me on the recommendation of her psychologist. After the third visit, she reported nightmares related to sexual abuse from her girlhood. The excitement and stress of her upcoming marriage seem to be flushing out submerged symptoms that have been hidden deep inside. I let her know that the part of her brain—the amygdala, whose sole job it is to keep her alive—doesn't know the difference between “good” and “bad” stress. Every intense stimulus is a potential threat. But if a threat does result in significant wounding, flares and rockets will often be sent off into the sleeper's night sky to signal the need for attention. Acupuncture is one way a message is returned, delivered at the level of a bat's sonar frequency: we hear you; help is on the way.

Eggs and Bacon Bay is about an hour's drive south of Hobart. The cove is sheltered from the wild weather that is delivered in great gusts by the Roaring Forties. Heading further south from the bay is Cockle Creek, the last tiny hamlet before heading to the southern-most tip of Tasmania. There is no other body of land until Antarctica is reached a few thousand miles away.

I made the two-hour walk out to the point from Cockle Creek. I was told by a local that surfers make the trek out to the frigid waves that are birthed off the continental shelf, forests of bull kelp pushing the waves up, helped along by the Roaring Forties. Through the soggy heathland along the two-planked boardwalk, sure enough, the only person I passed along the way—racing against the clock as it was getting dark soon—was a wild-eyed surfer, barefoot, surfboard perched on one bare shoulder, boots slung across the other. This was the middle of winter. His mossy green eyes radiant with an ecstasy of which most people can only dream. I asked him how far I was from the bluff. Another 10 minutes, he beamed. I said thanks and he strode off down the planks, leaving residue of a vitality that made my heart want to burst.

Very gently, I wake up a slumbering trauma that had lodged itself in her leg, her own mind having to split away from the offending area. The tissue on the edges dense, close to losing life at the surface. But the still pink center has just enough blood flow to move the lymph, just enough vascular pressure to keep the tissue viable. Just enough.

With a few more gentle tweaks I move the flow, quietly, back up to her lower abdomen. Stagnation on the banks of an old leg wound give way to the power of fresh flow as it swirls around locally, then courses upstream towards the vital, intimate spaces of her belly.

A fresh flow can help her consume space, inhabit her body, wear her hot pink dress with a flare that comes up off the depths of the shelf, washing onto the shores of her wedding site.

A hyphen is a fine detail that can be hidden amongst the camouflaged text. When noticed—Look! A hyphen!—it can alter the way we think about the field's ecology, the text's milieu. Like Barthes' notion of a punctum that has the effect of piercing the viewer of a photograph. A little off-center detail that was incidentally captured by the photographer comes as a little sharp shock that takes place outside of language. Much like how an acupuncture needle generates a zing: a sudden felt aberrance, an agitation, an affective twirl that escapes language.

A virtual needle coming out of my fingertips. A mapped acupuncture point on its own is static, inert. A live spot on the skin needs to be activated, brought to life. It needs to be met. Informed touch warms up the spot and locates the gate precisely (Yes! That's it!). A gentle tweak opens the gate, granting flow entry.

After giving the needle a gentle twirl, a microscopic fascial footprint is left behind.

Hyphen-ing, as an activity, is sticky.

Through the process of stickiness, it gathers.

When making a lyric essay, my mind meanders, makes wild associations and attempts to spin pure sensibility through words. When I twirl a needle, the narrative can take an arbitrary, unexpected turn and wander in a completely different direction.

Without a post (such as, posthuman, postCartesian, postliterate), the more-than is generous, free to herald an opening.

Rather than drag with it an ending, telling us what isn't, the more-than suggests what is.

The more-than affirms. It does not declare, but allows.

As a practicing acupuncturist, I am privy to intimate spaces: spaces in bodies and the stories that emerge from the safe confines of the treatment room. Even after three decades of practice, I continue to marvel at the way gently twirled acupuncture needles do their quiet work. And how the heat from smoldering moxa seeps into pain, leaving its lingering scent as the pain becomes a trace of itself. I marvel at the moment when the soft chatter of our voices in the treatment room starts to hum with the vibrating needles: how spoken words and objects and our bodies coalesce, in situ. These ineffable spaces and micro-movements (composed of gazillions of thresholds, transitions, qualities, and intensities) create a desire to explore language as a way to re-think, and re-present, notions of body.

