I finished the collection of essays, I Just Lately Started Buying Wings, as I sat on a 747 jet lifting above the ground and carrying me to London. And from London it occurs to me that I’ve been considering motion lately: first in reading about Geryon in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, then in Kim Dana Kupperman’s aforementioned collection and now in the book I’m halfway through, Wanderlust, by Rebecca Solnit. Departure has been on my mind recently: departure as boundary; the desire for departure; the need to separate; departures of the heart; of the mind; the way my mind wanders from whatever here it occupies to float elsewhere in the daylight; a division, a deviation; a leaving; a journey.

I like motion: to feel muscles tense as my body pushes forward; the sound of grass or gravel or mud beneath my feet; the wind passing over my ears; the ways the eyes move forward into the distance and back into something small and close. And there is something too about the openness of the sky and the ability to think in open space; it’s something about how the body feels small outdoors and so the brain can sprawl as it likes.

Silence is what I’m looking for lately, the kind of silence which isn’t really silent at all but contains the sounds of leaves or wind or birds or insects or all of them. It’s the silence of space: I imagine grass and dirt and childhood. Walking in the landscape is a means of both solitude and connection; silence and thought. On a recent walk through London streets and parks (see also these pictures), I noticed noise and beautifully manicured flowers and trees, and how I never touched anything. What I’m craving is the kind of place which begs to be touched: a branch here, a petal there, a certain rock, fingers dipped in a stream.

“If the body is the register of the real,” says Solnit, “then reading with one’s feet is real in a way reading with one’s eyes alone is not.” This, I think, begins to arrive at my meaning: that movement and touch feel real in the way they can be traced through memory and observation and feeling. The body has memory: think, for instance, of a lover brushing a hand over your back or cheek. I can still feel these moments. I think too of the mountains I’ve climbed and how in the climbing they ceased to be abstract lines on a topographic map. This kind of experience is what I am dreaming of.

And, now, here I am back in New York, finishing this letter at my desk, from which I will leave in the morning for several weeks at the Yaddo Artist Colony. At Yaddo I plan to walk, to move, to make things. I hope to be offline while I’m there and outside. I’ll report back on my return.

At Takeout, we’re working with the British government on their Tech City initiative and this week, a few illustrations I made are debuting at South by Southwest. Tech City is the East Shoreditch section of London, which is the site of a growing tech startup scene (and, I might add, the awesomeness of street art all over the place by Banksy and other folks). For the project, we decided to hand-draw the messaging to communicate the energetic feel of the community. I also love how much control I can have with illustration, in that I can visualize something in my mind (usually while chatting with the client about the project) and then make it with pen and ink.

These are the first images from a larger project so there’s plenty more to come. But I thought I’d share as they debut in Austin this weekend.

Everything about the game is militant: most notably the colors, green and red and black with various splatters. The type: sans-serif and uppercase mostly, without any of the curves or swirls or softnesses of the more traditionally feminine serifs, italics or even lowercase. Think of a body: a woman with hips and thickness of skin; with wind in her hair; a smile. A man with more rigidity and reservation; the interior obscured by flatness. It occurs to me here that I have to indulge stereotypes to even talk about this. The game of course comes in a box and on its cover are what I presume to be men, nameless and ready, with stakes held high and battered flags awake in the setting red sun. There is so much red.

I am preoccupied with the design. I keep thinking in my head: made by a 19-year-old male. Again, stereotyping. But there is something about the overtness of the masculinity; the rampant arrows and phallic cities; the uninformed stencil font of the title; the attempt to represent camouflage, attempt to reference both modern and antique without choosing: there is simply something so oblivious about it. For example, the rules. The rules are formatted interestingly in a folder with tabs; one has the impressions of having received a mission, an order or set or orders. But when the folder is opened no hierarchy is apparent; the order of things is obscured, mangled, unreadable almost. The tabs jump from A to X without any indication of why or how. My father spends 45 minutes reading and sorting and citing the rules to us.

