<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">Hello list,<br><br>Thank you to Renate and Byron for introducing and welcoming me to this space. Thinking about Byron's prompt, I keep returning to a recent, odd-but-not-uncommon border-embodiment moment: The other day, I had the curious experience of babysitting my 15-year old niece and a friend as they zipped about via jetski the various islands and channels of the St. Lawrence River. By 'babysit' I mean that I sat in a small Boston Whaler, covered in sunscreen and a towel, drifting with wind and current, reading texts, emails, and other electronic detritus on my phone, occasionally jumping from the boat into the water to cool off from the muggy heat of the day, all while keeping an eye on the two girls as they bounced across waves and wakes in the distance. They were having a blast, as one does at 15 with privilege enough to own a personal water craft (PWC) and to be absolutely oblivious to the international border they were crisscrossing the entire time. <br><br>That stretch of the St. Lawrence is dissected by wandering lines, wholly invisible without a map or GPS device, geopolitically dividing Canada, the US, and, downriver from where we were, territory of the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne. The car-centric border infrastructure of each nation, on land or via bridge in this region, is unambiguous: passport check-points, border agents, duty-free shops, militarized vehicles, bold-font signage, long lines of traffic, ubiquitous machine vision, and so forth. On the water, however, the border appears as merely an abstraction. One must pay careful attention to and be able to read subtle signifiers within the landscape to conclude that there are multiple international boundaries slicing through this massive river, rendering each mainland--and about sixteen hundred islands--the territories of separate nations. Or at least, that is, until this abstraction is made corporeal if one is not, say, a 15-year-old American white girl in a bikini and sunnies listening to a Drake mixtape on a PWC at fifty miles per hour but, rather, a crew of Chinese-Canadian residents of Kingston docking their Ontario-registered cruiser at a town pier on the US side for an evening of pizza and beers--having forgotten a passport. Or a player for the Akwesasne Lightning lacrosse team, fishing with buddies from the Onondaga Warriors, on a bass boat drifting in the shallows off Croil Island with an out-of-date fishing permit. Or any of myriad scenarios encountered by individuals and communities excluded from hegemonic majorities within the US and Canada.<br><br>The above is to note that, as a practice, my work (increasingly) considers such personal, embodied moments as points of entry into the complexity of an "ecology of mind," following the influences of Gregory Bateson, et al. My body has been through a lot over my lifetime (brief version: I have a mechanical heart valve following a massive aortic dissection, compromised kidneys, and seemingly endless resulting ripples through physical and mental health). Noting Bateson, I (try to) take comfort from a rethinking of the "unit of survival," from organism, species, family, etc to, instead, "organism plus habitat." That is, as my body "fails" (it's not failing; it is simply being a body) I increasingly understand my-self as merely a tiny node along a near-infinite network. My body, positioned in space, recording a set of observations that I
might process as memory, anecdote, in visual language, a photo, a
sketch, an essay, maybe just a social media post. Oversimplified, sure,
but, for where I'm at, that's about the size of it. I'll be curious to
read how others on this listserv engage phenomena at these scales,
especially given the ceaseless barrage of ills and apocalyptic
updates ever clarifying just how precarious precarity is. <br><br>- Paul Lloyd Sargent<br></div></div></div><br><br></div>