One of our problems— and I mean “our” in as about a capacious a definition of the term as I can muster— is our tendency (much more than a tendency, I think) to traffic in intensities. I love the idea of traffic as a verb for economic activity, and in re-looking it up I find that I am met with something I often meet when looking up word-usages like this: that they often have negative or pejorative connotations— connotations that are still somehow semantically necessary to their definition, which I still (apparently and naively) think of as an objective exercise. What I mean to say is that when traffic is used as a verb, the core of the form of that definition is that it is simply another word for trade, or financial/ economic machinations, but it is also attached to a specific aspect of that sort of thing, the “illegal”— bad, morally wrong, or unsanctioned. To me, one can benignly traffic in benign things, like apples (locally sourced and organic, of course), but apparently to traffic is only to trade bad things badly. Which actually works for my definition, as it does have a negative connotation (see: “(one of our) problems”), and is also hilarious because it means its primary, nounal bad thing meaning: actual traffic. But I digress, or meander, or tergiversate.
We traffic in intensities: experiences or desires of easy-to-apprehend activities, tastes, and feelings, etc. We actually don’t know how to chill, to occupy or even apprehend the vast “grayscale” spaces of our experience in between the shit reality of our jobs and the ecstatic affect of our music festivals. Some thinkers like to remind us that it is an option, the residing in the world in ways that allow us to “notice” what’s “subtle” about it and ourselves, but by and large this sort of thing is no longer in our job description; remains excluded from our purview, beyond the margins of what we’re able to apprehend, hidden behind a horizon we don’t even realize is there.
An adventure is a narratological example of this trafficking. I remember, with delight, with what delight I experienced the first Jurassic Park film: it was opening day at the theaters in the mall on the west side of Topeka, Kansas, and I still viscerally inhabit that feeling, which in a very real way can be summed up in the scene when the kids have broken into the computer room and hacked the system to get the park online but just then the Velociraptors master the technology of human doors and come in to eat them, so they escape up into the ceiling and just as the ladder falls and Sam Neil pulls up one of them a Velociraptor jumps and snaps its jaws, just missing the flesh of her leg by and almost imperceptible margin. Foof. It’s good shit.
On our last morning at the Salton Sea I set out to have a look around. It was 90 degrees by 8:30— an intensity. We ascribe an emptiness to the word “desert” often, and this vernacular is important because now I wonder if a negative intensity, which we could think of this idea of “the desert” as, plays a binary role to whatever its opposite would be. I’m inclined to think that this sort of negative intensity (again, crucially (I think: much of this is still hypothetical) vernacular) does not play that sort of binary role, but instead does something like drop the bottom out of thinking about the world like this— that is: that this “central”ish concept of the desert in the middle is itself an intensity, hidden between normative poles of intensity (eg shit job/ music festivals). Forgive me: we’ve just returned home and I can’t tell if I have a question or a comment.
That morning I snapped a lot of photographs, many of which contained my car— the 2012 Subaru Outback that was my mom’s and that I bought from my dad and drove back to California over this last Christmas and New Year’s. It was one of those great mornings for photographs, and one in particular contained my car, my water bottle, a sign residents of the community in which we stayed had put up that reads “SOS,” and an old canoe filled with dirt and a few struggling succulents. I appreciated not only the presence of my car, which is sort of a metonymic way in which I travel with my mom and dad, but the particular distribution of these objects in space, both of the desert and the photograph. It was pleasing, and the title of the photograph immediately popped into my head: “scenes from an adventure.” Which was funny because it was immediately followed by the felt contradiction of what I felt I was doing— (at least attempting to) not traffic in intensities, notice the subtle details, etc.— and what I just then realized adventuring connoted: a specific sort of trafficking in intensities, which is something I’ve been thinking about (in the pejorative, lol) for a long time.
This morning I have sat down and begun the work of mapping out writing about our (non) adventure, and the ideas are just gushing like a swollen Colorado river smashing some idiotic and ill-fated half-assed attempt to master it. Tentatively titled “NO / TRESPASSING: Impressions, Reflections and Questions from the Vernacular Desert,” it will meander about my reading about, thinking about, and visiting the bottom of the high desert and the top of the low, from Joshua Tree to Slab City, and will be the first official ‘zine of the Parallax Conspiracy for the Articulation of Thaumaturgical Research/ Ideas. It will feature a lot of full-color photographs, and will be structured around seven concepts— vernacular, trespass, freedom, bodies of water, art, salvation and ends— as a sort of nod to what ended up comprising the second half of my playlist for the trip, Paul Simon’s new ep “Seven Psalms,” which I highly encourage you to check out.
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Thanks so much for reading! I hope to have more to share with you soon. XO