“Data is interesting stuff. There are some contexts whose nature is appropriate to research, and the gathering of data. There are others where the mere mention of it obliterates or re-shapes the context(s) and/or its subjects without awareness or announcement of this fact.

Relationships are a good example. Many times something that encounters human researchers is either obliterated or transformed into something it never was and would never otherwise become.

An attempt to ‘gather data’ from any living being, relationship or place, is, in some contexts where this approach is inappropriate, devastating. It does no good to have data about something obliterated or reforged by your gathering of it.

Interestingly, consciousness itself is like this, and this feature is a problem in the avenues of research that seek to explore human sensory and relational superfunction. It is also a feature of the problems that emerge when we ‘ask each other questions’.

Questions change the state of the querent and the subject. This is more true for children than adults. Yet neither we nor the questions announce or account for this fact and its many unexpected repercussions.

And there lies the tail which we must follow all the way to the strange creature that is wagging it, and us, with the momentum resulting from our own gestures of seeking and awareness.”

— an a i