Meanwhile, clinical and professional boundaries need to be water-tight. Trust in a therapeutic relationship is paramount. What happens in the treatment room stays in the treatment room, which is where the 'factual' stories remain permanently sealed.

To ensure privacy and confidentiality—and to be able to think and write, ethically fret-free—all 'clients' and their narratives are imagined. They are fabulated. I make things up. Any perceived likeness to any of the clients in the clinic scenarios contained within many of these essays, is purely coincidental, and so imagined by the reader.

The ineffables are free to roam across the page. The text-word-bodyings give them a voice.

As such, more-than human agency is authoring this book. The boundless qualities and textures that quiver within the text's interstices are its driving agent.

It is the middle zone that twitches with eagerness and holds the potential to push the written words into their lines of flight, into their becomings.

In ancient China, at public hangings, families would rush to the dirt below the dangling feet of their freshly hanged relative and scoop up the dirt. It was believed that at the moment of death the dense hun—which most closely resembles the soul in Western culture and resides in the liver while living—drops to the ground. At the same time the po—akin to spirit and residing in the lighter and more ethereal lung tissue—ascends towards the heavens. The collected ancestral hun was then mixed into the soil of the family's garden plot, where the ginseng roots twist it into their cellulose fibers.

The more-than qualities of the dead relative's hun live on as the ginseng is steeped into longevity tea.

“The writer can only imitate a gesture,” says Barthes in his essay, “Death of the Author,” “that is always anterior, never original.” Barthes insists that an author—the subject doing the writing—does not exist prior to or outside of language, that is, it is the writing that is anterior to the author. The identifiable body of the author is only along for the ride.

For Barthes, there is no subject to throw under, nor is there an authority to do the throwing (although, the irony of Barthes' own death—he succumbed to injuries after he was struck by a laundry van—does not go unnoticed as a subject). Instead, “[The author's] only power is to mix writings […] in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.”

This is a challenging reorientation. Without the author author-ing, how to orient to the text? With no author at the wheel, where will we wind up? And what will it all mean?

The epistemological Houdini, having escaped the binary straightjacket, materializes as a shapeless semiotic force and is present within the swirling mix of text. For Barthes, it is no longer the author with the agency. Instead, agency lies within the indeterminate movement of the mixing of text. And in the movement, new demands are made on the reader: to bring the text to life and into meaning, there must be engagement. Passivity is no longer an option.

Lyric is the more-than dark matter of literary arts: like junk genes in our genetic material, there is plenty of it, and we know it is there, but it eludes capture. Dark matter in the universe is only theoretically quantifiable. Try to find it, and it vanishes. Its presence is everywhere, despite the impossibility of its real-time measurement. Due to dark matter's pervasive presence, many cosmologists are in agreement: the old theories no longer work.

For poet-essayist Lyn Hejinian, it is necessary to enter the vast uncharted internal territory that has opened up since the death of the singular subject: “The 'personal' is already a plural condition,” Hejinian says, and goes on to try and locate the more-than condition: “Perhaps one feels that it is located somewhere within, somewhere inside the body—in the stomach? the chest? the genitals? the throat? the head? One can look for it and already one is not oneself, one is several, incomplete, and subject to dispersal.”

Like Barthes, Hejinian orients to the form of language itself and to language's pursuit of knowing a subject, not a person.

Hejinian's description—of the impossibility of singling out the singular personal—conjures, for me, the experience of being within Whitehead's body functionings-world: to be amidst the ever-varying manyness of all that comes as one.

Amid the unfathomable complexities,
the needle's tip makes distinct twirls
as we cleave our way into the anterior beyond.

Slobber.

I say the word in my head and it echoes off internal walls.

As a single sonorous word-vibration, it needs to be said aloud.

Break the silence: sss leads the way, then my tongue pushes forward the laa, and the berr reverberates from my lips. Slobber.

But no slobber comes out. As a sound-word-body, slobber needs a stimulus to come to life.

