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Light from an uncertain source casts a glow on the yellow house across from ours. Bright shoots of flowering lavender make a frame for the light. I think it’s possible that there is an out-of-reach object causing this, perhaps it is a reflection. I wave my hand to play along its borders. With eyes, fingers, I love to trace the soft blur at the edge of unfocused light.
My point is that there are meaningful parts of life, interior or otherwise, ambiguous or certain, which evade capture; that measurement and excess are co-present. Details overflow their container and play across reflective surfaces; they remain incoherent yet firmly planted in context, irreducible.
My goal is to draw these meaningful but incoherent parts of life with lines that don’t hold a shape, as evidence in support of obvious and incomplete thoughts.
I love but don’t trust narrative (I’m sick of my illness journey!) and I’m ok with machines, by which I mean things to align, detune, compress, and transpose, to speak nearby.
My point is that belief in possibility is not possibility itself, and that, as I have read, the world is not made up of our collective stories about the world, even if those stories are all we have to share. Between the world and the stories, there is coherence. I write this for myself, to read and reread over time; I write this to digest and distribute my thoughts, to confront difficulty; I write this to compose myself, to write myself into being. It’s only a narrative but it’s also alive.
24.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that each person carries a book in their head. A technology for assembling oneself through the limiting effects of reading and writing, it exists in a practice of disparate appropriation, the gathering of scattered fragments. This book is unique to the person who carries it. It is a guide to guessing: how each of us knows, for ourselves, what is at stake and what is likely to happen to us. It describes the varying certainties of our beliefs. Rational as it may be, this book is always incoherent. It doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t stand in for the world.
I am reading a screaming book. In its scream I can hear the shape, size, and density of a resonating body, its mouth, teeth and tongue that give articulation to the piercing tone; lungs with a particular capacity to hold air before it escapes through a vibrating throat. I have a picture in my mind of the kind of creature this book is.
Information penetrates, like the sick warmth of radiation, or slips from mind without notice, a moment free of attention. A changing, chemical smell, a rotten heaviness, sweaty hands on hairless skin. The perception I find comfort in, you find unbearable. For each of my numerous appetites and repulsions there can be equally numerous routes across, or views onto, the shared landscape of my illness. How does this variation in itself take shape as understanding? Made sensible, visceral, to be acted on?
By consensus, the technologies used to locate answers to questions of care consider biological, psychological, social, and environmental evidence. Care providers use their tools of analysis to listen beside deeply connected contexts; an assembly of machines for desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations. The process requires contact and presence, so we sit, touching, beside the tools and beside each other.
25.
When I go in for treatment, I never pay the parking meter. I don’t owe anyone for this time.
Seated in the most comfortable chair, I play the slowest game of cards. I wear a perfume, a custom scent mixed by a thoughtful friend to mask the chemical aroma of treatment. I smell of resin, asphalt, and tar.
A nurse arrives to squeeze the syringe more steadily and watchfully. One of the drugs in my treatment regimen, a semisynthetic plant extract named Vincristine, cannot be given by the drip of a machine. From the Madagascar periwinkle, used for millennia to treat, among other things, cancer; one ton of the plant’s leaves make an ounce of this drug, so now we synthesize it. If it so much as slips from the vein it will tear through my body, dissolving skin and internal tissue. Hollow out, chew through, erode, burn up, disintegrate.
Although I have since watched a 3D animation of its molecular structure rotating on-axis, the model’s red, gray, and blue spheres and their connections do not explain to me this drug’s common effects: hair loss, difficulty walking, and the vaguely-defined ‘change in sensation’.
“Shall we sing a song together?” the nurse asks.
Hand in hand we go / to the land of the ill / to share in the shade / of anti-assimilation
From where I sit in the cancer pavilion, adjacent to all the rest of what we call life, behind double-pane tinted windows, I can’t distinguish between what I hear as the sound of waves crashing against land, or gusts of wind whipping against walls. I can’t tell the difference, and I can’t locate the separateness of one repetition from the next.
26.
“Are you ok with music,” my host asks, holding the solid oak door open and gesturing for me to enter. The question is besides the point, music is already playing, a live recording of a concert by a band I don’t recognize.
“I love music,” I say, raising a pink cardboard box, “and I brought snacks!” Her home has been recently remodeled, in good taste, clean rooms thoughtfully lit. Gauzy curtains obscure the view to the desert garden outside the window. Free-standing display cabinets line one wall, thin glass and old wood, from a different era.
I am seated at the kitchen table, my host retreats to a home office in the back of the house. My attention wanders, I space out, listen. This is crowd-pleasing music: the performers pause, except for a kick drum to keep the time. I imagine the singer crouched forward at the edge of the stage, pointing his microphone symbolically at the audience, pulling their incoherent voices into a wave of melody, stomping and clapping.
