ATTACHMENTS

 

I am thinking about attachments.

I am thinking about reliance and the impossibility of an existence of

    non-reliance.

I am thinking about kinship and systems and machines and bodies.

I am thinking about the development of a language of angles bent into steel

    rods, and red cloth stretched taut and fixed in place.

I am thinking about the manipulation of relationships, material

   relationships and human ones.

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I am thinking about the optimism required to keep living in this world in  

   order to keep attaching and relying and interdepending.

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A mandatory optimism.

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Binding, tying, welding, melting, joining, knotting.

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I have to trust the string not to break when I pull it,

   and to bind when I tie it;

The metal not to break when I bend it,

   but to give way when I cut it. 

​

I have to measure before I cut or bend or weld and I have to trust my

   measurement.

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Or if I don't measure I have to trust my eye and my hand to measure without

   measuring.

​

I depend on my tape measure

   my eye,

   my hand,

   my arm,

   my body,

   my boots.

​

You depend on your ligaments, your tendons, your flesh bones skin.

All dependent on each other, never isolated, never alone.

​

I have to trust the screws to stay in the wall.

Supporting the metal, supporting the thread, supporting the cloth.

​

I have to trust the fishing line to stay tied to the ceiling, and these ink print

   letters, arranged in words, to stay on this wall.

 

And so do you.