Brazilian painter, sculptor, and performance artist Lygia Clark was interested in ways of showing—through direct, lived experience, or vivencia—how the body's insides are on the outside. She dedicated herself intensely to activating body experiments, mostly through the use of relational objects, including one called Slobber Threads that she staged numerous times in the 1970s with her students at the Sorbonne. Slobber Threads continues to be re-enacted globally by artists, therapists and others keen to experience a collective singular body.

The experiment involves about 10 participants, nine of whom stand together in a tight circle, facing in. In the middle, one person lies prone, sparsely clothed, on the floor. Each standing person is given a small wooden spindle of cotton thread of a different color and is instructed to hold the spindle in their mouths, close their eyes, and use their tongues to gradually unspool the thread onto the person below.

The presence of the spindle in the people's mouths, combined with the unspooling action, stimulates saliva production. The muffled “clackclack clack clack clackclack” of wooden spools against teeth can be heard as saliva-saturated tongues push out slobber-soaked threads. Layers of unfurled thread grow into a multicolored mesh of second skin on the person below. For Clark, the act of pushing the thread out of one's mouth draws attention to the permeable, sonic feel of bringing something from the inside to the outside. Then, according to Clark, “they begin to perceive that they are pulling their very guts out.”

Once all the thread has unspooled, the standing participants open their eyes, crouch down, and with physical effort—for the protein in saliva hardens as it dries—tear apart the thread-web that has covered the person on the floor. The prone person often reports a sense of claustrophobia that lifts as soon as the skin-mesh gets ripped apart.

Slobber. The word spills over, in excess of itself.

As Lygia Clark simulates the feeling of pulling out one's guts, Whitehead steers our attention to an obvious yet neglected fact: “No one ever says, 'Here am I, and I have brought my body with me.'” So habituated are we to the Cartesian split—of the mind as separate from the body—that Whitehead's sensible, logical twist disorients us, momentarily.

Whitehead's simple statement jars us from our mind and back into bodily common sense: Of course I am my body.

Slobber is a word with a body.

Whitehead's common sense re-orients body away from the all-too-familiar Cartesian fleshy thing, where the notion of body is external; a subject that is presupposed. Instead, Whitehead's relativistic view places body—the concept—as an activity, as an immanently emergent happening within a body. That is, Whitehead's body is not a body thinking but a thinking in the bodying, in the activities. “Our knowledge of the body,” he says, “places it as a complex unity of happenings within the larger field of nature.” These happenings—trillions of functionings and activities, or what Whitehead calls “actual occasions”—take place where there is “no definite boundary to determine where the body begins and external nature ends.” Such as the complex unity of happenings that take place within the fluidy reverb of the slobberers' collective moving guts.

Another way to follow Whitehead's concept of body could be to say that bodying is everywhere present as a “society of molecules.” This bodying society—always unified within the larger gyrating field of nature—“[b]elongs to the structural essence of the body that, in an indefinite number of ways, it is always losing molecules and gaining molecules.” The bodying society of gutsy slobberers bring this concept to life.

Slobber is a happening, everywhere present as a vibrating, ever-changing society of molecules.

Clark and Whitehead firmly place bodying as the source of all experience: “All sense perception is merely one outcome of the dependence of our experience upon bodily functionings,” says Whitehead. Rather than embodying process (of, say, generating slobber), the process itself embodies as it moves along—a concept enacted by the collective bodying experiment of pulling out guts. Whitehead's philosophy outruns the subject by placing movement—process—at the center of experience. Inside-outside, subject-object, mind-body binaries do not exist in Whitehead's world because, “We are in the world and the world is in us.”

There is only a seamless becoming of continuity, of reality always in process. Always immanently generated; moving, changing, becoming, the past contiguous with the future-present: “There is a rhythm of process whereby creation produces natural pulsation, each pulsation forming a natural unit of historic fact.”

From this perspective, there will always be eternal possibilities for following the sonic fluctuations of bodying slobber. Until we die, and even then, another pulsating process takes over: decomposition.

Slobber drags the past with it as it moves on.

My brother, when he was alive, liked to use the word slobber.

As kids we would taunt our beloved dogs with food and watch the globs of slobber gather and grow in rows along their long lips.

