Nisha Ramayya

drinking at the artificial wormhole

Abstract

This creative-critical piece explores relationships between mathematics, the sea, and sound, to test out listening as a receptive and generative methodology that may hold together disparate topics. I first encountered Fernando Zalamea, a synthetic philosopher of alternative logics, at Arika in Glasgow (2019) and was rapt hearing him speak about and enact a mathematics of gesture, romance, and epistemological possibility. In a series of conversations and performances with boychild, Laura Harris, Nathaniel Mackey, and Fred Moten, Zalamea returned time and time again to Moby Dick and a line in Moten’s all that beauty (2019): ‘We’re all whales.’ Moten read that line at the launch of Gravitational Feel, his collaboration with Wu Tsang, as Ahmad Jamal Trio’s ‘But Not For Me’ played on a loop. Running with these loops, tying knots haphazardly, diving benightedly, I find myself on a seabed, steps away from a drop-off that is really an artificial wormhole. Unable to see or to hear, I try to tune myself in to speculative frequencies – jelly, telepathy, entropy’s music – and to listen oceanically (hydrophones help!). Such a listening practice enables a move away from institutional pressures and sacrificial logics, at least, that’s the dream. We do it together for the sake of sticking together, bound by monkey-rope, submarine cables, and vibes. I don’t know where we’ll end up, if we’ll be sent or assimilated, but one way or another this piece will venture a response.

*

Presentation

On Thursday 21st November 2019, I attended a study session in Glasgow led by Columbian mathematician, philosopher, and critic Fernando Zalamea. The session was part of political arts organisation Arika’s Episode 10: A Means Without End, a programme of public events featuring a fabulous line up of artists, poets, and philosophers, a few of whom I’ll mention below. I found the entire programme to be emotionally, aesthetically, intellectually, and politically mind-altering, as I’ve written about elsewhere1,but here I want to focus on Fernando, the synthesist to whom I lost my corazón (co-reason/co-heart). Before introducing Fernando properly, I’d like to mention that when I first encountered his work, I hadn’t studied maths since my Highers, thinking very little about it in the 15 years since leaving school. But something about Fernando’s work makes me want to study anew, to think about mathematics, to dwell in its structures and activities, to set aside worries about not understanding in order to come closer to what he terms mathematics’ ‘wild heart’. It’s difficult to speak about something that one doesn’t know about without propagating anti-intellectualism or quackery, yet it also feels important to throw oneself into the unknown, to try to articulate the experience, to share those hazards and flops. I’ll come back to the limits of poetic licence in a bit, but for now, visionary-poet Will Alexander provides a helpful way through these complex junctures of knowledge, language, and poetry that is not a way out:

Of course, one reads and ventures into all manner of things across duration on this Earth. In this sense, the poet is not a vacant species, the poet is endemic with life itself. I guess the overused word passion applies here. For me, passion creates technique, not some external knowledge superimposed upon a deserted psychic land. In other words, what moves you? What allows your imagination to vibrate? My experience gives me understanding that the alphabet blazes, that its accents stir not unlike recorded dusts on Mars. Bud Powell, the jazz pianist, in his constant desperation to play, seemed consumed by an experience not unlike the one that now consumes me. If I go more than a few days without writing I feel as if ostracized from myself and so, like a camel or a cheetah, I speed to the nearest watering hole of my imagination so as to continue to survive in the flux that continues to guide the quotidian kingdom2.

We won’t evade the problem of not-knowing, instead, we’ll try not-knowing as an approach to and beyond the surface; lapping at the watering hole, casting a hydrophone, descending that lifeline to access other elementals.
          Fernando led and participated in a number of sessions on epistemological entanglements, gestural maths and dance, mathopoetics, and Moby Dick. He repeated the same questions at the beginning of each session, riffing on Denise Ferreira da Silva’s work on race and social justice: how can we understand difference without separation; how can we fight against separation and reduction to entangle and expand our understandings of the world; how can we move on in the world, within the world’s complexities? These are questions for mathematics as much as for philosophy, poetry, and politics, he maintained, and maths should not be segregated from culture and thought. By way of several mathematicians – predominantly Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866), Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), and Alexander Grothendieck (1928-2014) – Fernando offered us many dialectical theories to prove the inadequacy of the singular point of view and to present models for considering entanglement. In order to bring together and to think together polarities like One and Many, Infinite and Finite, Structure and Deformation, Beauty and Truth, Fernando explained the mathematical sheaf, which is central to his book Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics (2019)3.He writes:

The pragmaticist maxim thus serves as a sophisticated ‘sheaf of filters’ for the decantation of reality. The crucial role of the sheaf secures an amplified multiplicity of perspectives which, for that matter, filters information in more ways than one, thus establishing from the outset a certain plausibility for the claim that knowledge may be sufficiently rich and multivalent. (118-119)

The sheaf glues together multiple, diverse perspectives, enabling an expanded knowledge to counter the violence of dogma. This is a non-universalizing universalization, taking us through the looking glass from completeness to incompleteness, from the known world to the unknowable world, inversion’s prerogative.
          As well as talking and using the whiteboard, Fernando gestured and gesticulated, using his hands and arms to condense the mathematical techniques, to show us that we could do maths too, embody complexity, hold abstraction in our historical specificity. He explained how these concepts manifest in poetry, in cinema, in the figure of the whale, in the felt and projected experiences of our lives. He demonstrated a pedagogy of kindness and generosity, offering us highly specialised ways into the shared wonders of knowing and not-knowing our world, pausing frequently to take questions. Can you explain ramification? Do Riemann surfaces hold pronominal possibilities for exploding gendered subjectivity? What do you mean by logic, beauty, neighbourhood? Does maths go beyond language? How does this theorem help us in our quotidian lives? Why do the layers signify whale-song? One attendee said: I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but when you said continuous, I burst into tears. A pair of origami whales made by Arika’s co-founder Barry Esson appeared on the table. I told my friends that I’d fallen in love. Fernando referenced Fred Moten’s all that beauty4,this poem in particular:

Blackness is swimming,

can’t quite let the water go or be,
we harp on the water.

The blackness of the whole thing
is that our flesh lights up the world,
the ringing, the bubbles,

               the particles appear
to fade
in suspense. What else
might happen to us folds us
in. Not, but amniotic wail.

                          We’re whales.

We hate the world. We love
the word whorl, our whirlpool
pianism, our pullen, our
pullin’, our practice,

                            our
saturated name. (64)

This poem came up time and time again; Jackie Wang heard in its music the music of Alice Coltrane; Fred read it at the opening of Gravitational Feel, a ‘kinetic sculptural performance’ made in collaboration with Wu Tsang. Shimmering ropes fell from rotaries above – gold, indigo, turtle dove, aquamarine – notated with small and big knots, filling the space with friendship’s weave. We sat cross-legged under stichomythic showers, those heavenly wigs, as Fred and Wu read poetry over Ahmad Jamal Trio’s ‘But Not For Me’ on loop, playing hide and seek like Old Bollywood lovers in a banyan, like clown fish.
         In a discussion with Fernando about Moby Dick, Laura Harris likened Gravitational Feel to the monkey rope, in which Ishmael, bound to the harpooner standing on the dead whale as he himself stands on the ship, ponders:

For better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake. […] Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.

[…] I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg’s monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it5.

