geoskinscriptions

geoskinscriptions in skin kins inks

            Flying over the southwest U.S. for the first time, I am riveted by the patterns

etched into the skin of the earth, erupting into plateaus of stone, repeating themselves

in fractals across acres.  With my forehead pressed against the airplane window, I watch the landscape move beneath me unfolding slowly its patterned varieties of weathered bedrock, ancient lakebeds, volcanic fields and alluvial fans.  Having been reading about fractal landscapes, seeing these fractals from the plane is an unexpected, glorious treat. The flat-topped stratified sedimented earth-sculptures patterned in clusters prompt my glee, “Those must be mesas!” my first-time seeing these iconic geo-cultural images and the conical structures I determine as buttes, ancient places of ritual, wide cones narrowing into slender clefts and yawning grooves.

            Witnessing these immense landscapes from this grand scale is disorienting (Beardslee), as size is simultaneously tiny and massive, and I feel myself falling

through my plane of glass, falling into my field of view like Alice through the looking glass, my heart pounding behind my eyes scaling canyons narrowing into fossilized river beds veining like a calligraphy of fern leaves; sand windblown into scalloped shallow waves fluid as muddy water; desert-painted fractal swirls of dusty fuschia, terra cotta, sandstone green: a picture of melting rainbow sherbert gone macabre.

            So much like a body’s skin, this gravel loam, sand, soil, stone stretched tight and thin, loose and gathered, leathered and layered, scarred, smoothed, pitted, blemished, even hairy with the coarse foliage of desert trees, while the Mojave River runs beneath the sand, like veins coursing beneath the surface of our skin.

            In abstract ways I’ve thought about similarities of the skin of earth and skin of bodies, but seeing the particularities from this grand scale revealing itself to me like a literal motion picture, I am stunned by the tangible visibility of my kinship with this earth body beneath me, whose stories are written in stratified layers I read with my cellular memory, my heart-memory, requiring me to see differently in order to comprehend the geometric narrative of this fractal performativity.  Stories are written into the valleys of the landscape as they are etched into the wrinkled lifelines of my hands as they are scratched onto the surface of the page. I name them geoskinscriptions, these stories inscribed into the terrains of earth, body, and page; inscripted into the skins of our geo kins: the soils, mountains, valleys, trees; skinscripted with the inks of our waters, our bloods, and our pens. 

            These geoskinscriptions emphasize for me the relationship between human bodies and earth bodies, embodied knowing, and performative writing. They reveal to me the fractal nature of bodies: Earth as a planetary body, a large scale version of a human body, a large scale version of life embodied on a page. At each particular scale of kins, skin, and inks, a universal story of relational dynamics unfolds, is told through geoskinscriptions, inscriptions etched and inked into the skins of bodies: earth, human, and page.

--Diana Tigerlily