Theodore Roosevelt never returned to Panama; he never saw the Panama Canal

                                                                                                 —David McCullough

The mind is an idea of the body.

A tool that keeps getting used out of habit.

A tool that is too easy to use.

Reading and writing are ethical practices.

Reading and writing are big spoons & little spoons.

The entanglement of matter & meaning.

The entanglement of big spoons & little spoons.

Can you tell me what is so beautiful about that?

Can you tell me what is so beautiful about spoons?

Everywhere you look it is the same.

Everywhere you look it is the same different spoons.

Cuts do violence but also open up & rework.

Cuts do violence but also open up the body.

There is not knowing from a distance.

There is not knowing about spoons.

“If I am at Love Canal in the United States, a populated area

where a bunch of toxins were dumped, and the people were

getting cancers, then I might want to evacuate the people.

On the other hand, if I am at the Mayo Clinic,

where they are treating cancer patients, and there

are a lot of people with cancer, it is not the thing to do.”

Waves are disturbances in fields.

Waves are disturbances, like the idea of bodies.

When 2 waves meet, crest to crest, they make a higher wave.

When 2 waves meet, crest to crest, they act like waves.

But there is no disturbance here, remember?

But there is no possibility of being erased, either.

The issue is not one of erasure.

The issue is entanglement, the big spoon little spoon.

Being is threaded through with mattering.

Being is threaded through with entanglement.

All bodies, including but not limited to human bodies, come to matter.

All bodies, including but not limited to human bodies, act like waves.

Ethics is about mattering.

Ethics is about the smallest cuts mattering.

Attention to the tissue of ethicality that runs through the world.

Attention to the possibility of spoons.

[1] This poem includes found language from “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers,” an interview with Karen Barad by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin. For full reference, see Poem Notes.