Ishmael describes this bond in terms of a sacrificial logic – a rope with two ends, two knots; one destroyed so the other can be saved, or, one destroyed because the other is; the surrender that devotion entails – a logic that Fernando and Gravitational Feel confound in their differential entanglement, weaves of demonstrations to disqualify extreme perspectives. A pamphlet of emails, research, and drawings by Fred and Wu was on sale at the bookstall; I bought a copy for my friend James, my friend Laurel bought a copy for me. A week later, my partner Rob made a mini-Gravitational Feel for my birthday, using a wooden mobile and a pack of multicoloured cords. A handicraft box jellyfish, it hung from the ceiling in our bedroom until the cats pulled it down, only to realise that it’s much less fun grounded.
         This mini-sculptural performance made by Rob, Worf, and Ticklepenny Prawnmobile reminds me of an offset from the mother-sculptural performance made by Fred and Wu, a polyp, a pup. It’s a citational practice that’s a devotional practice, running circles around the loved one to get their attention, abrading a path in your context that overlaps other paths and other contexts, bringing up clouds of referential sediment that obscure before settling and forming little heaps of thought, maybe as a musical phrase or a poetic tactic or a socialised tic. Sometimes I feel like a barnacle attaching myself to influential writers and texts, clinging on for dear life because everything depends on them, from a single poem to the futures we’re conjuring; once attached, we might radiate. Sometimes I drop a quotation into a poem to watch my words and obstructions change colour, scatter, get drunk. Fernando shares some of Grothendieck’s metaphors to depict immersion’s aid:

For Grothendieck, a problem can be imagined as a sort of ‘nut’, whose hard shell has to be penetrated in order to get to its ‘soft flesh’. In Grothendieck’s conception, there are two essentially distinct strategies for opening the shell: hitting it with a hammer and chisel – sometimes slipping and sometimes smashing the inside to pieces along with the shell – and immersing it in a liquid (‘the tide’) in such a way that, after weeks or months, its exterior softens and opens up ‘with a squeeze of the hands […] like a ripe avocado’. The first strategy (yang) aims to resolve the problem; the second strategy (yin) aims to dissolve it. Through an adequate immersion in a natural, ambient medium, the solution should emerge within a generic landscape that outstrips the particular irregularities of the shell. (148-149)

I love the scalar incongruity of immersing a nut in the sea, rather than a dish or even a bathtub (and hear those echoes of Ishmael’s cooperative bliss!); Fernando’s own metaphors carry us further out. In Peirce’s Logic of Continuity (2012), he opens with the fluid interconnections between maths and myth, embodied by an ever-changing figure: ‘Like Proteus, the sea god which changed his appearance at will, the continuum moves between the physical world and abstract ideals’ [n. p.]6.These figures are difficult to represent, but not utterly beyond representation; rather, they require multiple, mutable attempts in language, diagrams, and performance.
         In another transit, or discordant translation, the author of a book about cephalopod consciousness describes the body of the octopus as a topology: ‘there are facts about which parts are connected to which, but the distances between parts and the angles are all adjustable’ (220), which also suggests a methodology for reading and writing poetry7.I am making intuitive, somewhat erratic leaps between things, eliding the distances between contexts; this is not proper scholarship, says my internalised examiner, and maybe poetry shouldn’t be caricatured as logic’s subterfuge, the metaphor ejecting a bloom of ink in the face of history. But Fernando offers a way to think about these movements, which means that we’re almost ready to jump. At Arika, he talked about Moby Dick’s oscillating images of the whiteness of the whale and abstract blackness, knowledge and non-knowledge, what’s part of us and what’s beyond, mappable space and subterranean currents. To illustrate the back-and-forth transits of topology, Fernando described seeing a painting by ‘Glasgow Boy’ Arthur Melville in Kelvingrove Art Gallery and finding interconnections between the artist and the novelist: in their surname; in the painting’s depiction of Spanish mountains and the mountain in Massachusetts that inspired the enormity of the whale; and in the curator’s descriptions of colour and shade. Fernando explained the kind of knowledge that the gluing and transits of sheaves can engender: ‘this abstraction in the co-razón is the one who is projected in the particulars of our razón below.’ Plasticity is not carelessness, and there might be ways to tune in to speculative frequencies to access other knowledges, other gestures, other inscriptions even as they disperse. We’re at the deep-sea drop-off; Fernando offers a final boost:

In fact, it is not even a question of a ‘reading’ in Grothendieck, but rather a listening. An articulation between images, intuition and ear, as opposed to other merely formal manipulations of language, seems to be fundamental for him. In addition to the metaphor of the nut and the rising tide, another of Grothendieck’s central metaphors is, in fact, the image of the creative mathematician attending to ‘the voice of things’. (151)

*
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*
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*
*
*

shhh  – – –  intermedial
song – a little little light to none

to none “donate voice”
go down – shhh “to voice
bank” leave

dunked poet’s lullaby
like sugar in watercolour

granular hush
to send
line
off

*

the descent pockmarked with caves, caves papered
with layers
          “dynamic”

closed to feel “interaction
of energy lines”

wetly amass to taste without touching:

hello
hello you

*

               *
               *
         greetings
       “crystal”ular
               *
               *
        ball”oonical
        salutations
               *
               *

*

ballum rancum ooh-ooh-ooze
“spirit estate is the space”

pliés & splats of microtubes
“spirit estate is the space”

radioledance across latitudes
“spirit estate is the space”

*

who says it’s me! down the line and hears it’s you
who says “call me tantra” – hears write this bridge

this bridge called roseability

*

pecking coral to build
“vibratory fields of webcams”

                    ~chainmail
                glitch~

to grit in unison

*

multidimensional sirens sound

“how to
      educe
sonic
      events
from the past”

how to redo
    glitter
         city
             chi
                chi
                   chi

DO! to dissolve the keys

*

ask not faint rays of sun
on what is predicated

your sunken eyes
your “promised land”

ask athwart of flatness

*

“sound being given, thing evolved”

*

a glimpse of what we’ve left behind:

               submerge papers in
                   “period”ic flow
              pseudokin “rubs out”
                     the context
                “tantric sentence”

following haemolink elimination, tree

            brought down, Mulder
               & Skully uncover
          the fungous catacombs
                  of life’s birth

*

         “tragic”
       l i d l e s s
     l e s s n e s s
      n e s s l i d

some ears are
open caskets

*

a glimpse of what will be:

housecats on the windowsill
   “quack”ing at parakeets
     in the silver fir parrotfish
knit intestinal rainbows

*

“consciousness without memory”: the perpetual mantra
           hrīṁ strīṁ huṁ phaṭ ||
           body seeder
           wildfire shuttering up and down
your sevenfold spine: now! now! now! now! now! now! now! &c.

*

some ears are ears of the “world prison”

some hear membraneously

*

to fly through these jammy clouds of pan-studying
we fly “building in improvisatory asides”
to admit the artifice of foresight
buoyant skull escape pod
expertise ricochets
skywriting
passion
atoms
are
us

*

the particular correlates with all other
particulars in the universe, a scallop’s
bubble-the sonospheric foam, a clack-
“the straight edge of the cloud” unless

*

if name and form fuse, signs
proving things for things,
stirring them into sensibility

as one can’t lie to a telepath
how precisely we’d sound
how sound would consummate

“freeing data
                   and

triggering virtualities”

*

sound says: “the lesson that sticks” is the easiest to forget
let each souvenir retune you in a flash, let each flash pale

*

[Read ‘a group exhibition of atoms, interim, stars’.]

[1] Nisha Ramayya, ‘Notes on A Means Without End’, Poetry Review, ed. by Mary Jean Chan and Will Harris Vol. 110, No. 1 (Spring 2020), pp. 35-45.

[2] Will Alexander, ‘Language Seems to Stoke Itself: A Conversation with Sylvia Legris’, Music & Literature, No. 9 (24 April 2019).

[3] Fernando Zalamea, Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics, translated by Zachary Luke Fraser (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019).

[4] Fred Moten, all that beauty (Seattle: Letter Machine Editions, 2019).

[5] Herman Melville, ‘The Monkey-Rope’, Moby Dick; or, The Whale (London: Richard Bently, 1851).

[6] Fernando Zalamea, Peirce’s Logic of Continuity (Boston: Docent Press, 2012).

[7] Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life (London: William Collins, 2018).

Sally Ann McIntyre

The Weight of a Feather in 1907

PART I

i.

When he arrived, his only fantasy seems to have been that of the list. So much so that the custodians of the land were forced into re-burying their own dead so he would not rewrite the meshwork of place and its living relations into a still and ordered silence.

The list went with him, a map that informed his every movement. He brought it with him over the yearning sea, part of the baggage he bundled up on land with his well-oiled guns and his rations, even as he slogged off into the thick green dawn of cacophonous, bird-ringing air.

To re-write the world through a kind of re-placing also invited a re-definition of his own role: that of adventurer, taxidermist, and collector. His battle with the land displaced a battle with the hierarchies, the music of the old empire.

It was a form of sensory cancellation, the kind of deafness which attends statues, the book of his ingressive narrative. In the indecipherable and soundless book of nature, too, his only encounters seem to have been with objects.

His tireless task there, as he perceived it, was to keep moving in the service of this stasis, to lay the grid of the list out over the land, to add his signature, to construct the museum catalogue.

ii.

The collector encountered the Southern form of the bird for the first time in 1877, in the remote reaches of what would become known as Porter’s Pass. He heard it before he saw it, an unfamiliar sound calling out from an unlocatable position in the density of bush.

It seemed to throw its voice there, to be present in two places at once. Writing in his field notebook a curt assessment, his was one of the first, yet least eloquent, descriptions of its song:

“flute-like, melodious.”

He moved on. Through these densities, into the reductive clarity of sight.

And this is where the recording stops.

iii.

