All That You Touch
How do you consent to change?
Register for this free JavaScript workshop on Tuesday, May 23rd at 6pm EST where you will bring your favorite website, get introduced to JavaScript concepts like the DOM and learn how to change your favorite website using HTML and JavaScript.
All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change. — Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, Chapter 1
All that you touch.
This past week has illuminated the intimacy of change. The subtle, soft, contours of our imagination bend toward new stories, caressing the new possibilities, I stretch toward them. This pleasure pose is one my body will only perform if there is an overwhelming, unmistakable, yes coming from my pelvis, swirling into, through, around and beyond my gut to extend up my back, greeting my heart. Only then, at the end of this journey — where yes lands on the tip of my tongue — can my mind be made up. Made aware of this internal intimacy, this internal stretch that creation requires. This eternal dance that change requires.
I have been meditating on how and why Butler chose to put the words “touch” and “change” together, invoking intimacy and consent. Jayna Brown points out in Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds, consent is a central theme in Butler’s work. It wasn’t until I was building the All You Touch JavaScript project inside The Classroom that I realized the connection between our desire for change and the personal consent we must give to be changed. The gentle permission we must extend, with a welcoming gaze, with a permissive graze, with an inviting touch.
Boundary violation, between individuals and between species, is often at once horrendous and compelling. Forms of interpenetration are a central fascination and obsession in Butler’s works. Often these events are simultaneously repulsive and desirous. They are sites of ambiguous consent.
There is a central (im)possibility in the Parable novels, a hoped-for sea change in what interpenetration can mean beyond the question of coercion. Touching and being touched, malleability between the material and human worlds, are at the core of Olamina’s concept of God. Yet how is it possible to step away from the troubles of the human long enough for the change to happen?
— Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds, pg. 102
I had the idea for Seeda School as a science and technology institute centering the black feminist imagination in 2019, but I didn’t create and release Seeda School’s first offering until 2022. I often ask myself, sis what took you so long? Now I look back on all those years, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and realize I was building up pleasurable permission — cultivating my capacity to change. Gently inviting my nervous system into the dance through the intimacies of artist residencies, the sensuality of world building in speculative fiction books and the comforting touch of daily practices becoming a tender refuge of somatic safety (in)forming curriculum. The permissive touch had to come before the change that stewarding Seeda School was going to require of me.
In many ways, a school, a classroom, any learning landscape asks for our consent. Our consent not to be a single being1, our consent to change. Take all the time you need touching the places that still hurt, tenderly tending to the wounds that are still agape, kiss your childhood memories in all the places you were let down, cuddle all the somatic practices that expand your capacity for change. We long for you, we welcome your touch and delightfully anticipate all the ways it will change us.
Why did it take four years to open Seeda School? Because it took four years of pleasure-play-permission practice to fortify my nervous system to welcome its touch, to consent to its change. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks reminds us how intimate2 of an (ex)change teaching and learning is. Inside Seeda School we are attempting to embody the possibilities embedded in this practice, in this (ex)change every time we gather across the web. This is one of the reasons I fell in love with code and teaching. Reflecting on the possibilities of JavaScript and how one might teach it, I returned to Octavia Butler, and in returning to Butler, I returned to consent and in returning to consent I returned to my body savoring all the ways I have finally given myself permission to change and be changed. Making room for even more irresistible (ex)changes with myself, the world and the learners who keep touching, changing and creating only to touch and change again and again and again and again. Cultivating our capacity for what’s next, what’s now, the only lasting truth.
Register for this free JavaScript workshop on Tuesday, May 23rd at 6pm EST where you will bring your favorite website, get introduced to JavaScript concepts like the DOM and learn how to change your favorite website using HTML and JavaScript.
“It’s torqued seriality—bent, twisted, propelled off line—is occult, impossible articulation. The line is broken; the passage is overtaken, become detour; it is, again as Glissant says, unknown; it bears a non-violent, unavoidably violent overturning, a contrapuntal swerve, a voluntary submergence way on the outskirts of assent; it performs a rhizomatic voluntarity, roots escaping from themselves without schedule into the outer depths. This involuntary consent of the volunteer is our descent, our inheritance, should we choose to accept it, claim it, assent to it: forced by ourselves, against force, to a paraontological attendance upon being-sent, we are given to discover how being-sent turns to glide, glissando, fractured and incomplete releasement of and from the scale, into the immeasurable.” — "to consent not to be a single being" by Fred Moten
“Certain behaviors, gestures, habits of being were traced back. Attending school then was sheer joy. I loved being a student. I loved learning. School was the place of ecstasy—pleasure and danger. To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.” —Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, by bell hooks, pg. 3
this was gorgeous and thoughtful, thanks for sharing