*** This is a text written for a panel with Don Mee Choi on Translation and Language Justice, organized by Jen Scappetone at the University of Chicago. There is a video of the event here. ***

We transit. We hover. We alight. We are light. Particles collide. Collisions abound. A light through framed glass reads as motion. A window doesn’t only provide a view and it might also provide a view. History comes back around as a future about to occur, or a memory that might flutter, might oscillate, might vanish. The weather isn’t optional.

Borders demarcate territories. Fields. Boundaries are useful. Borders are violent. Maybe that’s not right. Maybe it’s not about being right. What is right action?

We wrote: Who we choose to translate is political. How we choose to translate is political. How we act, and with whom, is political. All actions, including inaction, have an ethics. What values do we manifest in the ways we choose to act, to stop acting, to react or re-act, acting again, differently this time?

Language is a border — a membrane — between intuition and feeling-life and the external world communication gestures toward.

The border is a powerful tool, literally in the most concrete barb-wired surveilled policed restricted searchlit movement-controlled weaponized way, and figuratively in the most buoyant, apertured, expansive, broken-open, limitless way.

Language is utterly necessary and utterly failed. What is right action?

Yes and we are never not thinking about all the violence happening at the U.S.-Mexico border. We are never not feeling like more abstracted or poetic references to “borders” need to be contextualized within the lived and too often died experiences of people at the literal borders of territories that were boundless porosities and organic matter until they were not though they still are. Yes and we are never not experiencing that tension torquing between our words and our wordlessness. Oceanic grief unboundaried.  What is right action?

There is, let’s say, a thing as it is being done and existing even as it begins to close. A close is a new opening. There is always a path. A thing can be winding down and still exist. There is wind. There is air. There is also another thing, this thing that is also a being that is also a way of being that does not exist yet. The thing that is to come. There is a relationship between opening and closing, of course, and, let’s say, there is a border between these two things. Being inside that border is a precarious state. The border between one thing as it existed and another as it comes into existence. Or maybe these are not things at all, but a web of relations and ways of relating between bodies. In other words, writing. In other words, translating, which is in fact and in feeling other words.

Membrane. Ravine. Suture. Crease. Bifurcation. Proliferation. Administration. It’s all source. Resource, as in source again. Not to be used, but to be destined, as in directed toward. To be shared. Mutual aid. And when the aid we need — the aid we can offer — shifts, how do we break open our mutuality so it can remain supple and welcoming, can continue to honor those sources? Patterning creates ritual and conjures magic and weaves warmth that can protect us from the elements, open us to the elemental. And patterning can become automatic or presumed, resisting suppleness where the weave was intended to remain open. So we needed to open it again, explicitly. Carefully. With care. Toward what we do not know. Toward what: we do not know.

There are many ways to conceive this border region. Some more kind than others. Some more realistic than others. Some more impossible than others. The border can be a breakage. A transformation. A division. A cartilage. The border can be space where two things come into conflict. It can be a space of trauma. Violent or friendly frictions. it can be a space of porousness and possibility. It can change from minute to minute or landscape to landscape, and present a disturbing variety of emotions and realities, contradictory ones.

What is the work of caring for another in this newly-boundaried space? How might we care for one another as everything around us is shattering? What is it to shatter in the space of the shattering end times? The end times recur recur over and over again. One person dying. One person beginning to breathe again. One person not beginning to breathe again.

How does it change our sense of “source” and “destination” if we set out to think in this border region? There is something that is the place this all began. There are hills and their capitals and there are buildings and there are abandoned lots. There is a specific hill in a specific landscape where the name “Antena” was conjured to reference a set of shared practices we wanted to cultivate. There is one language and its various versions as they are spoken in one place. Another language and its various versions being spoken in another place. There is the space between those languages where they combine and become each other or fall into each other, as if to lean one grammar into another, one vocabulary into another. As if to translate, te late, do you want to, latir, to beat, as a heart, where the membrane is as essential as the muscle, where the boundary or border is needed to allow for circulation.

We created our own language using received and invented vocabularies — let’s say, we translated — let’s say, we ultratranslated — and we moved around inside that language for ten years. And now that language is no longer itself. The translation transforms the original, becomes source, reverberates against the original to shatter it. Dimensional refraction.

Now that we have arrived to this point a decade later, can we say we have arrived? Was this the destination? Who’s to say, since we explicitly named that we did not know where we were going. This ending or this closing? This point of refraction? This is not an ending or a closing. Or is it?  What is right action? Where are we in relation to the border spaces that inhabit us? What does it look like to leave without leaving our companions behind?

This is the year we spent inside. Inside ourselves. Inside this pandemic state. Inside the boxes. So far. so close. Breathing publicly only our air inside our masks. Breathing in public re-made and re-structured. A dream life that emerges without masks, like before, like we were, before, before it began, or we ended.

The challenge is not exactly to make this space a generative space, much less a productive space. Biz-as-usual production should have stopped a long time ago, or it should have paused, but it did not. The state could have provided ways for everyone to cease production or to transform that production where it was absolutely essential. Instead, the production of a normal life continued on. So we have the source of all this, or sources, or thisnesses, and we have where we are now, which is hardly the destination that we set out to find. In fact, the source was already a destination. The destination another source. There is no linear path between one thing and another, between one action and another, one person and another and many others, as if you left and then you arrived. Or the linear path is there only because there was a cut  made or a word placed at the beginning and at the end. Yes and it is paths. A cut or a word or a phrase. And that, let’s say, is something we can translate.