Although the collector quickly learned both languages spoken locally, and could use them in print and, more haltingly, in his everyday transactions, the writings we have from him are largely translations from the German.

He did not extend these attentions to learning the bird’s language. In his many field notebooks and the later, longer texts, we hear and see only glimpses of the bird’s behaviour; although there are of course many references to its morphology as specimen. There in the book, his own placeless place, he is the giver of the name, its descriptive logics of separation.

It would fall to others to record the bird in life. There are only a few extant descriptions. These more sonically observant and attuned first-hand accounts arise in the same period  from other explorers. They write, enraptured or lonely, on their long sojourns within these wilder Southern landscapes, of the bird’s haunting song:

…[F]ew people are aware that the Crow is a song bird, as it is only in the depths of the forrest they can be heard to perfection. Their notes are very few, but the sweetest and most mellow toned I ever heard a bird produce.

When singing, they cast their eyes upwards like a street musician expecting coppers from a fourth story window, and pour forth three or four notes, softer and sweeter than an Aeolian harp or a well toned clarionet.

Indescribably mournful. The wail of the wind through a leafless forest is cheerful compared to it. Perhaps the whistling of the wind through the neck of an empty whisky bottle is the nearest approach to it, and is sadly suggestive of departed spirits.

When reading these recordings, we might note two things: firstly, that the words they used were also approximations, the name of the bird mis-translated into European equivalences. Second, that they knew the bird as many things: a sonic mirror, a relatively common forest bird, a drinking companion, but not yet through its silence. They were not yet calling it the grey ghost.

iv.

When the bird began to listen, it was from the fact of a disturbance, that of his intrusion into the set of known relations. It met him at an auditory threshold, at the juncture of plant-thicket and echo, so tightly woven into a sonic knowing it could walk along it effortlessly, without any need for flight.

At the very beginning of encounter, it approached him without fear. It bounded through the breathing forest as though tumbling, to ask the question, along the pathways of interlocking branches within its known territories.

“Who are you?” it said, calling in its own language.

Peering down at him from its home in the dense canopy from a position of inquisitiveness, tangled so thick into the fabric of its world. Walking alongside him as a co-presence through the breathing forest, signalling in greeting and warning, disappearing at intervals to become echo and refrain.

A call and re-call, ever forming. Figuring reverberance as shapes within the whole overarching density of green.

“Who are you?” the bird said.

v.

Through the almost-impassable bush, the collector hacked his way; he carried his culture with him in the form of words sharpened like long curved knives with which to carve silence into the breathing land. In his field notebooks these carvings were laid out in careful rows of observations, dates and names. He named the birds, the valleys and the fjords. At night by the campfire he occasionally curled them into the forms of poetry, and fetched a mouth organ from his pocket to whistle sentimental refrains from the old country.

What the bird thought of this music is not recorded.

vi.

The collector understands his first encounters with the bird not as interlocutor, but as  observer, within a complex scenario of trust and subterfuge, recognising the bird’s curiosity, even as he positions himself as pursuer:

“As long as they are not disturbed they are very tame and peer inquisitively at the intruder in this lonely wilderness,” he writes, speaking later through the mouths of his own translators, in 1892.

And then, “When they are chased and molested they shun the persecution by quickly hopping away, using their wings at every jump.”

vii.

The collector gathers as many specimens of the bird as he can carry. In an apparent disregard for its specialisation and its attendant rarity, he moves numerically beyond the type specimen, beyond the limit of the orders placed, those wanted by both local and global museums, toward the edge of a more complete cataloguing.

He takes whatever he can find, individuals, pairs, then whole nests complete with eggs or just-hatched clusters of tiny blind and vulnerable chicks. From this distance, it is difficult to grasp his motivation for these questionable acts, which far exceed that needed for scientific verification and study.

Whether this frenzied taxonomy is predominantly prestige-based or financial, it is impossible now to know. Perhaps it is just that the list has possessed him. That he has been drawn into its fiction of a graspable limit. Excited, ultimately, by the idea that the whole life of the species is in his hands.

Perhaps it is simply that he wanted all the birds for himself, the barbed scythes of a categorial imperative twisted into a pathological drive for the complete collection, a Borgesian mania of accumulation, where, mistaking the map for the territory, he could not return until he had collected the whole species.

Perhaps ultimately this motivation toward total accumulation might itself be seen as a drive toward authorship, the collector re-casting himself not only as the discoverer, the giver of the beginning limit of the name, but also the writer of its end, its limit in extinction.

When the dark speaks he cannot hear it. It is a darkness also hidden from himself; the song attending the successive acts of violence is camouflaged within the terseness of the notebooks; we do not read it there, within each logged body, set down as a discrete indexical ciphering.

(Natiomystis cincta)
(Heteralocha acutirostris)

(Callaeas cinerea)

They appear there as a checklist, a telling of bare life stripped to its empirical appearances, a carefully scripted set of names, dates and locations.

viii.

The moment when the list gives way is when he sees them. When they emerge again, and for a brief instant he grasps the bird’s living and dying, its co-presence tied up within his own. It is no coincidence that this is also the point at which his listening returns.

He writes at Milford sound of an encounter, as violent as all the others. A bird is shot from the invisibility and safety of a hide, from the self-scripted sovereignty of an unobserved position. But before he can emerge to grab and quickly gut its body, the encounter transforms through his witnessing of something new:

”When it fell to the ground, the other, he writes, “hopped down to the fallen bird and instead of fleeing; it repeated several times its call note and jumped highly excitedly around its dead comrade.”

Through listening, an individual death is suddenly thrown into focus. Through relation, through a companion’s distress, it is something he understands: “I had to go away, as I could not stand to look on; it pained me deeply that I had shot the poor bird,” he writes.

ix.

For the collector, the return of the ear is a painful thawing, sudden and involuntary. We read in his journals that he cannot shoot the mourning bird, a development he initially understands as a strangely inexplicable failing, a moment of self-doubt, an inability to move beyond sentiment, to do the job.

Instead, he waits until the bird has finally left its dead companion. He then furtively leaves his hide, scoops up the now-cold body, strokes the slate-grey feathers of the breast. He places it, solitary, with the others, the orderly sets of pairs nestled together, their legs bound with a hemp and paper sheaf of careful dates and locations.

What ghosts him within the experience, and beyond it, is the call note, repeated several times. As he hears a question ringing down the centuries without answer, it is a gateway through which his listening opens out, toward recognition of another’s sentience, the voice which is the articulation of its grief, and with it his own responsibility for its being and nonbeing.

It tells him that he is both seen and heard. That he is also the song of a man in the mouth of a bird. That his own experience has also been authored, is being written by the bird in its own blood.

x.

From this point onwards he will find that his specimens are also ghosts, irreducible to the bare, objective functioning he gives them. They follow him as he utters solitude in a world teeming with hidden beings.

They tell him that while he appears to exist outside history, there is no way out of time. As much as the act of collecting is for him a form of writing himself out of entanglement, of simplifying the narrative. As much as he writes his own loneliness and exceptionality within this world of connections.

He begins to repeat the call note to himself, walking through the forest, as a whistled self-haunting. The refrain continues to haunt him even on his return to the old country, all the way to his own early death, where, half-mad, poisoned by the taxidermy chemicals he uses to create his many specimens, he whistles it over and over, on his death bed. The extinct song from half a world, half a life away.

The bird, now extinct, also learns from this experience. For it, in the future forest, all is echo. It too learns how to use the knives of silence he has brought into its world, as a set of techniques. It learns how to live as a ghost, a half-perceived whisper in the tomb of the archive. This lesson is for the future when the forest, too, will be a museum.

PART II

i.

Under the vast raftered ceiling of the wooden room, the birds are overwhelming, a measureless repository of waiting memories. A shaft of sun from the one nearby window spills daylight across the table upon which lie the specimens usually kept far away from its radiance, in drawers and cupboards. Those now laid out by the curator of birds in front of me, despite their seeming magnitude, comprise one small fragment of the total collection itself. Something I am used to seeing in black and white, in the historical partitioning of painterly representation, swims into the light of day, as painful as a thawing of something long-frozen, long-numb. They emerge from their carefully guarded cupboards and drawers, Into the light. A stunned quantity of frozen beings, their vivid un-faded feathers caught in the shafts of golden radiance, as in a coloured photograph dropped out of time and inserted back into the narrative at the wrong point. A representation made long before that technology existed. Memories belonging to no-one now living.

