In Air, Mirrorworld, (this) writing and (that) sound perform modalities of how air comes to matter in affective registers and sensory thresholds, as toxins or political pressures. The co-mingling of scientific truths and their disturbance. The recording device mishears the event, or fails to verify what was experienced in phenomenal time, revealing what Michel Serres describes as “...the fragile condition of regularities” of the sensory¹—a physics of mutable laws. It also fails to make certain sounds renderable as sound: its beginning is a swell toward audibility and a feeling that deepens in your chest. Repetitions and refrains of noise, flickers and loops or shadow, describe the logics of progress and the intensity at which it is felt, absorbed and processed² Infrasound—frequency that exceeds human audition, but which some animals hear, and some humans experience in other senses—organizes this theory through the sonic.

In West Texas and elsewhere, anti-winders complain of subtle effects of infrasound and shadow-flicker emitted by wind turbines, noting vertigo, nausea, nightmares, depression, tinnitus, insomnia and suicideation. Others find the whoosh and swoop of the blades calming; a guy goes out to sit on the hill and listen to them. Another calls them “ballet dancers.” Another “petals on the wind.” For whom is the matter of air just a murmur? Just the “pulse” and “swooshing” of a wind turbine, or the detail of a shadow-flicker drawn across the floor as it turns? For whom is it a matter of concern? Its viscosities sensed or obviated as nuisance—noise.³ Tensions between sound and source, law and air, offer attunements as tools of poetic speculation and methods of making evidence. A talking point—the windmill, or a gas, or the LED light, the noise or lack thereof becomes the node around which the social comes to be via atmospheric qualities. A case is made beyond the verifiability of air on skin, sound and ear, the specificity of law and land.

Elemental compositions: a species of writing. Gathering up a milieu in the specificities of a moment, a sentence. Its tidal or telluric currents reassemble the planetary through atmospheric relation, a poesis Böhme described as “...this ‘and,’ this in-between by means of which environmental qualities and states are related.”⁴ Air is atmosphere’s physicality, a viscous state between subject and object, as a cloud is liquid, solid and vapor: “moments along a continuum” ⁵—of borders, states (of matter), proximities, affinities. An expanded notion of the social as sensing things. In-between, the viscous “dissolves the distinction between matter and form” and expands the body into a more-than-human sensorium affected by degrees of heat, pressure, humidity and rarefaction⁶ and its often violent interruptions—of time, the geologic, the shared.⁷ The viscous holds a distributed “I,” air that substantiates and problematizes the relationship between subject and world, between the sensing body and the airs of her becoming.

In this poetic space, things are in varied states of attunement: addicted, or avoiding it. Aware but not attached. She is / body is medium, vessel—“enwinded,” entangled, absorbent, transductive,⁸ while air passes through her, a clarinet. Air makes her body through the breath, “...the movement between us—“us” in a capacious, more than human sense.”⁹ There is a question of what relation is—how things inter (or intra-) act. Can you put relation first if multiplicity is prior? If a moment? If movement? You had to be there. How things get thrown together and their level of precision.¹⁰ Concepts break down as it becomes apparent we’re not talking about the same thing, and that’s the point—to break down constituent paradigms and parts and to fashion something else, or at least allow room for the possibility of something else—a motion into. Against a representational “real” and toward relation via indeterminacy. A poetics or “matterphorical” threshold of expressivity, where “...trying to be as precise as possible involves a bodily felt sense of what that sense-making sense is.”¹¹

Now I am moving around sentences about the air. I am wondering about the intermingling of sense and element and the punctuations of sounds. To dwell in “that” space, uninterrupted dreamtime where I may refuse the pull of the social. Where I may refuse work to figure myself writing—in a “continuous present.”¹² The forming of what one knows by writing what one senses, perceives, feels. “Instead of the “I think”’ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, an “I breathe,” (the awareness, however indistinct, that one is breathing) accompanies the objects of one’s thought.”¹³ Thought understood as the sustained attention to something, a feel of something—subject as sensor, or breather.¹⁴ Attached to others, their breathing, obviated in pandemic panics or a smell of rotten eggs near an oil refinery, their ability to capture carbon, give shade or oxygen. Their thought-sense becomes you.¹⁵ Since “what cannot breathe, cannot be,” writes Daniella Gandorfer.¹⁶ A sentence fragment or a line where the subject is not destabilized by the object, so much as she comes into being because of it.

Recordings are my own or from freesound.org. (More distributions of attention, place or the simultaneities of feeling). Some suggestions for listening include good over-ear headphones, lying on the floor, speakers on the ground, a padded space, darkness or dawn, a wide plain or field, railroad tracks, a long stretch of highway, others around you. The threshold of air hitting microphone draws feeling back into the limit of the instrument, the tech.¹⁷ It’s not about the sound, but the way air is sonified as bumps and glitches—and the enfleshment of air as you breathe. Eerie refrains of aeolian harps — the wind passing through rusted windmill blades, bluestem grasses. Another windmill stalls in a breeze — cuts off the relationship before it has to feel the ache of its denouement. The coincidence of their repetition or rhythm. Electricity hits priezo’s minerality in the contact mic, drawing out the high frequency of some appliance. The relief of a human voice describes a scene, or the weather radio punctuates the midst of listening. Their struggle with a camera, wind in the mic, what happens in the background of a storm.