Mutual Contamination

An excerpt from "Betrayed: The Iraqis Who Trusted America the Most"
by George Packer, The New Yorker
March 26, 2007

American institutions in Vietnam were just as unresponsive as they are in Iraq, but, on an individual level, Americans did far more to evacuate their Vietnamese counterparts. In Saigon they had girlfriends, wives, friends, whereas Americans and Iraqis have established only work relationships, which end when the American rotate out after six months or a year. In the wide-open atmosphere of Saigon, many officials ... broke rules or risked their lives to save people close to them. Americans in Baghdad don't have such discipline problems. A former Embassy official pointed out that cell phones and e-mail connect officials in Iraq to their bosses there or in Washington around the clock. "When you can always connect, you can always pass the buck," he said. For all their technology, the Americans in Baghdad know far less about the Iraqis than those in Saigon knew about the Vietnamese. . . .

To receive this briefing, I had passed through three security doors into the Embassy's classified section, where there were no Iraqis and no natural light; it seemed as if every molecule of Baghdad air had been sealed off behind the last security door... A former official at the Embassy told me, "When we say that the corridors of power are insulated, is it that the officials aren't
receiving the information, or is it because the construct under which they're operating doesn't even allow them to absorb it?"

Mutual contamination. Exposure. Going out. To meet. To be met. To be con-tam-inated (from con- "together with" + the base of tangere "to touch."

No one alive is exempt from life: from responding, over and over, every day, to another . . . to others.


28 days
puts mutual contamination into play
its force is the going out
to meet and be met
an invitation to mutually contaminating exposures
to the world, to strangers, to each other, to works made

28 days is an intentional, delicate going out
a moving toward what gives more life, more joy, more life-force, more change, more difference, more contamination
not as solution for sealed doors, insulations, or exemptions from responsiveness
but as ephemeral practice
to be re-made every day
because, not being an answer or cure,
28 days is nothing more nor less than the choice to carry over to tomorrow
not today's shootings
but today's traces of meeting and being met

28 days

exposing bodies to
proximities of
thunder clap
lightning bolt
exhale
pausing with
rain storm
tornado
copper mine
starry night
sunrise
sunset
glimmering lake
spent uranium
ancient
valley
red
white
blue
nuclear history
passing through
ceiling fan
pausing longer than
to bring to
be changed by
life-force overtakes
toasting of tea cups

turning
towards

light
wind
water
what is alive
bodies as dowsing
as sensors
of places and times
where the world’s life-force
forces of emergence
of a place
as event
continuously unfold

eating
drinking
bathing
rising
sleeping
making
in ways that move in accord
mutually contaminate
leave traces
slough off
creatively make
in response to
shapes
colors
movements
scale
rhythm
forces of a place
as we pass through
its materiality

The earth needs human bodies to move accordingly to
its (life) forces
landscape
environment
d a i l y
in mundane ways
in domestic living spaces
not as commercialized and privatized
“green” home furnishings
but as continuously creating
and extending
relays and exchanges
scaling up
all that moves accordingly