nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

insurmountable barriers all around me, painful at this new and expanded sense.Slow surfaces: as I walked, blades of grass, soft soil, the carpet in my room;as I lay down, the mattress, the dim light coming through coloured paper, alow murmur, the muffled sound of an audio-book through the foam of myheadphones lying half a meter from my head.Fast surfaces: a phone ringing, people talking at a high pitch, walking gingerlyon a hard floor (the tapping exploding in my head), pressing the coldwall with my palms, sun light on my eyelids.That was it: a surfacing of my head, inside and outside my skull. Pressingagainst the skull wall, realising for the first time its consistency as a muscle, amuscle that had flexed and was now sore, that ached a dull, continuous ache,like a fever.Later, I became alerted to everything happening around me. New ideasswelled and breathed with the aching. The inertia-driven primacy of themind over the body retracted at the touch of the world on both. Everythingbecame a body, and my feelings and thinking became painfully inadequaterepresentations of these affects.Interacting with others was like wading with my whole body through asoft white mass: I could move, I could speak, but all was muffled and fastidious.Words failed me, as did concentration on long sentences or complex conversations.In choosing solitude and rest, I was left with a confused whirlpoolof thoughts and impressions. Words appeared as pale reflections of the dullaching of my brain, crawled off its surface, rolled till they reached my tonguewhere they jammed and stumbled. The more I tried to control it, the more thebrain swelled and bent, reluctant.All is surfaceIn touch with sounds. Sun light, artificial lights, all these were bodies that Ientered into contact with, pushing and pulling my naked brain, teasing it.Sound became a surface in contact with my own body-surface – the physicalnature of waves too seemed to touch me, in a peculiar synaesthesia whereeverything turned into touch, and touch was my whole experience of theworld.Beyond the head, my whole body became a surface of contact. The talons,the tips of my feet, light on the pavement, heavier on the grass lawns,the plants of my feet transmitting complex textures, displeasing or pleasing,everything becoming touch, everything apprehended through my body, andmy thoughts, heavy marbles rolling against the rough cloth of a pulsating bag,my skull. And my only organ was a sore muscle-brain.178