The Encampment Richard, Web Manager, age 43, San Francisco, California December 1998 My wife and I are leaving a hospital where we work. It has a kind of WWI feel to it, one level, plaster walls, simple cots, dark. Many people are lying naked on the cot/beds. The cots are higher than one would expect, waist level. For all the suffering, there is a nice bodily focus here–maybe something sensual like in the movie The English Patient. My wife stops to help a woman stretch her leg out and up. I go on and leave and walk down off the hill we are on to my tent were I'm staying. The tent is full of items, as if we were on a safari. Crates and boxes and portable tables, instruments and cooking equipment. There is a man in my tent who is looking at my camera. He says with a mix of admiration and curiosity "You ~know~ what kind of lens this is you have?" I don't immediately recall, but say "Yes" and then remember it's for taking pictures of planets and say so. He says it's especially good for the rings of Saturn and Jupiter, and asteroids and stars in that area. He has a tone in his voice like he is surprised I would have such a lens. I look for my roller-blades, put them on and skate back up the hill. I'm quite amazed, and can't recall learning to roller-blade. I'm glad I did, it is very exhilarating. Richard's interpretation: Illness and wounds, I was taught, are something to get over and past. One must get on with life. Yet so much body is found in illness, so much focus and attention. Sometimes this attention is toward reparation and restoration, and other times it is involved with new connections. A sensual, almost erotic gentleness pervades the hospital. Here in the cracks in the daytime world of health and conquest lies another sense of desire. So often desire is characterized by a missing object and lack, but desire is also production. It produces new connections, new flows, breaks in old flows. I am deeply connected to this, and she to whom I am married stays on to stretch the muscles of the wounded, to help position them. I might say I am married to this hospital, but also pass beyond it. This passing is a decent to where I am, where I am camped. An impermanent being without a fixed home, I still collect objects and materials. The boundaries of my camp are open to others. He points out to me what I have. I am embarrassed by his surprise. There may be something here for which I must account. It's a special lens, a way of seeing into the interiors of space. I had almost forgotten about it. He reminds me how special this is. I get so focused on the hear and now, these distant views sometimes dissolve into the background. It is hard to tell if I now enjoy the view more, or people being aware that this is part of who I am. It's much like interpreting a dream early in the morning. I can stay with the dream, become again one with the dream, fall back into the experience…or I can begin to see the experience as past and begin recording and recalling the event. Clever folks can do both. I find my means of transportation in this camp as well. There occurs to me the humorous connection between in-line skating and online-surfing. The special lens has indirectly allowed me to find my vehicle, a modern version of Ten League Boots. The delight was in the body moving, striving yet without effort. I seem to be headed back to the hospital with new vision and gusto. This is my encampment.