Juan Luis Berlandier died crossing the San Fernando River in the summer of 1851. I want to ford that same river. Feel its flow. Maybe I will. Hold his hand as he goes under the water.

Elizabeth Freeman: Now I think the point may be to trail behind actually existing possibilities: to be interested in the tail end of things, willing to be bathed in the fading light of whatever has been declared useless.

Writing can allow us to connect deaths, separated by chronology and nation and borders. I feel a poetry in his drowning, poetry in the sense of a body being swept up into the flow of a river and carried by the current under under under the air. But what is poetry that I could ascribe it to this death? Poetry in the sense of failure, a failure to imagine the magnitude, the force, a littleness in the flow of story.

An acquaintance told me his idea: to bottle the air on the day, each day, when someone is killed by the police in our city. Make an installation of marked bottles with the dates of each killing. Something about breathing, about not being able to breathe.

Michel Foucault: This is not a book of history. The selection found here was guided by nothing more substantial than my taste, my pleasure, an emotion, laughter, surprise, a certain dread, or some other feeling whose intensity I might have trouble justifying, now that the first moment of discovery has passed.

Little men dwindling into the landscape: anachronistic, disappearing, fading, never really even being seen. No reason to spend time with them, no reason to think about their breathing. And still, I ask myself, if they breathed, what would the sound be? ¿Cómo se podría escribir ese sonido? Doubt reaches tentatively for a poetics of touch, feeling.

We’re completely out of place.

Without closing,

JP