“Look at all of Rufie's slobber!” Craig would exclaim, amazed. His wonder at the dog's capacity directly expressed: the process of salivation making visible strings of saliva. My wonder at my older brother's wonder. Our amazement at how quickly the saliva would form. How the dog's eyes and body would freeze, fixed in restraint, with a barely perceptible quiver of hopeful anticipation. How it seemed as though we could control the amount of saliva secreted, as if on tap.

A dog porous to the environment (potential food held by its taunters) that does its work on the dog's bodying process. The wonder doing its work on us. Slobber as a direct expression of a dog's desires, appetites, wants. Unlike most of us humans, who tend to keep our desires hidden by swallowing our saliva.

More amazement: gravity eventually drags the strings of saliva, the

d
r
o
o
l

to the floor: Our cue to toss the food.

Slobber: When I use the word, it brings my brother back to life for the duration of the word's slobbering lifespan.

Slobber is what it does.

Patti Smith, aging punk-poet, does slobber, a lot. She says she cannot help it and makes no effort to swallow, to suppress, to turn her saliva back inside.

Patti's waistcoat is torn, open, so her diaphragm—and her swagger across the stage—is free to release wild slobber. Strands of her grey hair are moist with spit. Her mouth, her words, her music, secrete copious amounts of slobber. Like Lygia Clark, for Patti Smith, the inside–outside is porous, indivisible. Her compositions are carried by slobber, and slobber is a conduit for expression.

Slobber sprays the audience: Molecules of Patti are vaporised in the air for all to take in.

Stand close and inhale—swallow—bits of Patti.

As her whole body sings.

Slobber: feel its secretions, its viscous weight hanging on, just.

I wonder: with all of his copious conceptual secretions, perhaps Whitehead's slobber was never allowed to fully express itself? Born into Britain's Victorian era when expressions of desire—its smell and messiness—were often swallowed, suppressed, secreted away under clinched waistcoats and strict morality. Pages were kept dry, free of dribble and spit. Yet Whitehead's thinking secretes juicy propositions that place us as a happening within our bodies: the whole body thinks. “The body is ours, and we are an activity within our body.”

In other words, what we are is what our bodying does.

So, if we consider Whitehead's proposition, that what we are is what our bodying does, what about sounds? Do sounds immanently body forth, as word-sound bodyings? Do sonorous words need a fleshy body so they can language forth? To be able to come alive, both on and off the page?

Onomatopoeia is the Latinized Greek term for 'word-making.' That is, simply, words that sound like what they describe.

The fleshy body is a resounding chamber: words that use the air from our lungs and the position of our teeth, lips, and tongue to form audible words.

Hoick. Mucus needs the throat's surface—and a force—to push it up and out.

Words related to the voice that comes from the back of the throat:
giggle growl grunt gurgle.

Words related to the voice that comes from the lips:
murmur mumble.

Words related to gas as it is released from a stomach:
belch burp.

Or a word related to the slow movement of gas as it moves through the intestines:
borborygmus.

A word related to air that don't need to be pushed through the lungs and throat:
whisper.

Words related to water:
splash, spray, squirt, drizzle, drip.

Words related to soft bodies hitting the ground:
splat, splatter.

Word-sounds embody process as they language forth. Put another way, word-bodyings are immanently emergent happenings within sonorous activities.

Slobber: the word signifies nothing more than the sound it makes.

It is what its sound-bodying does.

Plub is a Gaelic term used by the fishermen on the Mull of Kintyre on the southwest coast of Scotland. It is the sound a single herring-body makes when it jumps out of the water and lands, making a tiny splash:

Many Scottish herring fisherman still shun high-tech devices used to locate shoals of fish. Instead, they use their bodies to feel herring deep in the water under their boats. To do so they use a feeling-wire. The wire—made of twine and sometimes piano wire—is dropped into the water's depths with a weight on the descending end, and the other end held between the thumb and forefinger on deck. The vibrations through the boat's metal hull become a part of the feeling-wire. When the person wiring “feels them thick,” they call the skipper and the crew springs into action. Practiced through generations of fishermen, the wire is still used to estimate the depth and density of a shoal of herring, and can even distinguish between the different species of fish.

Finger–thumb–wire–belly–hull–seawater–herring bodies fuse together as they attune—and become—the vibrations underneath.

As their whole thinking bodies.