The collector shipped them off to Europe in 1889, coinciding this with the publication of the bird books. But these are not his masterpieces, these once-living beings. They resist his – and any human – authorship, even as they are subject to its reductions and transformations. In 1889, they became fugitive texts, retellings of lost forests, slipping through our imaginations before we had time to solidify them there. In their vault in Vienna, they are far from these lands, and we who inhabit those losses do not remember them. They are not our emblems, nor our fictions. They are our ghosts. Some part of me thinks: it is better this way.

ii.

I enter into the archive of the visual and material traces of the bird as entering into a mausoleum. These representations were stabilised by arsenic over a century ago, set into its thin powdery stone. They do not look like the illustrations I have come to know, within the iconic bird books, those images which, despite not having been drawn from life but from museum specimens, have almost substituted themselves for the birds lost to living memory, although their extinction dates are relatively recent: 1907, 1914.

Sir Walter L. Buller, the author of the books, was notoriously hard on the underpaid colourists who filled in the birds’ substance within the illustrator’s initial sketches, wanting the colours exactly right, as though from life.

Even though the colourists, like the illustrator himself, had never seen the birds in life.

iii.

In a museum in its home country, I have seen a curator of birds touch an extinct owl, stroke its feathers with a sad kindness. In another I was given a set of blue plastic gloves with which to handle a sacred wattlebird lost to time, but in his collection in the Natural History Museum in Vienna I was simply left alone with the birds, as though respectfully, a private audience with the massed dead.

As with many ornithological collections from the 19th Century, the trace elements of the arsenic used in the preserving process had arrested the progress of decay and through affecting a stasis in insect attack, stabilised the form of the creature. This halting of the breakdown of organic matter also meant a transformation into a different material order, as the forests of Chernobyl were said to have shifted ontology from vegetable to mineral. There, the normal cyclic transformation of vegetation through decay was arrested in its transformation, conforming instead to a stonelike stasis. The forests stopped mulching, leaving leaves to pile up endlessly. This toxic suspension of time in turn caused potential problems among the living, who are not of its dimension, an infiltration of a different order of time, up through the food chain.

iv.

Encountering the Southern form of the bird In the archive i expected something inflexible, ossified, rigid with time. What I am confronted with instead is a material pliability that stops time forcefully in the present, as it simultaneously underlines the enormity of the loss. the softness of feathers, the presence of tiny details of life – the tuft of down on a grey breast, a kind of chalky grey like warm slate. The orange of a withered wattle, framing a still, closed beak. Each of these colours stunning in its vivid complexity. A cluster of birds in a cardboard box, snuggled together. Still and quiet, it is as though they could have been shot yesterday, and it takes a lot to comprehend that their tags say: 1884.

v.

It has been noted he was not an educated man, that his craft was learned through patient auto-didactic method. In one sense, to look upon the rows of extinct creatures was to come face to face with his knowledge of his own artistry, his own authorship. There was no doubt he was a good taxidermist. Unlike some of the botched jobs in cabinets I had seen around the world, these specimens were not obvious grotesques, unmentionables, which despite their sacred nature must be locked away permanently, out of the light. The birds were perfectly preserved, each set of quiet legs tied with a small label, his name stamped on it in a blue ink, like a business card, or the pricing on expensive goods.

It’s like they could have been shot yesterday.

vi.

In Vienna I look at hundreds of beings that can no longer look back, for whom the very agency of seeing has been removed. In the public-facing specimens the glass eye, inserted in its place. There, seeing becomes a depthless simulation; a decorative wall, a placard.

But in this bird, rewritten by the collector as a study skin, no replacement eye has been offered, and the sockets are open to the tufted fronds of arsenic-infused cotton, above a beak tied with a small loop of hemp string. Cotton and flax. These substances are also infused with colonial histories. They fill the body, rendered placeless, with their own material agency, another order present as a blind and glassy field, a placeholder for the farms that have themselves replaced the forests with a blind and husklike dryness, where the tall grasses wave in ripples and folds, grazed by the molars of sheep in quiet wind. They are recordings, stilled and inactive. The memory of forests is buried here, erased beneath the quiet amnesia of this useful landscape. The forests burned, to make way for pasture, are a layer of charcoal, an unspoken and illegible violence written as a layer of ash in that geological strata. It is also present here, in the quiet body, the arsenical-soap stilled study skin, which is also a recording. It holds these sounds to itself as a witnessing, and itself becomes an archival sound-object, a phonography without playback.

vii.

In the bird’s eye, plucked out and long discarded, is the past I cannot access. There is a world there, a way of sensing and moving in the dense green thickets of canopy of the 1880s, which are not a landscape painting, that do not conform to that Eurocentric convention of contemplative distance. There, in the plucked eye, exist the food trees the bird knew as landmarks, the ones it regularly visited within the small constrained territories, walking through the forest in great leaps, in lines of kin, clambering through the thickly matted density of treetops, branch to seamless branch to branch, without any need for flight, without ever touching the ground. Those long-felled trees appear still, a mapping emerging as a series of bright points, a constellation sinking down. This too was song: a sonic tree-map of low muttered closeness, and all air, all earth, all distance subsumed in this closeness, the green density of the whispering canopy. The memory of nothing now living.

viii.

When looked at more closely and over duration, their historical positioning as objects is not so stable. Some of the assembled avian dead seemed to stutter inside their taxonomies, the labels tied to their flightless feet in a book-like burden of naming and re-naming, indicators of historical and scientific contingency  signalled in the proliferation of careful copperplate and patient fonts. There was a residue of unknowability even in this mausoleum, this tomb of quiet light, all this ordered certainty. A kind of grey haze that crept across the wood panelling like smoke, occluding something in vision. Was it that these kinds of blurred definitions accrued naturally to any orderly narrative in time, or that the sheer bulk of the extinguished life obscured the clear narrative that each scientific specimen would otherwise portray? Was it just that I flinched from seeing them, resisted his authorship over these bodies just as I tried to comprehend the monumentality of their extinction, wanted to see them – the vast and blank plain – outside his scripting of its narrative?

In Vienna I look at hundreds of beings that can no longer look back. There, seeing joins to listening in experiential time. The silence speaks, and I have to close my eyes, and join the birds in blindness.

Within the patient writing, clearly making sense of their deaths, the stark fact of extinction appears unanswerable. But a bird is only a book when read from left to right.

PART III

i.

The archive professes totality and cultural permanence. But what of the objects that exceed its categorical imperative, its fantasies of completion, its need for closure, its incapacity for ambiguity, it’s narrow recognition of the self-same, its inability to fully comprehend that which fades, crumbles, degrades, or is subject to erasure?  

The archive collects the dead and does not recognise the living. it does not recognise that some becomings run into the open, that some becomings quaver on the gradient of the instant, that some becomings can willingly choose to evade its scrutiny, to disappear.

ii.

The archive is the inventory of the things we know. We know, for example, that the South Island kōkako (Callaeas cinerea) is an endemic bird from Aotearoa. It was declared extinct in 2007, forty years after the last official sighting. That very same year, a sighting was made by two observers at Rainy Creek, near Reefton. This report will eventually be accepted, and prompt a retrospective adjustment in the bird’s conservation status: from “extinct” to “data deficient”. The bird accordingly shifts its place again in the archive. It has come back from the categorically dead. Not yet welcomed into the list of the living, but shifted into the liminal space of a nebulous unknowing, of the we-don’t-know. The bird is beyond the edge of the list. There, possible sightings of Callaeas cinerea continue to be made the South Island, on a semi-regular basis.

The contemporary monitoring of species is increasingly done by data collection, although such automation does not fully, at the time of writing, replace forms of human observation, whose basis in human perception and knowledge joins the automated surveillance of the camera trap and its audio equivalent algorithm in an uneasy relation. This complex observational amalgam includes such technics as the search for tracks, marks, discarded  feathers, and other physical signs of activity, stop-motion cameras, and sound recording. All these evidential methods have attended the search for the South Island kokako but have yet to materialise it as a conclusively readable text.

iii.

For the ornithologist, it began in Fiordland in 1977, almost exactly 100 years after the collector had arrived in the same remote Southern landscapes. While tramping in he heard “an ethereal tolling bell call” at the head of Lake Monowai. It was dusk, too dark to see the direction or any shape, but he knew enough to know the map, that this was the exact location of an historical report of the bird’s presence. He went bush for three months, searching for any sign.

