Taped to the wall above my desk is a promotional postcard from Poetry Magazine. A quote from the editor, Christian Wiman, reads: “Let us remember that in the end we go to poetry [or art] for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both. “ It feels increasingly challenging to fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them. Robert Pogue Harrison argues that Western civilization promotes ‘institutions of dislocation [I would add disconnection] in every dimension of both social and cultural existence’, and this has led to an ‘aggravated confusion about what it means to dwell on the earth’(198-9). In attempts to negotiate this confusion, I am exploring ways of knowing, documenting, sensitizing, and measuring to enrich my understanding of the space between myself and what we have come to accept as ‘the natural.’ To “more fully inhabit” seems to necessitate firsthand experience and a heightened sensory awareness of surroundings. This idea of full inhabitation is something I am exploring in my work. I would like to consider, speculate, and reflect on larger issues using my particular relationship to the natural world as a point at which to begin. I am grounding my investigations in two sites, which comprise one place for me. One site is my backyard from ages three to eighteen, and resides in my memory. The other site is a few blocks away from my current San Francisco apartment and is also functioning as a surrogate for that initial stomping ground, and the site for my project field research.

Wednesday, April 4

Day 5: Educating the Skin

Lupine, cypress, eucalyptus. These are the only three plant names I know as I look around. I begin to get disgruntled about how I am so severed from any intimate knowledge of the land, knowledge that used to be passed through generations. Then I realize two things: I was the one who moved to California away from any accumulated knowledge of the Midwest, and I was standing among a combination of plants that didn’t exist together anywhere in the world, except right here. No one with any indigenous knowledge of one plant would necessarily know the next.

I’m reminded of Paul Tavana, the oldest by at least one generation of four South African woodcarvers I worked with. He was the last one in that group that had any knowledge of the local plants and their names and practical uses. The younger men explained that no one in their generation knew these things. Paul showed us how to mix the sap of two trees to create a rubbery substance.

Watching him I could see that this was part of his bodily knowledge. ‘Ichi una’, or skin knowledge is what the Cashinahua of Eastern Peru call it. It is the knowledge of the world one acquires through ones skin, through the feel of the sun, the wind, the rain and the forest. Skin knowledge is what enables the Cashinahua to find their way through their jungle environment and locate the animals that they hunt for food (Howes, p. 28).

The tradition of attributing some form of intelligence to the sentient body stretches back to antiquity. It was only with the introduction of body-mind dualism of Rene Descartes that such bodily ways of knowing became alien to mainstream Western thought. A wise person among the Cashinahua is described as:

Their hands know: they are skilled workers. Their skin knows; they have an extensive and intimate knowledge of their physical surroundings. Through the activities of their eye spirits they have knowledge of the spirit world. Knowledge of their mortality and immortality resides in their genitals. Their liver provides them with a full range of emotions. A truly knowledgeable person is one whose whole body knows. (Kensiger 1995: 245) (Howes, p.29).


One of my strongest elementary school memories is sitting on a large rock on the playground beating many harvested dandelion stalks. I remember having a half-belief that I would eventually transform this material into something completely new, and unexpected. I was trying to know this plant, and its material in a new way, to get to its essence. I wonder now if I was fulfilling a desire to engage in the kind of relationship that was no longer common in my time and place in the world.
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