Walking out through the parabolic hinged door to the windy porch that feels like the inside of a pizza oven – but cold. The bricks are colorful and inviting to the touch. The water beckons but with breeziness not vertigo. Vertigo happens when I look up. The whole building feels like it is tipping into me. My feet are stable but I’m leaning back to counter the fall. As clouds fly above the bright blue sky, the whole building feels like it is flying and tipping. I can’t find stability, but I hang there, suspended in a continual falling in. The bricks jutting out a bit, contribute to the sense that the building is coming apart a little. How does this happen? My sense of balance is more than my inner ear. The building reels, and I can’t handle it. But I can look at the wall and the sensation of movement stops. Only when I look up. This is cultural: my entire sensorium is attuned to the habits of buildings rising straight up, or on a simple incline. This one tips me as I try to align to it. But it is not aligned in the way that I’m used to. My sense of balance turns out to be polyvalent and some of those valences are at odds with other ones. My viscera hang down orienting me to gravity, my feet agree, so far. But the visual sensation of tipping building tips me. My feet are now weighted to ankles, my viscera are off. Using the words of my dance collaborator Nita Little, my attention oscillates between these facets of balance. All of these facets are cultural, trained, they can be retrained. But right now my attentional bricolage wavers, my balance wavers. Reflections on Fjordenhus by Joe Dumit, professor in anthropology at UC Davis

"It is not a matter of deciding whether you are on the Left or not, but whether you are terrestrial or not: ‘Have you thought about the material nature of a soil upon which nine or ten billion of us must live?’ It is in this context that the question of migration intersects with the question of climate. People who do not think that the question of climate is important, or who deny that question’s existence, can still see the question of migration perfectly clearly. It is one that is decisive in every country, election after election, and it is driving people back to focusing on national frontiers at precisely the moment when these are least suited to dealing with either the question of climate or of refugees." - For a terrestrial politics: An interview with Bruno Latour