And the rules have changed. The game Risk was invented in 1959, less than two decades after the second world war. (Are our memories really that short?) My dad remembers playing as a kid in the sixties: to start, he and his friends would simply place their troops wherever they wished and begin their safe attempts at world domination. For instance, my dad would say, “I’d like China” and would then place troops there. The next kid would say, “I’d like Russia” and place troops there. And so on. It is different now. The placement of troops is assigned. World domination, we’re told, is not the goal. Instead, there are “objectives” and achieving them is how the game is won. There are minor and major objectives. Minor objectives: control Europe; control Asia; take over four cities in one turn; control North America. Major objectives: control two continents; control eleven cities; take over a continent in one turn; control two enemy capitals. I can’t tell the difference, exactly.

Before a recent game started, I browsed the headlines on my cell phone, pausing briefly on a New Yorker article involving the Syrian dictator, President Bashar al-Assad. Journalists were estimating 20 to 30 murders a day by the government since March. Peaceful demonstrators carrying olive branches are being sprayed (sprayed?) with bullets, raped and bled out. I write this without even being able to properly imagine it: the bloating, the tearing, the screams, children, decapitations, torsos unattached, how one might even return home after such devastation. Home? For the past two months, I’ve switched off the news in the morning, too sad to listen to it. This is unforgivable, me in my warm apartment. Just today, I tried to explain to my friend about how the reports depressed me and so I stopped listening. He went silent; he, a captain of the Navy for thirty years, a member of Common Cause, listener of NPR: he is deeply concerned. It’s easy to silence the things we don’t want to know about. That night, I turned the news back on.

But before the news: we played Risk. During the game, phone switched off, we said things like, “Egypt is now attacking India.” And: “Stand down, sir.” And: “Hold your fire! Retreat!” And: “I wish to withdraw my troops.” And: “There’s been a massacre.” And: “Russia has been compromised.” And: “The airfield is impossible to overcome.” And: “Blood will be shed.” And: “It was worth it.” And: “Troops must be sacrificed.” We found ourselves funny, too. Laughing and yelling and reciting whatever we’ve heard in movies. During our second game, my sister Tweeted, “That’s right. I own all of Europe and Africa.” I should’ve said something about how problematic the Tweet was, but to acknowledge reality would be to break our suspension of disbelief, I suppose; to leak the private, simple, manufactured reality of the game with facts of real Reality. I went silent.

We also said, “Remember: never start a land war in Asia.” This, family lore. Or maybe its cultural: from the Princess Bride, a movie we must have watched two hundred times. To quote portions of the movie to one another is to laugh, to remember, to feel the fabric of the old couch we sat on while watching. What I like about games with my family is the way all of our history rises up and emerges in the periphery, connecting and reminding. Age has taught us to distance, to not say, to omit certain pieces of reality. It’s not totally easy to talk anymore, if it ever was.

And I think too of the word risk and when it is deployed. Not often, certainly. Lately I have used the word when thinking of a heart: this or that would be a kind of risk. To love is a risk. To be loved, to be vulnerable is a risk. Or: a risk was taken and failure occurred: failure of the heart, of the mind and our bodies and attentions. Risk as related to physical danger is something else: something our bodies enter into for reasons other than love, mostly. To make something is a risk, an induction of fear and the possibility of failure or exposure. Death and hearts are not exactly on the line. Kind of but not exactly. There is, after all, always the possibility of making something else. Not so with humans whose hearts are delicate and in need of certain care.

A few months ago, I saw a map of a woman’s heart from the 1800s. The map seemed inadequate to me in what it carried, if still lovely and interesting in its way. It also had me thinking about a project I made a few years ago about mapping body parts in relation to memory. As in: what memories does the body contain, can it hold? The drawings were large and sort of essay-like in their associative sprawl. I am wondering now again about body parts and if they can be mapped in any real way. So I started yesterday with a heart, updated now, specific and moving toward reality. It feels like the beginning of something. [If you click on it, it links to a larger version.]

[I'll stop here. But know that I wanted to continue for a very long time.]