Here what begins as balance turns inward and the thinker waiting at the page-turn has already described the turn. Anzaldúa treats attention as “multileveled”, taking in surroundings, bodily sensation, intuitive takes and the images the imagination creates. ¹Gloria Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro:
Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (Latin America Otherwise) (2015),
120.. Transmission asks the Interactor to form a sound-image, send it, go mentally blank, and treat whatever arrives next as received from someone else; a discipline of holding a signal that may never be yours. Meandering sends hearing downward into the soles, one weighted foot at a time. The recording made among the trees ends at the voice itself, breath tuned to moving water until fragments become words and the phone keeps what formed. Each exercise relocates knowing a layer further in. By the final recording the interactor is no longer receiving an account of the glen; they are producing one, in sound, with nothing printed to check it against.

Lost Control rations sight deliberately. The route is scoped once, committed to, and the gaze then fixed ahead while the feet drag across slate to find what will bear weight. Nothing confirms a step before it is taken. That is an unsettling way to move through a valley whose written record is a shelf of confident accounts resting on nothing: a carving with six proposed origins and no material evidence, two residents with four incompatible readings and no recorded names. Walking without visual proof of footing repeats, in muscle, the situation of the archive. The question the clippings keep asking, how anything here is known at all, is handed to the ankles.

This is where the interior work starts in earnest, and Anzaldúa is exact about its conditions. Empowerment, in her description, is “the bodily feeling of being able to connect with inner voices/resources” during “stillness, silence, and deep listening”.²Anzaldúa and Keating (2015), 152.. She is equally insistent that the connection is made by moving: reclaiming body consciousness means going for walks, going out to meet the world.³Anzaldúa and Keating (2015), 132.. The sequence from slate to kieve to woodland path is that claim performed in order. Listening is built downward through the body until something speaks from inside it, and the speaking is done in company with water and birds rather than over them. Whatever the interactor records has no evidentiary standing. It is nonetheless the only account of this crossing that exists in a first person, and it was produced by a method, repeatable, locatable, timed to a stretch of river.

One is “never only in one space, but partially in one, partially in another”, with the between occurring both as its own space and as the transition.⁴Anzaldúa and Keating (2015), 124.. The zine is an assistant to inducing the state to observe the space between words, surfaces and sensations, between each bank, between the page and ear, between an archive that cannot verify and a body that keeps knowing anyway. Walking with Elen, the two ladies, walking past a series of carved labyrinths of unknown origin all beg a question of provenance and authority. The activities experiment with what it is to sit in that space of imagination and reality where the discrepancies take on a different role, one that situates the narrative, the factual knowledge about these subjects as only one layer of the narrative. What emerges is not completely translatable in words and arrives with the turn of the page, after the condition has already been lived, which is the order Anzaldúa called for and likely would have wanted.

Everything on this stretch ends with the pages going back into the bag. An instruction is read at a standstill, a code is scanned, and a voice takes over; the hands that held the sheets are needed for the rocks. It is the quietest shift on the walk so far and it carries the most weight. Until the valley, the printed matter and the land could be consulted together, cross-checked, held at arm’s length. Once the crossing begins, consultation stops. The interactor trades the evidence of the eye for the testimony of the skin, on terrain that punishes hesitation.