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One evening early on in this project I looked down to find my hands were no longer attached to my body. From my journal:

2020-6-23

Yesterday evening around 9, sitting at the counter after eating, my hands resting on my stacked ankles, regarding them, the unaccustomed veinedness of the backs of the hands—an impression they were not part of me. Mild but clear, and unbidden: these were alien features of the world. It is not that I experienced revulsion for them or a desire to have them removed or destroyed … just a neutral dissociation. Looking at them now, on the keyboard, I can summon it again, even as they move under my command. An abiding awareness of the distinction between self and milieu …

The experience continued for a period of weeks. It came and went. At times, as I recall—though I do not see a record of this in my journal—it extended to encompass the entirety of the arms, the right arm in particular. At no point was it disturbing—often, in fact, it was distinctly pleasurable. It was less a tactile or proprioceptive experience than a visual one. Looking at my hands I experienced a recurrent alternation in the visual impression they made: now my hands appeared parts of a whole that I identified as my self, now they appeared separate. Soon I could flip my perspective at will and, again, there was something distinctly pleasurable in this. It was the same kind of pleasure as that of autonomous sensory meridian response, the tingling up the back of the skull some people experience when they hear certain impulsive sounds—crackling, crunching, the stridulation of orthopterans. It has since abated: looking down at my hands, once again on the keyboard, I can summon the dissociative sensation but faintly. But the memory of how pleasurable it was remains, as does the insight, if the term is warranted, that even the most settled-seeming of relationships, such as that of one’s hands to one’s body, is something that is continually being remade, with greater or lesser success.

(The experience I’ve described could be construed as a mild form of somatoparaphrenia. Reports of a sensation of limbs or extremities “floating free” are uncommon, though this may be mainly because experiences of this sort do not cause the distress and practical difficulties that lead sufferers of typical forms of hemispatial neglect to seek help. It is notable that the experience, in my case, was distinctly bilateral.)

When I lived in Los Angeles I often went running on the ridge above our neighborhood, and my route included a fire trail that faced west toward the sea. Some of the trees I used to pass on the fire trail came to feel like friends.

My thoughts turn often to those trees and others I used to see in LA. Lately I have come to feel that friend does not do justice to the relationship I had with them. The word that surfaces in my mind when I recall reaching up to touch the limb of a bishop pine as I went past, or smelling the peppery-sweet scent of gum oil and looking up to see a spotted gum looming above, is familiar. These trees were my familiars.

Perhaps one thing I mean by familiar is that, in regarding the gum at the western end of Sea View Lane Trail in Mount Washington, Los Angeles—it is possible I have transposed this gum, in memory, from some other location—I understood the two of us as playing coordinate roles in some common undertaking. I understood us as being parts of something.

The idea for this book came to me at the end of August 2017, halfway through an artist’s residency at Shiro Oni Studio, Onishi, Gunma prefecture. The monsoon had come late, and the heat and humidity militated against vigorous activity of any sort. I spent much of my time lying on the cool tatami floor of my room, trying to recapture the sleep that had eluded me the night before. In the late afternoons I’d go around the corner to my studio, where I’d listen to a processed field recording I’d made in the local elementary school. I’d procedurally split the recording into overlapping 500ms segments that I then resequenced according to their spectral features and concatenated to make something new. The outcome was repetitive, shot through with the school attention chime that sounded halfway through the recording — the effect was like a cross between kulintang drumming and the stridulation of the kirigirisu or long-horned katydids that sang in the grass all night. I seemed to have stepped out of the timeline of my ordinary life and into an oppressively humid waking dream.

The foregoing (“The idea for this book ...”) is something I wrote as publicity copy for a different book, Waking Paralysis. But it could apply equally to this one. That makes three books to have come, in one fashion or another, from that six-week residency: The Human Scaffold (2021), Waking Paralysis, and this. If you pressed me for an account of what this one is “about” I might say: Sound, posture, time. Dissociation. Touch.

