Touching Sense

Signs are portals into portals. a never-ending cascade of references all associating everything to everything. We agree to this structure as it domesticates the world at large and allows framework for future synthesis. We don’t dare disturb the web as our life might lose its illusionary value. We are in a never-ending war to normalize the world via data; reduce and flatten and strip the other, for we need to organize ourselves in constant relation.

Our senses, particularly our visual sense, are susceptible to this game of synthesis. With the onslaught of audiovisual media, they are a scanning machine; organizing, cataloguing and decoding our surroundings providing indexes to fast-track associations. However, some senses bypass this coding apparatus, particularly our feel, touch and smell senses. Have you ever experienced the visceral feelings of a broken bone, or the heartache of a lost lover, or the rancid slime of rotting vegetables, or the warm embrace of guts from a fresh kill, or the biannual fragrance of sweet clover, or the smell of dew during a nighttime stroll, or your favorite sweet treat on the loneliest of nights. These sensations are hard to be indexed in our web of visual and audio associations. Physical sensations cannot be transmitted through bits of information like sound and images. Our smell and our touch require a presentness, an in person connection to the world. Every rendering of audio can be reduced to the 0s and 1s; 44,000 combinations per second, give or take, for most audio recordings. Likewise the image of the Sedona valley can be reduced to 0s and 1s via your google search of ‘Beautiful Arizona Landscape’. But these mutations of information cannot be applied to touch and feel. You can never compute the feeling of severe heat encompassing your presence in the Arizona bush, or the below freezing winds paralyzing your finger in the South Dakota winter. These are but true moments of sense, ones that don’t ask for your participation to be present. Without consent, they unfold into your life and catalogue deep into your memories, creating a personal index, one that computes with feelings and temporality, moments that cannot be reduced to everyone but only to the original maker

Alfonso Lingis talks about how our life is measured by moments of overflow and excess. Ones of ephemeral orgasm or transient destruction. These peaks allow for narration and recollection, an association to build off of. How can you have peaks if but not to appeal to all your senses? I need moments that cannot be reduced to bits of information and hyperreal data; 0s and 1s. I need the ambiguity of feel senses, the emotional welling or disgust that smell produces, the sensuality that a warm embrace gives rise too. When things cannot be reduced to bits, they enter to a plane of time, one that is always participating in our current generation of self.

I think this is why I partially feel so strongly about hunting. It engages in all the irreducible senses. The ritual of crisp air smattering your face, the kick of the shotgun, the putrid smell of guts, the fragrance of blood, the delicate softness of feathers and fur, the dance of taste buds when consuming the harvest, the weight of body as it exchanges punches with the thickets, the weight of calmness and excitement, of energetic exchange with the land. These moments are in movement, with moments of excess and grandeur. This ritual solidifies sense into a time capsule, one that weaves it through your ways of being when the flood has passed.

Nostalgia of place and time, although accessible through audiovisual bits, holds but a sliver compared to the excess energies of real-life position. When you recall a musty smell, or taste a familiar meal, fragments of sense data are pieced together to remind you of your being. This irreducible feeling is generated inside of you and reminds of you peaks you may not have given weight too. You access a portal of your personal index, not the hyperreal illusion of the audiovisual images fed to you. Sense data not only bypasses the outside world, but also your internal mental world as well. It pulls debris up from the muck, it lifts rocks that have been wallowing in the current, it allows access to a deep repository of sense data that helps connect the fragments of memories to the temporality of the present.

I hope down the road I viscerally recall the sense of South Dakota like that I do of my adolescence. Although the landscape is one that rarely offers emotional spikes and descents, it does offer an overflow of sense data. The sweet clover, the swarms of mosquitoes, textures of soft petals and thick fecal matter, the weightlessness of horizon, the delicacy of ground plums and prairie onions, the unforgiving wind, the unrelenting heat, the tremble of gravel roads, the accessibility to move weight through wild lands, the scent of wetlands and algae, the brutality of little used cattle gates, the icy below 0 days, the corn stubble; sharp as barbs, and the sheets of rain the give way to fragrance and touch. I’m looking towards the future, and in it, I want to learn what it feels like to touch the land, smell the land, and devour the senses that this place has to offer. I want to be close to source, and I’m confident my senses won’t lead me astray. South Dakota is always releasing its excess and want to touch, smell and taste it.