I wonder: since I am an activity within my body, and thoughts are also an activity, do ideas therefore have bodies? Do concepts form first as an abstract blob from which words fuse with sound to form language, in the form of a word-sound-body?

If these wonderings are met with a desiring yes! then words—that is, language that lands as written test—are a sort of more-than human material. And this material—activated by forces and flows and tendencies—is capable of generating text-flesh that grows into a thinking in the bodying. Text as a complex of happenings bodying forth.

Can writing, then, carry the affective vitality—those more-than human qualities—smeared through the sound—and feel—of words?

Words which include that way of inhaling—swallowing—molecules of Patti-ness in the bodying. And that way of taunting Rufie's drool, and the Craig-ness that will always live as a sonorous activity in our bodying drool.

And the life of this essai (French for an attempt, or a test): it bodies as it aims, and bodies as it follows that complex of feeling in that particular way of wording. The structural essence of this essaying body and its indefinite ways of bodying forth: it is always losing and gaining word molecules (until the final edit).

In other words, essaying forth I am in wording activities.

How to practice bodying word-sounds? For Manning, it is about developing the practice of “sitting at the uneasy interstice of process and production and asking what things do when they shape each other.” And find ways to invent techniques: sit with a dog desiring or lean into the relational field of a collective group's saliva-saturated spools of thread; follow slobber's potential to refold a past-present juicy with Craig-ness. Always in the middle, in the not-quite-yet, belonging to process—and the self-enjoyment—as things shape each other.

Find ways to sit in the complex unity of happenings that are (im)mediated by relational objects, those carriers of potential. Again, as Whitehead has sensibly reminded us: there is no definite boundary to determine where the body begins and external nature ends. Such as that way the wire-thumb-belly-hull-herring feels them thick. The drool that drops in that way. A practice of following the qualities, tendencies, and intensities that are always already more-than human.

Follow the essaying sounds become the sounds themselves reverbing with more-than qualities and tendencies.

As a thinking in the bodying, worlding words.

A society of molecules always in reverb.

My bodying is a sounding porous membrane attuned to the field, following the rhythms and forces at work and play, always in our midst.

As I sit in the uneasy practice of bodying word-sounds, I ask, over and over:

What are the word-sounds doing as they shape each other?

Slobber: the single sonorous word-vibration reverbs off my fingers, poised over the keyboard, ready to catch every vital, juicy drip.

Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who has been profoundly deaf since she was 12, performs barefooted so she can better hear the vibrations as they move between her body and the ground.

Thoughts move. Writing sticks thoughts to paper: words, syntax, and rhythm punctuate a flow, or not. The thrill when a thought gathers other thoughts and form vortices that potentiate a concept. As the forces gather strength within the idea's vortex, a more-than quality forms that is out of human earshot.

“The lyric essay requires an allegiance to intuition. Because we are no longer tied to a logical, linear narrative or argument, we must surrender to the writing process itself to show us the essay's intent.”

How to express the inexpressible—and the imperceptible—through language? Maybe through those sweet spots when the moment a needle's tip zings—like a lightening flash—a discharge of calcium ions bound-up in taut muscle tissue.

The zing is a thunderclap after the flash, sending ripples across the body's horizon.

Over 400 years ago, the shearing force of grief moved the essay's inventor, Michel Montaigne, to experiment with a new way of writing. The sudden death of his friend—whose conversation he cherished—left a void he needed to fill.

An acupuncture needle would be nothing
without tissue to twirl
and a body with which to converse.

Joan Retallack, a comrade of Hejinian and other Language Poets, puts essay-ing as a risky activity with an uncertain outcome. As a poethical act, she wagers the risk as necessary, recalling Montaigne's words: “If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.” A spirit of playful experimentation motivates the form to forgo the air of mastery, and instead actively seek out precarity and ambivalence. Retallack, by invoking Montaigne's words, reminds us that the essay deliberately seeks out slippery contingencies without toeholds for the mind to gain purchase.

Xue, an acupuncture point, literally means hole. Classically xue meant a cave, or was referred to as a “chamber below the earth.”

The essay is awry, off balance: “Montaigne cultivates sentences that admit unsteadiness while finding a moving balance in disequilibrium. This is the way every interpermeable life system works—in dynamic, vertiginous flux—finding its patterns in contingent motion.”