Those are things this book could be said to be about in the sense that they are things I have in mind as I work on it. But there’s a second kind of aboutness that attaches to made things, an aboutness of process. If you pressed me for an account of what this book is about in this second sense I might say:

[Amazonian worldviews] have a strong “constructional” dimension. Amerindian constructivism is particularly salient in mythical accounts narrating the creation of the world and the different life forms that populate it. It conceives of all living beings as composite entities, made up of the bodies and parts of bodies of a diversity of life forms, among which artifacts occupy a prominent place. According to these cosmologies, at the beginning there were only people and their artifacts — and sometimes, only artifacts. These artifacts are conceived of as the primordial building blocks out of which the bodies of people, and even gods, were first created. In this Amerindian view, artifacts fall on the side of the “natural” or the given — they were the first divine creations — whereas humans, animals, and plants fall on the side of the “cultural” or the constructed.

Thus anthropologist Fernando Santos-Granero, introducing a volume of essays on the role played by made things — variously, masks and flutes, baby slings, headdresses and other bodily ornaments, identity cards, bibles, and airplanes — in the cultural life of the societies of the Amazon basin. Santos-Granero and his colleagues are responding not just to the intrinsic interest of the topic but to a broadly cited view, associated in particular with the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola, that the distinguishing feature of the Amazonian worldview is its “perspectival” quality. Here perspectival refers to a tendency, widespread in the hunting societies of the Americas and the boreal taiga and tundra of North America and Eurasia, to view certain animals — generally those significant to the hunt — as possessed of a quality of sociality comparable to our own. These animals have a perspective, they look out on the world, as we do — and see us, variously, as predators, prey, and junior partners in an ongoing effort of worldbuilding. This is so, Santos-Granero says — the worldview of the peoples of the Amazon is perspectival — but that is not the whole story.

In fact we can go further. Not only do material artifacts play a distinguished role in the theory of personhood common to the peoples of the Amazon: we observe something similar practically anywhere we look. Consider, by way of maximal contrast, the words of legal scholar Margaret Radin, from 1982.

Most people possess certain objects they feel are almost part of themselves. These objects are closely bound up with personhood because they are part of the way we constitute ourselves as continuing personal entities in the world. They may be as different as people are different, but some common examples might be a wedding ring, a portrait, an heirloom, or a house.

One may gauge the strength or significance of someone’s relationship with an object by the kind of pain that would be occasioned by its loss.

Is it surprising that a people who could use against stubborn wood and pliant grass and bloody flesh nothing more serviceable than stone — is it surprising that such a people should have become so familiar with the idea of metal? Each one of us, in his dreams, had felled tall trees with blades that lodged deep in the pale pulp beneath the bark. Any of us could have enacted the sweeping of honed metal through a stand of seeded grass or described the precise parting of fat or muscle beneath a tapered knife. We knew the strength and sheen of steel and the trueness of its edge from having so often called it into possible existence.

In “Land Deal” (1978), the novelist Gerald Murnane imagines the colonization of Australia as the dreamed encounter of two “race[s] of men”, the narrators and the “men from overseas”, those who propose — preposterously, in the narrators’ view — to exchange implements of steel and glass, wool blankets, and quantities of flour for use of the narrators’ land. That they, or someone, must be dreaming is confirmed for the narrators by the fact that they recognize their counterparts’ trade goods from past dreams — and by the dreamlike abstractness of the men from overseas themselves.

The dreamer … had invented a race of men among whom possible objects passed as actual. And these men had been moved to offer us the ownership of their prizes in return for something that was itself not real.

… The pallor of the men we had met that day, the lack of purpose in much of their behaviour, the vagueness of their explanations — these may well have been the flaws of men dreamed of in haste. And, perhaps paradoxically, the nearly perfect properties of the stuffs offered to us seemed the work of a dreamer, someone who lavished on the central items of his dream all those desirable qualities that are never found in actual objects.

… In any case, we had been fairly sure that the foreigners failed to see our land. From their awkwardness and unease as they stood on the soil, we judged that they did not recognise the support it provided or the respect it demanded. When they moved even a short distance across it, stepping aside from places that invited passage and treading on places that were plainly not to be intruded on, we knew that they would lose themselves before they found the real land.

The question remains of who is dreaming. At first the narrators assume it is they themselves. Later they are forced to consider the possibility that it is the men from overseas: