In August I was in the dunes for a while as they were doing their canter between air and earth, peeling away the ground out from underneath me. So this is the way water and land knock together. At sand like this? Like running around, all cut into furrows of whitish ellipses, contours, crooks and half-moons. It’s mathy madness, hyperbolic equations looped through this meeting of energies. The encounter is so good and curved, so curved and released, waivered like having thrown-in-the-towel, having signed over autonomy to the fold-plunge behavior of this surface, the foliated fabric of this planet.
Dune flexes out like a bicep, swoll-laughing about the ascent of matter through air. As how woofing breaths of wind have choked up the tender grains into forms, long-cultivating these sand blossoms which are so arced and oval, oval and without anchor. Dune, your refusal of straight lines is grinning and good. I can imagine cupping you in my palm like how I touch the back of a head or a calf, something which makes the arm twist and makes the hand do something round.
The sign says don’t walk over there, those dunes are eroding, and I’m a bit thrown off because it seems impossible that any dunes aren’t always just falling out of themselves, constantly becoming otherwise, made over, brushed up into pomps by the wind and slunk down into flats by the tug of gravity and our grinding steps. And again, and always, without anchor.
Lindsey’s walking up ahead, looking a bit detached from earth as she wafers up along the crests, unfermented into the atmosphere. Lindsey you’re at an angle I’ve never seen you at before. 50-degree-bent Lindsey it’s an unfamiliar state of you, and it’s pretty funny the way it makes your pants dangle, and I like it because I’m used to seeing everyone I know all upright or hunched-over or laid-down but not ever really just crooked. You’re like a broken knee, you and the world, forking each other finally anew, finally not at that old perpendicular. It’s really very defenseless of you, in a way you’re not ever, how your body can’t stay flared-out erect, the way it capitulates to the sands migration. You’re a bit unsafe, a sucker, like how you are when you trip on your words or get seeds trapped in your teeth. But it’s a sweet exposure, for if we could watch your path through the dunes in fast-motion we’d see you rippling gracefully, softly foaming like the sea, stretched out on this naked white land, dissolving.
You dune walker Lindsey you’re acting like the sand right now, how you’re pooling and jumping up off the Earth. Loping along like a little sediment, effervescing at the edges of the world, tilting with the tilting of the planet, so pleasant.
Lindsey you’re a dune, a dance, a heap that’s always slipping back into itself, a topological movement on either side of things. This duning-up and duning-down is lawless and discordant, steering either towards absence or presence, towards a mountain or a vanish. A wild concatenation of events, a life that coheres for a blib into unsolid spats of shape on the surface. The dunes and you too my Lindsey are always springing forth from the delicate churns of the elements cooking. It’s clear I’m hitting dune-you in a very small moment, just a little flick-out of the material relations-in-motion that body the world. Coherence is both an intricate accomplishment and a precarious condition. To dune is to be in the middle of that mess, a thing without conclusion, roiling and tumbling in the thick of unsettled transformation, and to christen all that lot that toils in the folds of formation.
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