The ornithologist joins this narrative as a figure. It is his recordings we now hear, the fragments of  which are inconclusive, that do not form a coherent and legible sound library of traces. He has been tracking the bird through remote areas of the South Island for over forty years. The library of sub-evidential sound recordings of (what might be)  S.I. kokako calls, which he has gathered in this time is a series of partial, inconclusive fragments, some altered by editing or audio cleanup, some digitised from earlier tape recordings, with a total running time of less than two minutes long, the bulk of which was recorded while the bird was officially extinct. He listens, re-listens, subjects the recording to forms of audio-cleanup, hoping to find the bird hidden in the thickets of noise.

The ornithologist’s collection of sound recordings, while not authored as such and comprising only one part of a wider activity of experimental conservation research, might for the purposes of the current discussion also be considered as a counter-archive, in its relation to the classical texts of natural history sound recording, biologically-motivated field recording, or phonography. One that, in its preoccupation with the search for something that might not actually exist, with the gathering of traces of fugitive texts, in its allowance for the existence of the unfinished, for that which is perpetually under revision, and in its yearning for the seemingly uncatchable, calls into question the archive’s actual ontology, its very reason for being.

iv.

The ornithologist asks, when playing back calls of North Island kōkako into the forest, in the hope of a legible response:

“Could it be that common birds like tui or bellbird remember kokako and their calls and are eager to advertise the fact when one broadcasts calls of North Island kokako or locally obtained calls?”

In this, he reveals a process the natural history sound archive normally conceals, one in which listening to sounds becomes an experience of being cast into the space of an echo, one that, if it returns at all, never returns as evidence of authorship or identifying mark, but in the form of an irresolvable difference, in the form of a question. The closed binary of the same is destroyed and replaced by an open complexity, where the trace of a bird’s identifying song might be passed on to other authors, and return as a ‘mockery’, in turn mocking the archive’s categorical imperative and rendering it void within the greater densely-woven textuality of forest memory. 

v.

In his long experience listening-out for thekōkako, searching for its traces, tracks and signs in the forest, the ornithologist is increasingly convinced the bird exists, but is also increasingly aware through the process of searching for something that is never found, of his own existence, his own traces, the crack of the stick on the path, or the human scent he leaves as an involuntary signature, his own bodily presence including that of his listening. The ornithologist sees his own position, knows the corporeality of himself and his listening, as species among species. The bird, also listening, chooses not to appear. It has learned something about appearances from the activity of this species who observes it, and chooses not to display itself, to be seen or heard. It is in hiding, in a hide. It inverts the relation between the observer and the observed, as normally understood in birdwatching, in ornithological field practice. The ornithologist writes of the difficulty of tracking it: “How can one detect a bird that is so quiet, unpredictably responsive to playback, and appears to keep its distance from humans?” His tracing of the bird itself becomes the deciphering of a fugitive text within the forest, where the methods of natural history collection are themselves rendered inadequate, obsolete, much as a mutating virus becomes immune to a vaccine. The classical texts of observational listening are called into question, and a more open listening starts to appear.

And where does this listening occur? Not in the dead air, the stasis of the archive, but in the more open, mobile space of a listening, listening to itself. As the idea of an originating viewpoint is called into question, it occurs in the action of the tracking, in the tracing. To attempt to locate the relation of the human/non-human ear within this listening, is also to recognise the presence of a living ear, which is always coming into being, that contains more than recording can allow. To question where and if our role as observers within these epistemological frameworks might still be able to occur, in this more open field. Where we can no longer simply listen from the fixed position of the bird identification manual or birdwatcher’s hide, nor from the shelter of a binary of the out-there and the in-here, the collector and the collected, but from a position that is always both outside and inside, moving-to and moving-with, which always fails to catch the subject of listening in the service of understanding the silence of non-observance as a listening back. The listening as a constantly re-calibrating relation between two moving subjects, holding open a space of listening to another, moving within language of fugitive, always-hiding figures. an open listening, which allows them to disappear.

vi.

The ornithologist might be dimly aware, and increasingly, that the story of the forest he hikes through, in the difficult terrain also traversed by the collector forebears he symbolically numbers himself among, includes texts that cannot be logged, that are perpetually slipping away in the dark, that can be apprehended only in glimpses and glances. Texts that remind us what it means to purposefully erase a recording, to let it disappear completely forever. These texts stand in defiant opposition to the archive.

The ornithologist searches the textual and sonic archival record, looking for clues going all the way back to the first observations of the colonial collectors. He might conclude that the kokako’s behaviour is less trusting than it was in the mid to late 1800s. The observational field he moves through has accordingly changed, since the bird has allegedly modified its behaviour in response to humans, since it became “shyer,” its process of disappearance is an active rather than passive escape from observation, the archive, the taxonomical record. But maybe we can just say that the kokako has learned to listen, that the heavier footstep of this new species has caused it to enter another space in relation to listening.

vii.

The taxonomical-archival relation is a system of fixities, origin points, observational centres. To correct the kokako’s status from the closed (extinct) to the open (data deficient), puts the bird back into this archive uncannily: both as a living absence, and as a figure aligned with contemporary digital impermanence. The bird sits in the forest of the cultural imagination, not filling it with the beauty of its song, but with the presence of a potent withdrawal, a refusal, rendered as silence. It is an Elvis taxon, appearing in times and places it should not, in grainy photographs as a blurred and insubstantial shape, from the back, with a tantalising suggestion of definition. Like a corrupt file on a hard drive, it is a text rendered unreadable but still taking up space. Even the certainty of its extinction is now flickering, insubstantial, unstable. The fixed image in the ornithological manual degrades, it becomes unrecognisable, it folds again into a listening which the forest reaches out to hold, this time as fade and decay.

viii.

This is not a project of preservation. There shall be no archives allowed. No datasets and genetic repositories as sonic ecosanctuaries, as libraries of life with their harmony of well-tuned niches, awaiting a technological future of perfect forms, an orderly and stilled living museum. The collector is, at best, an unreliable and confused observer, nothing more, logging hearings of impermanent, shifting, insubstantial texts. As listeners to his gatherings, we not presented with a totality. As listeners we record the metadata but not the data. We celebrate the trace, and bid a simultaneous welcome and farewell to texts that by accident or design do not end their wanderings with us, that continue to fade, decay, or simply remove themselves from the deadening promise of our observation. This transmission fails to hold its signal, it dissipates into the blue of an air sparking with a battery-acid tartness, a burnt smell of electrical discharge. It builds a forest again within the location of our listening, a spectral thicket of unsurpassable noise. And it is here where the bird stays, erasing itself at every moment. Erasing a song and re-presenting it as refusal. It is a message written in invisible ink, a self-destructing tape, a whisper passed through so many mouths it has ceased to have meaning at any point of locatable origin.

By now the collector’s voice itself has also been subsumed, far from his fantasy of the ordered list, of the singular author, he is only one of a chorus of songs sung in the forest of the book, the textual traces of these woven multi-stranded events, through many mouths and tellings. Just as his field-jotted writings echo after his early death, through his son’s compiling and editing, building on the bare traces of his fragments of notes, ironing out their many factual errors, pulling them into the category of the adventure story. Such actions raise the possibility that he himself might not exist as we have come to know him, but only as genre legend, historical chimera, some species of echo.

Freya Johnson Ross

Call me: the politics of interpersonal listening

Don’t be afraid

you can call me

Lying in the dark, rehearsing snappy conversation in my head. Does this count as cultivating self-listening, or is it a nervous tic? Walking along the street rehearsing what I want to say to you, or rather, what I don’t want to say to you. Wot do u call it?

What does your internal monologue sound like? Is it chirpy or angry? Are you familiar with it? Are you so familiar with it you’re bored? Can you tune it out or have you practiced quieting it? Actually perhaps ‘it’ isn’t right, or too singular, maybe it’s they… 

How do you listen to yourself? Can you do it without cultivating speaking to yourself in some way, or are the two inseparable? For example, if you write a diary are you talking to yourself or someone else? Or maybe it feels like an external voice is observing and noting on the page.

Maybe you listen to the way your body feels or senses without words. Exhaustion. Thirst. Sadness. Restlessness. Tension. You just read these words. Think them. Say them. Hear them. Feel them?

If you lie still can you ever hear your body, perhaps sensing the internal vibrations. Swimming in breath or pulse. Hide and seek. More delicate than listening to a recording of your own voice: talking, lecturing, reading, practicing, musing, pretending. Horrifying and delighting. ‘Perhaps I just get bored with myself’. Find your guts.

Listening needn’t have a response, form part of a dialogue. Speaking into a void, to exorcise, you don’t want anyone to hear. Or if you’re just noodling. When you read your own (old?) writing, do you feel like you’re listening to past you. Writing a letter to yourself and having it posted by the workshop organisers so you receive it some months later *eyeroll*

You say elision, I say liaison. Listening between the lines, lip reading. Lip syncing intimacy. Rising sign.