I practice lyric-ing the body with punctures.

Or, in puncturing the body, lyrics are made.

I recall a period of time when, as a young child, I had a deep concern for the pickles that lived in a jar placed on the top shelf at the back of the refrigerator. I was convinced that without breathing holes in the lid that they would suffocate. In my world, the pickles and I were one and the same. The pickles not only embodied breathing, they also, as far as I was concerned, weren't able to breathe. The slime that grew around their bodies was proof to me that they were dying.

A friend, four and a half years old at the time, posed three questions to me in quick succession:
Do trees have muscles?
Can water swim?
Where does metal live?

Instead of trying to imagine an answer, I gently tossed back each of her carefully considered questions: Did you ask the trees? And water? Can metal tell you where it lives? How about we go out and ask them?

We went for a walk and a wonder. A wonder walk. I figured she still has direct access to the things themselves, so I tagged along to find out what each had to say.

This is a fact: the physiological properties of connective tissue—from fine microscopic strands to the thick planes of fascia—respond to movement in the body and change as a direct consequence of bodily movement. Movement changes the behavioral responses of connective tissue.

The interaction—the movement—between ideas lays down conceptual connective tissue and creates the capacity for the body of the lyric essay to grow, change and become. If an idea cannot stay in relationship with another idea, it shrivels, atrophies, and dies.

My thoughts dart around restlessly and become a chaotic parade of phantoms, animals, climatic conditions, abstractions, ideas, smells, pieces of furniture: all things that exist for themselves in the “mind” that is everywhere. Could it be that what I perceive is a result of the act of personifying? As my “mind” intermingles with and seeps into my milieu's “mind”: that vast field where self-organizing things and I share a zone of experience?

Infra (“within”) hyphenated with thin creates infinite possibilities. We know not what a body will do.

I wonder: how do concepts behave?
What do they do when we're not thinking?
Personify themselves, as themselves? Like Newton's gravity?
Can concepts inhabit a zone of experience, free from representation?
Maybe there is a dimension out there where concepts frolic and cavort and collide, with glee.

If it is possible for concepts to personify other concepts, how about words?
How do words behave?
Words that exist, for themselves.
Words that are intrinsic, that push out from within.
Pushy words, sticky words, words that flock.
Words that spill over.
Soft word bodies that feel the force of thought, in-forming.
Alliterations stick similar-sounding soft word-bodies together.
Onomatopoeic sound-body words swish their sounds as they do what they are.
Words as pan (everywhere) psychic (intelligence): words, for themselves, that have their own kind of consciousness.
And the practice of creative writing—the craft of figuring language—personifies their bodying forth.

In my ordinary mental meanderings and free-falling daydreams—before the act and effort of turning my internal thoughts and ideas into words—all the objects in my field of physical perception are there for themselves, in that Jamesian pan psychic way. Like James suggests, my sensate perceptions (smell, see, hear, touch, taste, intuit) become my “psychical reality.” I am not personifying—that is, imposing my perceptions onto the nonhuman world—but, instead, all of my experience is a seamless extension of all “minds” everywhere.

Personification steers clear of identity politics. It cannot become anything other than what it is, for itself. As an it, it cannot be owned, claimed, staked. Or made into a representation. Or have its wings pinned down as “knowledge.” It is air and fluids and forces and wings, all at once, undifferentiated. When using the English language, personification spills out everywhere, inseparable from the words we use.

On their own, acupoints are inert. But they project a quality. To be open, and to be clinically effective, a point needs to be met, stirred. Agitated.

Personification has a persistent way of insinuating itself into thinking, and into the creation of language. With silent stealth it seeps across porous membranes into interiors about to burst with figures, expressions, and turns of phrase. Images conjure ideas—ideas conjure images. A figure of speech is so reflexive that my fingertips cannot distinguish the thought from the word-images that they tap out. And I've always had a preference for the subtext, for that interstitial-land that resides between this one and another place.

The whispers, faint traces, sudden up-draughts and hauntings.
Isn't that the place where all figurative language is birthed?
And isn't that the zone of experience where the unreachable itch to create resides?

It is the tree's muscles.
It is water swimming.
It makes a home for metal, hidden deep in the earth, below the rivers and seas.