The ordinarinesses and simultaneities of experience

Journeys with Flies is a lyrical account of time spent between 1973 and 1994 among Mbanduru, Zhu and Tswana in the Kalahari desert. An extract from an opening section, ‘Entries’ (pp. 18–19), reads as follows:finding in an abandoned geology camp used in a premature hunt for oil on the Yukon coast in the 50s a rusted can of strawberry jam pulled open with our fingers scooping out the contents ravenous for sugar and fat our supply plane fogbound for weeks at Inuvik pilot biscuit and the caribou we shot thin in the calving season keeping us full but unsatisfied when the plane finally arrived we ate butter by the handful and had roaring diarrhea all that night that never lost the light of day . . .At Nwama, Eiffel-rust rain etched across chalcedony-green afterlight sucked out of the mid-Atlantic where the rainbow arc of the sunken sun is gliding toward North America.I can imagine that to be an organic reality, a function of the electrical charge of light clinging to its own perimeter and to reflections of important earth features – Guatemalan jungles could furnish the green for those bound to that place – wind carrying Eiffelcolor down with the shape blown into the rain. You can’t be in only one place at a time – how could you find the way there, or ever return?Coffee boiled for an hour in milk constantly skimmed so that it is like hot cocoa with a different taste, bitter roots roasted on a fire, and long after dark, the milking done, huge bowls of fresh clabbered yogurt . . .all this milk. Just a month ago there was practically none; only cows with newly dropped calves had enough so that some could be taken for people to drink.Those were hard days:look at usthinness is taking us’. Journeys with Flies is a literary-anthropological attempt to treat the perennial existential question of identity, an attempt to do justice to the commonalities of human embodied experience and to adumbrate a language of their conveyance.