This melody, this musical figure that I hear in the inscrutable record of some performance somewhere by some group and some audience, is only repeatable. I wouldn’t say remarkable. There is nowhere else it would go but to return in a loop. Its only option, following the rules set by its first iteration, formed by all of the conditions that contributed to the possibility of that moment, is to play again and again. I think of this as a musical fact, as I slice into a pastry and flakes of crust fall to the table, again and again.
Speaking generally, people use containers—musical or otherwise—differently than machines do. Repetition, I have heard, gives music its human touch, prompting listeners to distinguish artistry from randomness. Too much variation, on the other hand, is quickly interpreted by listeners as inhuman, machine-like. The research shows humans care for musical figures that bear repeating, while machines care for uncoiling, splayed-out nets of variability. Repetition and variation are methods for us to explore, to apprehend, any terrain or enclosure, to draw lassoes around the topos, to generalize the containers we use to think with.
As I listen, each frequency seeks permission before entering the room. Some harmonies are more insistent in their formations, more militant. Some rhythms of course, as well as textures and patterns. To listen to these arrangements as militant is to hear them clearly as expressions of desire, beyond the contours of needs and demands.
A composer and architect, living and working in exile, had survived the worst effects of war in the country he had been forced to leave. His music is characterized by individual events murmuring into a dense cloud before fusing back into discrete events again: gestures of tense repetition, like setting the vibration of chains against the skin of a drum. The intended effect, he would say, of this transition between event and cloud, was to apprehend traumatic memories as if feeling one’s way across an incomprehensible landscape—death, cities flattened from the air, collapsing buildings and dust-choked monochrome. Traumatic memories are not the same as sad memories. In fact they may not be memories at all.
Music, as the composer came to think of it, is best understood not from within the connected experience of a generic crowd, but in taking the place of a solitary perspective. For any individual person, music is a way of behaving: when they think about or make music, they are behaving musically.
Music is the feeling of becoming a whole person, even momentarily. It is the sensation of realizing something. Music is something imagined, virtual, arising in thought, articulated in sound. Dramatic situations, expressions of sadness, joy, and love are not universal attributes of music, but particular and limited instances. Music is the gratuitous play of a child. Music is a model for being and doing, a sympathetic drive. Finally, the composer writes, music is a catalyst. Just to be in the presence of music is to allow for transformation.
27.
I drive myself across the city to the quiet flatland, where the therapist works from home.
“Are you ok with music,” my host asks, holding the solid oak door open and gesturing for me to enter. The question is besides the point, music is already playing, a quiet piece of dim jazz from a portable speaker sitting on a low shelf behind her.
“Yes, of course,” I say, affecting a soft smile but stopping short of making prolonged eye contact. I take hold of the heavy door and step onto the tiled floor. “Shoes off?”
Once inside, we move to a sectional sofa in the center of the room. I dig my fingers into the coarsely woven cover. There is an abstract sculpture, or maybe a natural form—a skeleton? Branches?—on top of the bookshelf behind my host, who sits to my left, their palms placed weightlessly onto their thighs.
It’s my first visit to the somatic therapist and I’m very uncomfortable, in spite of every aspect of our encounter being oriented towards comfort. I do not believe I am entitled to this treatment, to this approach. I don’t want it. Repair of the whole body and mind just isn’t for me.
It is possible and necessary to communicate around experiences that overflow the container of description.
It's actually raining.
28.
I wake up, slowly, on the nineteenth floor, looking north to the mountains shrouded in clouds. Deep scratches criss-cross the glass by the handle of the sliding balcony door. What creature made these marks?
29.
My point is that music—rhythm in particular—allows for different ways of moving through, returning with, and coming together as patterns in time. Playing and listening to rhythms splits my body in time.
I grow connected.
I am from a generation that found it interesting to follow strangers in the street.
There is no spirit more real than “do it yourself,” although now that I say it out loud it sounds so mean.
30.
I’m on an island avoiding the ocean.
I barely recognize myself. I used to think that a bad mirror, scratched or greasy, was the ideal for all metaphors to aspire to, because it evokes both the damage and the opportunity that misrecognition enacts. To be defaced. To see as if through a dim window, now clearly for the surface it is.
For now, metaphors take the place of names. One symptom of the moment is an obsession with transitions whose particular shapes are mapped, like varieties of catastrophe, in the shorthand of generic forms: fold, cusp, swallowtail, butterfly, wave, hair, fountain. While some things (like these names for shapes) are so tangible they cannot be taken as metaphors, they still give me what a metaphor might offer: a piece of some other world, dropped into this world, to reveal the touching correspondence of connection among aliens.