I’m worried about cancer, 1 in 2, twit-tu-woo. The sound of your voice does soothe me, but hearing your noises of understanding as you listen to me voice these fears is worth a thousand ships.

Active, gentle exchange of listening, giving and receiving, reciprocity unspoken and not negotiated.

Taking turns, take a break.

Who do you ask questions of?

No but I meant:

You’re not really listening.

Wot? I didn’t quite catch that, I lost you. Sorry? I don’t know if it’s my reception – can you walk around a bit. Hang on, I’ll try again.

Is that any better?

Shit.

Maybe try turning off your video? Can you hear me?

Sorry!!

In your ear, intimate. Visibly out of sync – auditory jet lag. Uncomfortably close. Neuropathology swimming to consciousness: plastic, china, lid of metal. What’s insiiiiiiiiideeeeeee

Walking: let’s swap sides.

Airing out loud – validated, reflected by and through someone else who knows you. A precious commodity. Vent.  ‘Holding space’ has a ring of personal architecture – the framework for…an auditory hug?

Do you think I understand you. Hmm. Listening, holistically (or specifically) as relationship building. What are we doing? Perhaps I can help you to make sense of some of the confusion around what you’ve been feeling. We could explore that together. I’m sick of the sound of my own voice, how long it takes to feel like someone has heard you. To feel like someone.

If you’re feeling sad and lonely, what does it feel like to be heard by a stranger? What does it feel like to listen to a stranger? I did hear you on the Lesbian Line before, the birds are singing so loudly.

*suffocated*

I wonder how many people I know have called the Samaritans, and I’m not sure why I don’t feel able to ask them. Freedom in anonymity. A friendly void. Stickers on the inside of toilet doors, and signs attached to high places.

maybe it’s late

but just call me

Don’t imagine you’re an amateur psychiatrist. Some people have never had anyone to give them their complete attention. There’s no more precious gift you can give to another human being than your undivided attention. Non-judgemental. Not giving advice. Not jumping to conclusions. Most people don’t want advice: they want to be told that what they have decided to do is ok.

Are you ok?

Under your skin: mirroring or mimicking? The parole ricochets around the room. The zoom. Do you lean towards filling silence out of politeness, to convey or steer? Discussion, resolution, decision. The ears have it, the ears have it!

Shared, ecstatic, hypnotic. Moving. Singing. Listening as part of a whole, to stay part of the whole. In sync. Effortless.

Excruciating, lonely, tense: that bombed. Can you edge it in or are you too worried about how it will be received? No repartee to lean on. Silence. Awkward attention. Focused, quiet, listening. Positively restrained: leaving space not leaving the room.

Drained. Have you ever gone through a conversation with your internal voice piping up after a while, god they haven’t asked me a single question, as you draw out and inquire into the detail of another person’s mind. That’s not to say it can’t be delightful, or fruitful, to devote yourself conversationally to an other. But it can be tiring, or come to feel like you are servicing someone else with your grin, engaged eyes, nods and encouraging noises. Equally, listening to someone’s unfolding thoughts, ideas or feelings – their unrehearsed mood can be joyful, captivating, relaxing. Closeness: a privilege. Effort or dedication to listening, is just as present as when it is light, reviving or unnoticed.

What do you listen to to numb yourself? Really really loud relentless music. Deliberate radio in the background. Any radio in the background. White noise. Rain, café, rustling. Sound clash. Hoovering inside and out. Something really interesting. Silence, something closer to silence. Less impingement, semi-anechoic chamber. [hhinnngggggggggggggggggggggggggg]

Cheap, careless, unlimited repetition. render tender tck tck tck-tck-tck  tck tck tck-tck-tck  tck tck tck-tck-tck


Freya Johnson Ross is an artist and researcher whose practice is focused on sound, multimedia installation and interdisciplinary listening – and how this relates to methodologies for knowledge production. Her current work addresses the politics of listening and the ethics of making and using personal and institutional archives. From Glasgow, she has studied at the University of Cambridge, Wimbledon College of Art, and the University of Sussex.

Freya Johnson Ross

Mark Peter Wright

The following text is reproduced from handwritten notes that were found within a dilapidated structure. They appear to detail the last known traces of an as yet unidentified wildlife sound recordist.

I will do my best to recall the circumstances that have led me to this point. I stand amongst a scene I can barely believe. My reflection no longer belongs to me. Soon I fear it will be too late to even speak.

I arrived here a week ago to record the sound of cicadas. Conditions were sweltering from the start. I spent days out in the long grass under burning heat, capturing the sounds of neocicada hieroglyphica, cacama valvata, tibicen canicularis, tibicen resonans and many more. I would sit in the field for hours happily listening to the high frequency buzz of insects. The work required stillness and quiet on my part, as to not encroach upon the recording. I tried to be invisible and inaudible. I was a silent listener immersed in a world of nature I have now come to fear. 

I took what was essentially a hobby very seriously. My recordings were frequently deposited in archives and used for research or artistic purposes. With the days work done I would return to my makeshift home-studio, have dinner and hurriedly begin the playback and cataloguing process for the duration of that evening, archiving and grading each recording one by one in order to preserve the sounds for future use.

It was systematic work done in the dimly lit confines of my purpose built abode. I broke up the monotony of cataloguing by manipulating and layering certain sounds into compositions. Nature was as musical as it was scientific. I would listen to my animal orchestra until I drifted asleep. How I long for those nights amidst the wreckage of my current mind state. 

This routine went on. Long days in the field with immersive nights listening back to recordings. My memory is cloudy now, but I remember things began to change one evening when I awoke from a nightmare. The dream was unique in that it appeared to contain sound alone. An unidentifiable heavy breathing crackled and howled in the most terrifying of ways. It produced an abysmal feeling of solitude in me coupled with an overwhelming presence of someone, or something.

Gasping out of sleep I sat up in bed and noticed a patch of dry blood on the pillow. I panicked and checked my body but nothing, not even a scratch. I ran my hands over my face and stopped as I touched a clotted knot of hair near my temple. I got out of bed and walked haphazardly to the mirror. The blood seemed to be coming from my left ear. “Strange” I thought, “how on earth could that have happened?” It was extremely painful to touch and felt as though something had been gnawing at my cochlear. After rinsing my hair and cleaning the blood away I managed to ignore the throbbing pain and gradually drifted back to sleep. 

Dawn came and blistering heat pierced through the windows. After coffee and a quick bite to eat I picked up my equipment and opened the door for another day of recording. I didn’t notice at first but gradually, as I made my way towards the site, just 100 feet from base, I realised something was missing. “Where had all the cicadas gone?” I couldn’t hear their usual incessant noise. I clicked my fingers next to my ears. There was nothing wrong there. I sat for hours on end waiting for the cicadas to stridulate. The heat became more and more pressing as the fatigue of waking from the nightmare took over. I drifted in and out of sleep amongst the gentle sway of the breeze. 

I came too with a sudden exhale; my ear began to cause huge irritation. Raising my hand, I felt a sticky, puss-like liquid on the lobe. I pressed a finger into the ear cavity and jumped out of my skin as a high screeching sound ricocheted around my skull, releasing a pain that registered in my teeth. Startled and anxious I hurriedly packed up the equipment and made my way back to my lodgings where I fell into another deep slumber.

I awoke in the dark, unsure of the time. Feeling disorientated, I decided to listen back to recordings from the previous day, hoping they would reassure my confused state. I set up the laptop and played a file at random. No sound was there. I played another file and again, no audible sign of the cicadas. My ear burned as I clicked on wav file after wav file. I couldn’t hear the sounds I knew I had captured from previous days. I frantically switched views and begin to analyse the visual spectrogram. None of the usual hi staccato imprints that epitomized cicada song were apparent. There was however, a ghostly marking throughout the recording. The cicadas may not have been there but something certainly was. I began isolating frequencies where I thought the inaudible content existed and boosted the volume, moving my chair closer towards one of the speakers. 

A faint, slow rhythmical sound filtered through the air. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. I placed my good ear gently against the speaker cone membrane and then suddenly amongst the hiss of amplification I realised what I could hear – it was the sound of my own breath. 