In my household we have been overusing the word “abject” to describe all types of situations and positions. We need a new word for that which is thrown into the world without consent. My small family senses hopelessness and misery, in part, but also the ridiculousness of being unrecognizable, neither subject nor object. Animate, but unable to act. Visible, but not legible—or is it the other way around?
31.
I’m playing a card game my mentor is inventing. Some cards stand in for things that happen—events or consequences, both good and bad. Other cards stand in for resources that one might apply to mitigate the bad, or to capitalize on the good. The remaining cards represent the goals of a particular group. As we play, we tell stories out of the events, resources, and goals. What happened? What did we offer in response? What was this in service of? There is no way to win, no system for collecting points, no desired outcomes, only a gesture by which we reach toward alignment of our goals, sharing of our resources, and a common interpretation of how to process what happens.
32.
I’m playing a card game my colleague learned from soldiers in the colonizer’s army. Its origins are unclear, but there are many stories. The game moves quickly, and thinking is not rewarded. Patience, and a willingness to give up on patterns, is key to winning. It’s not a military game.
33.
I remove some details to make the description more generic. I am sitting in what I would call a plaza, although it has been given a much more fabulous name by the benefactors. It’s unclear to me if I live in a desert or not, and whether the assignment of desert status changes, and if so according to what system? I’m glad there’s a fountain, but what is the water for if not drinking? Or bathing? Not for plants?
“Leave the water, for water’s sake,” I chant back. “Deep in the earth, streams and sky!”
I’m obviously not the first person to thoughtlessly sit here, in the shade at the plaza’s edge, listening around corners for filters and for what passes through, for the sounds of fountains and voices, and how each body crossing in front of me casts its own shadow.
34.
In dry season, the fountain shatters: where water fell gently, tile lays cracked. The dull force of hallucination is, as a pattern, a container without contents.
Sentences About Rivers and Cancers: Discussion
[...]
Note: This chapter includes both discussion and work. Here are links to the work, available in either print or browser versions: print view: 77 MB pdf file; browser view: https://nonpointsource.glitch.me/
[...]
Here is an experiment in the explainability and interpretability of algorithms and imagination. I use explainability and interpretability to mean different things. To interpret something is to engage with how it works, to feel, play, and live with it. To explain something is to abstract from it, and put it into reasonable terms that can be made sense of. Explanation makes use of common sense ideas about what’s possible and what’s reasonable. Interpretation, as I’m using it, is the application of local knowledge, where ideas about reasonableness and possibility are contextual and contingent.
As views from a synthesized, vertical perspective, the text and images included here play loosely with what Donna Haraway has famously described in her characterization of situated knowledges as “the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living within limits and contradictions—of views from somewhere.”

As technical images, they call out first to the apparatus that produced them. As synthetic images they are both absent and present, “like the sound of the telephone deep in the ear.” Typified by Ingrid Hölzl and Rémi Marie, these are softimages, where “what was supposed to be a solid representation of a solid world [...] a hard image as it were, is revealed to be something totally different, ubiquitous, infinitely adaptable and adaptive, and something intrinsically merged with software: a softimage.”
Unstable, in-between, affective images. No exposure to light contributed to their making, imprinting instead “the “what” that fleets” of the model’s latent space. As a tangle of co-creation, these images embed not only the logics of the model’s design, but also the work of training, and the data used as links to ground truth, an assembly process that suggests stewardship of interpretable patterns, not authorship. To produce the images, I fine-tuned the Stable Diffusion text-to-image model with two new datasets, one of aerial photographs and the other of medical images, and then used the prompt “a polluted river in the shape of a human body,” over and over and over, editing a selection from the generated images.
The fine-tuning technique I used is called LoRA, or Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models. Invoking the fine-tuned layers at the inference stage allows for attenuating between an aerial perspective on a landscape, and a microscopic view of bodily interiors.
Multimodal AI models learn to represent meaningful relations (e.g. between text and image). This pursuit of meaningfulness comes at the cost of interpretable ambiguity, particularly in the margin between figure and ground, object and subject, or what we might recognize as point of view, or coherent texture. Fine-tuning facilitates hybridity at a high level, and preserves a margin of maneuverability before the image collapses into a certain meaning—in this margin, you are invited to make interpretations. I worry about what will happen when interpretation is not valued, when meaning is essentialized, and analysis is misunderstood to be a process of strict and literal translation.
[...]
These sentences about rivers and cancers draw on personal experiences of cancer treatment and care; the environmental and financial toxicities that precede and accompany illness; and the enduring contaminations that cancer and its treatment produce.