Fear streamed through my veins like never before. Panic swirled around me. I stumbled backwards from the speaker. Both ears now throbbed as a breath, my breath, emanated outwards, growing louder and louder. I felt a sharp piercing pain pour through my left ear again. I ran to the laptop to stop the file but it wouldn’t end. I unplugged the power and all I could hear was my breath pulsing louder and louder in a terrifying cascade that swamped the room. I began hyperventilating as I noticed the speakers seemed to be physically swelling with every pulsating breath. I crashed into a box of notes sending them spiraling through the air and I as turned, struck my head on the glass light bulb that dangled from the ceiling. 

I don’t know how long had passed before I came too, drenched in sweat. There was no sound and I was glad. Daylight splintered its way through the window. I picked myself up and walked towards the small refrigerator for some water, trampling over broken glass and paper notes. I felt a tug at my ankle and fell to the floor. For a brief moment I was sure something began dragging me backwards. Sat upright I raised a tired laugh as I fathomed audio cable had spiraled around my leg. Tripping me up yes, dragging me back, surely not?

Over the following days strange incidents continued. I walked outside and again, no cicada sounds passed through the air. Had I done something to affect them? During the nights I couldn’t bring myself to listen back to the recordings for fear of hearing that dreadful noise. 

Things began to escalate. A microphone momentarily grafted itself into my hand; I had to tear it away, breaking the skin of my palm. I woke up with cables wrapped around my legs. They became impossible to remove. In my growing delusion I cut one that was attaching itself around furniture and to my horror, a strange liquid oozed from it. Exhaustion grew. I lost everything. Sleep, dreams, heat and utterances took over. Life became a waking nightmare; my sanity escaped the room. I stopped going outside for fear that something was going to take over my body. Now I know that it was already here, in this room and in me, all this time. 

{Five pages torn haphazardly from the book. The only words visible in the severed margins appear to be: I, laughter, who, patterns, transparent, noise}

I have no idea what day it is or how long I have been here. I am tired and the pain is now unbearable. The last time I looked in the mirror my body began to pixelate and blend into the background. When I squeezed my arm a noise shrieked from everywhere. I stared at myself for minutes, shimmering and flickering with the room. Slowly, and with frozen fascination, I moved the pixels of my face and blanked out.  

{Two empty pages with faint lines drawn on them}

Last night I placed headphones on in one last attempt to find sanctuary in listening, but felt a tension between my ears. The pressure became so much that I ripped the headphones away and as I did so, cicadas spilled into the air in a horrifying slow-motion dance. In a fit of auto-destructive rage I demolished equipment and smashed hard drives into pieces. Exhausted, I pummeled microphones onto walls and across the floor. 

What is happening? My body is changing; my voice distorting; everything is alive!

{Long break in the page, scratches and torn pieces of page}

These last few hours, or days, I’m not sure how long, have brought a deterioration that bears no words. I have lost my voice. When I try to speak there is only shrieking feedback. Language now swims in a sea of metallic waves. I spend my day in noise, unable to move for the unbearable feeling that something is listening to me; thousands of things in fact are listening to the tiniest sounds of my every move.  

All equipment is destroyed but somehow it still manages to whirr into operation every night. My computer screen flickers on, speakers begin to swell and the sounds of my breath, my feet, my shuffling recorded body fills the night air. I am immersed in the horrifying noise of myself. 

{Smears of blood and matted grey fur stuck to page}

Both ears are now completely covered by abscesses. Everything sounds from within a muffled chamber. I can hear my heart beating loudly. I tried to run but couldn’t get out of the door. Thousands of cicadas moved across the window. I felt a microphone underfoot. Picking it up I was shocked to see legs squirm from under it, like an insect flailing in the air. I threw it against a wall. 

Grey fluffy material appears to be growing out of my skin. Sound continues to sink more and more within itself. I can hear my respiratory system crackling and wheezing; every step triggers a chain of echoes, reverberating up and down my spine. I cannot write much longer. As I grapple to form these words I’m becoming translucent. Like a pixelated image my skin is cubed, it morphs effortlessly into the environment. I am camouflaged from myself. 

{The notebook was discovered open at this point}

Mark Peter Wright

Lucía Hinojosa

crevice or, space that opens 

*

polyphonic pulse

*

What is a sound. A sound is two things heard at one and the same time but not together.

—Gertrude Stein

Rhythm refers not only to vocal emissions or to the sound of acoustic matter, but also to the vibration of the world. Rhythm is the inmost vibration of the cosmos. And poetry is an attempt to tune into this cosmic vibration, this temporal vibration that is coming and coming and coming.

—Franco Bifo Berardi

I’d like to make a metaphysical stroke over the body-machine which is trying to breathe and that hasn’t only been (even more) suffocated in the past months, but is utterly lost in the abstraction of fear, in an insecure, confused and repressed condition controlled by the undeniable structural global violence that permeates our contemporary paradigm. 

I don’t want to add more layers to the texture of uncertainties, accumulated in waves of overwhelming information, usually distorted, covered-up, and edited, regarding our fragile immune-social condition, the economic crisis, the reality war. Rather, I’d like to reflect on two concepts as vehicles that can reactivate our bodily experience, that will help us position and think ourselves in-relation, as bodies: sound and breath. If we perceive sound as materiality in continual vibration, and breath as the universal witness of a collective pulse, acting as a filter for ordinary experience and finally leading to an ideological, cultural, and socio-political experience of the world: how does a body breathe? I ask myself if our respiratory experience has also been oppressed as it becomes more and more involved with a structural rhythm of control. 

The vibration of sound and breath could work as instruments for a more profound ontological investigation regarding our current condition. If we perceive their agency with more attention, we could notice that they act as the evidence, the registry, of dynamic strokes over the body-machine, those which are apparently intangible, but that work as the essential rhythm of generative states within the body-machine. 

Parting from Franco Bifo Berardi’s premise, we can meditate on the presence (and absence) of the breath’s flux as a psychosomatic metaphor and a social symptom within physicality, visualizing the experience of these circuits traversing our bodies like residues in loop that are trying to synchronize—from the agency of the body’s subjectivity—with the context’s conditions, with its reality. I think it’s important to meditate intensely on this during this crisis that wants us to remain in an anti-respiratory state, in a continuous sensorial detachment from bodies-in-relation.

*

chaosmosis

*

Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.

—The Kybalion

Recently, I made a list of the etymologies of the word ‘chaos’. The evolution of its meaning is fascinating and, in a way, all of these descriptions have been enmeshed in today’s reality, like a constellation of infinite abysses:

+ kháos o cháos = the unpredictable

+ elemental confusion

+ a mass of matter without form  

+ vacuum occupying a hole 

+ from the Indo-European root gheu, it means being open

+ it means to yawn, or to open from a cavern

+ a random behaviour governed by complex principles, sensitive to its conditions

+ vacuum framing the rest of existence 

+ confusion of absolutes, disorder 

+ crevice or, space that opens 

+ the original state of matter

Berardi says that today’s notion of chaos lies on the absence of semiotic measurements in order to comprehend the flux of information and phenomena. It is the inability to attribute a “logical order” to a series of complex events that become unpredictable, and then, this indeterminacy extends into a very confused ambiance that is impossible to decipher through the frames of reality we have within reach. In other words, the semiotic frame that had been collectively integrated in order to perceive “order” is trapped within its own limits of reality. What we thought society or civilization was is falling, because the actual semiotic flow is going too fast and, at the same time, it has broken with the temporality and structure that we thought, illusively, was holding this model. Guattari’s term chaosmosis, and which Bifo eloquently recuperates from the standpoint of poetry and breath, refers to the synchronic rhythm between cosmic chaos and singularities, and more precisely, with subjectivities. It is “the process of rebalancing the osmosis between mind and chaos, with the osmotic evolution of chaos in itself.” In this sense, this stance opens up and generates an infinity of possibilities that enter into a cosmic rhythm that, for Berardi, happens through the flow of respiration, through breathing. Breath in this sense, is the ultimate measure of relation, overcoming the limits of an established semiotic rhythm and reality, subtly auto-generating from a vibratory re-modulation between subject and experience. Berardi says, “when we say chaos, then, we mean two different, complementary movements. We refer to the swirling of our surrounding semiotic flows, which we receive as if they were “sound and fury.” But we also refer to attempts to reconcile this encompassing environmental rhythm with our own intimate, internal rhythm of interpretation.”  

In this sense, the sound of drone music could be perceived as matter without form, which is governed by complex principles, as the unpredictable mass of experience: the open state of chaos. Our bodies, our materialities, are part of the vacuum that occupies a space where the rest of existence is framed, but they can find their own rhythmic scale to connect with this open state and enter into an osmotic condition from a continual, subjective exploration, an internal interpretation, and not from a prosthetic semiotic limitation, a rhythmic control: a model that erodes singularities. 