The text is a watershed holding many fragmented and interpolated sources which are cited below. Its composition is informed by time spent living and working close to the Hoosic River in rural western Massachusetts, which flows through the ancestral lands of the Mohican, or Muh-he-con-ne-ok: The People of the Waters that are Never Still.
As the primary conduit of runoff from throughout the region, this river is polluted, but not by any single source. “Nonpoint source” pollution is impurity that cannot be traced to a single point of origin—a persistent, ambient pollution; runoff, surging with stormwater, flowing into the river, contaminating the groundwater; thick with petroleum and other chemicals, salts, human and animal waste, fertilizers, pesticides, heavy sand and silt.
The conditions of the living river are our conditions for research: a watery analysis, thinking with bodies as pressurized wet salty things, to better understand conditions of interbeing, entanglement, and porosity—listening intently for nonpoint source pollution: seeping draining runoff and sediment, and how rivers and bodies circulate together.
This hopeful arrangement offers listening perspectives onto the shared imaginary space between rivers and cancers: from above and below water’s surface; where the flow breaks on rocks and debris, where runoff drains into soil and streams; as a chorus of voices, spoken and sung; stories, observations and meditations on the social, political, and ecological entanglements that compose cancer as lived experience.
To listen to rivers in this way is to also problematize the way cancer is understood, as linked to environments and inheritance. Cancers are very rarely attributed to a single cause or factor. They are situational, interconnected, accidental, inevitable.
As Susan Sontag grappled with Illness as Metaphor, implicitly analyzing her own cancer experience through the lens of literary material, this text seeks an elucidation of, and liberation from, the metaphors that prejudice common imaginaries surrounding cancer, for patients and caregivers alike.
To an extent, cancer is a common and relatable experience, one that creates and determines community. To an extent, all rivers carry the same water, touching multiple populations and territories in their winding paths. Cancer is both overrepresented and unmentionable (Sontag never writes explicitly about her cancer); some rivers flow clear and drinkable, while many others convey spectral runoff into concrete channels.
This text draws together a braided stream of source texts—illness narratives, scientific publications, and theory work across disciplines—to get at the shared conditions, coherence, and correspondence between rivers and cancers. Direct citation, memory, and observation collage together, as tributaries that flow inwards and spill outwards into oxbow lakes, as tumor strands that in their mutation converge and diverge.
A polluted river in the shape of a human body, repeated views. Each of the images accompanying this text was generated using a diffusion-based AI model, fine-tuned for a confusion of satellite and medical imagery. Learning from the land, learning from bodies. I am a landscape, whose visible layers indicate deforestation, drought, development. I am a test result, whose stained-color biomarkers draw attention to where resources are spent. The generative model used here de-emphasizes semantic understanding (the naming of visible objects, their narrative, their composition) in exchange for optical clarity (fidelity to texture, artifact, evidence). This is the closest I can bring automation to ambiguity, in the precise region of sense where pain is a fluorescent feeling.
Variations of speech and water, each flowing at a particular place and time, each with their distinctive rhythms, are quoted here as compositional guides: in counterpoint, in mutual support and suspension, as carrier and modulation. This form of word-for-word poetic interpolation is known as a cento, held together in this case as if tentatively laying hands onto the malignancy of a tumor. A tumor cento.
Cancer, along with autoimmune diseases, repeatedly enacts self-destruction within a toxic world—where contaminant is both self and indistinctly other. Cancer is the body, at a scale that is simultaneously personal and globally implicated. This is contamination as collaboration as Anna Tsing writes, where purity is not an option. This exchange of influence between body and world is also a form of what Gerald Vizenor called survivance—not a reaction by one against the other, but a mutual action, an enduring presence: without collaborations, we all die.
I encourage you to feel—
to misunderstand everything
especially the lightness of memory and the weight of voice.

We traverse land that appears to be level; the tightness in the thighs that comes with ascending a long grade, the looseness in the feet that indicates descent. Blood does not pulse through your tissues in great tidal surges, it flows within a diffuse net of permeable vessels, a capillary bed of creeks, streams, forks, and tributaries that lie over the land.
Your newly found skill of walking downhill will help you locate it. Focus on the points, not the lines that connect them: how many nodes? Ded-weed, lawn-keep, weedone, plantgard, miracle, demise.
It was thought the solvent would evaporate, because a storm always knows what it is doing. You depend on clouds and you depend on water. Do you think you are somehow immune?

does your blood clot too easily or too obstinately
is your blood spilled too readily do your tears flow too freely
the saliva that floods your mouth the sweat slowly dampening the fabric in your armpit or at the small of your back—
all of these waters are about a specifically situated you becoming tributaries along the river

In full possession
of our ecological roots
We can begin to survey our present situation.
Our blood has been drawn and we are allowed to look at a printed page
of its ingredients.

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