Eliane Radigue, Jetsun Mila, 1968. (Composition inspired by the Tibetan poet and yogi Milarepa). 

The vibration of the drone, characterized by sustained repetition of sound and notes, will work as an allusion to observe the relation between our bodies and the sphere of an unlimited semiotic flux. The drone maintains a complex, penetrating sonic reality, and we could say that, as opposed to a traditional musical composition that produces sound in calculated intervals, creating a harmonic narrative “starting from zero, from silence,” the drone is a generative organism that is alive, and that is “always there” as potential mass, already holding an infinity of sound permutations and variations. This effect is released and can happen over our sensorial surface, in an osmotic act, within the physicality of our bodies: the drone happens with the body, in-relation: the body is the vacuum where vibrations can be held. 

Eliane Radigue, L’ile Resonante, 2005. 

Drone and minimalist music activate a reality principle that is radical. Its conceptual and practical design is fluid and paratactic, avoiding a dual, tautological loophole. For instance, the traditional principle in Western music starts with the idea of silence. Notes and frequencies are added over silence from a linear perception in order to construct something from an apparently blank, clean space, creating a composition through a sequential notational system that “did not exist before.” This way of ordering reality responds to a hierarchical model. Drone music takes its principles from Indian classical music, from the sustained sound of the tambura. Drone music and Indian music sound very different, but they share the same model in a structural, practical sense. This premise is based on the idea that “sound is always, already there” happening through a field of continuous electricity, and the body can tune in with that other sonorous body-mass in order to create a new state of singular synchronicity. In a way, it turns into a collaborative act between vibration and individual. 

Jung Hee Choi, RICE, during the exhibition The Third Mind, Guggenheim, 2009.

The body must listen attentively to the accumulation of vibratory frequencies in order to tune into the sonic continuum and, from that place, articulate its own experience. There is no a priori imposition or an anticipated idea, or desire, for new measures to be composed “over” space, there is only relation and interaction with frequencies that are already permeating every space, every aspect of sound. As the Italian artist Caterina Barbieri mentions, “the sound of the drone is the most penetrating archetypal gesture.” In this sense, there is no aspiration to create a new semiotic limit or a measure. The most penetrating vibration is already there, within us, between sound and bodies. 

La Monte Young, The Well-Tuned Piano, 1987.

*

circuits

*

We need to visualize the subject as a transversal unity that encompasses the human. 

—Rosi Braidotti

The dissolution of the limit and the production of resulting tones and cosmic vibrations are central to the phenomenon of resonance.

—Ben Neill (Pure Resonance, La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela).

What is the experience of subjectivities? Where and how do they happen? Guattari and Deleuze put forth that the subject identifies with the centre because it lacks the capacity to observe the circuit of intensities and living states that it forms part of. But, the subject is being constantly reborn from the state that is experimenting, this is what determines it. In this sense, the subject within the body is actually impossible to locate because it is in perpetual movement and never in the centre, rather in its peripheries, moving. Therefore, the subject produces and is produced as residue, defined by the states that it experiments in a vital oscillation. 

Respiration traverses, affects and is affected by all of these subtle circuits, and maybe the attention to our breath could reveal the tempo, the rhythm of these routes where the subject happens, generating a temporality frame that could be interpreted subjectively and intimately, in relation to other tempos and other breathing circuits. 

Our anti-respiratory paradigm is gradually suffocating our sensorial awareness, with the promise that, if we wear our masks, we’ll go back to the norm, to our normal reality, where it was already impossible to breathe. If we think of the circuit of intensities and states that Guattari and Deleuze put forth, there’s really no before and after, but a continuum of exhalations and inhalations that are clearly informing us, as we lose touch with our intimate rhythm and vital subjectivity, about our psycho-social condition. The political and economic paradigm that insists on sustaining its “rhythm” generated by the politics of isolation, that leads us more and more to the terrors of an egotistic individuality and self-absorption, structural violence and inequalities regarding racism, class and gender, labor exploitation, ignorance and ecological abuse, and the ever omnipresent media garbage, promoting a frightening state that is not only asphyxiating but overtly anti-contact, anti-touch, irrevocably reveals itself by lifting its veil and showing us a structure that only works as it subtracts our breath, our air. But, in exchange of what? This is the essential ideological trade model, the effect of semiocapital’s power, as Berardi would put it. 

It is essential to feel and probably even think through the body’s agency and information, and only from there, to try to pierce into social, political and cultural fields in order to interpret and affect the model through different semiotic possibilities. To find the localities of our rhythmic patterns and think about these drives and flows—where do they come from and why? We could even differentiate and intervene with the circuits where our subjectivities are oscillating. Berardi talks about the word conspiration, which means breathing together, but I like the evolution of its meaning, the idea of a secret agreement, a plan. The agreement to observe the unseen, the hidden strokes and traces of our bodies’ intimate breathing.

I celebrate the circuits that produce new respiratory paradigms and that can tune-into frequencies of possibility in order to sustain other vibratory articulations and even produce echoes and resonance in other bodies, traversing to other respiratory fields: the poetic-political actions, the re-articulation of human rights movements fighting gender and racial violence, alternative study groups and feminist collectives, spaces for social and artistic experimentation; but above all I celebrate the complicities of friendship and rhythmic solidarity that are opening new routes based on open-ended, perhaps unfinished principles but that are able to articulate respiratory variations and multiplicities, creating a synchronicity that is possible because it is open to semiotic mystery, producing subjects that experiment themselves in-relation. 

Caterina Barbieri, Fantas, 2019.

References:

 Patrick Farmer: Azimuth, The Ecology of an Ear. SARU, 2019.

 Franco “Bifo” Berardi: Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, Semiotext(e), 2018.

 Los Tres Iniciados: The Kybalion of Hermes Trismegisto, Editorial EDAF, 1978. 

 Rosi Braidotti: The Posthuman, Polity Press, 2013.

William Duckworth, Richard Fleming: Sound and Light: La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela, Bucknell University Press, 2012.

Lucía Hinojosa

Thomas Martin Nutt

DETACHMENT / TOLERANCE

we exist neither for one thing

or for the other

but to prepare the way

Ronald Johnson. ARK 75, ARCHES IX

 

Event scores (also known as text scores or verbal scores) are usually brief, usually text instructions for creative action. This could be subtle or vivid. They were central to the Fluxus method, such as one could be defined, from the late 1950s, and through the 1960s and 70s. Their variety defines their intangible actuality. I framed lockdown by familiarising myself with Fluxus largely through active participation with these event scores. I didn’t anticipate that it would unfold like this.

Ontologically speaking, is there anything to be gleaned by actualising Fluxus Event Scores alone, at home, in lockdown?! Allan Kaprow wrote about the ‘poignancy’ of non-theatrical performance being contextualised in an ‘ongoing world, undisturbed and hardly caring.’ Considering the indifferent nature of a viral pandemic this sentiment took on a new significance. We didn’t anticipate that it would unfold like this.

PLURALITY

In 1958, around the time of Fluxus’ inception, psychiatrist Klaus Conrad coined the term ‘apophenia’ to describe a tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. At its extreme this might manifest in a belief in fallacies familiar to gamblers or conspiratorially minded people. So called mild cases of ‘apophenia’ are not a disorder, but a part of the human condition and are even woven into our cultural fabric. For example, we are likely familiar with the ‘man in the moon’ to explain the geographic features visible on the moon’s surface, but if you were raised in East Asia, you’ll probably be more familiar with the ‘rabbit pounding rice cakes.’

In 1963 Fluxus’ first major publication, An Anthology of Chance Operations, formalised a blurring of the boundaries between poetry, music and dance, that a burgeoning of Fluxus events and performances had previously inaugurated. The Duchampian notion of the viewer completing the work of the artist was interrupted by performers simultaneously extending the scope of the artist, and the role of the viewer. It became possible to hold multiple vantage points at the same time – composer, performer and listener. The externalised cognitive processes of considering a text score, while listening to an actualisation invited new shared experiences, different to that of the hitherto formalised relationship of a distal audience enjoying the final aesthetic of an artist’s labour and their genius, or their sensibility. 

EXISTENCE

Words are different to actions. A text score might be opaque. Similarly, an actualisation might be oblique. Both can be enjoyed at face value. To present the score and the actualisation together is to invite the viewer to triangulate on a directed territory of meaning. The more people observe something, the more perspectives are invited and therefore the more equally relevant interpretations – separate, overlapping or layered – can be expected. Our private conscious experiences are exposed as multi nodal interpretations of an event, a moment in time and/or a place – similar to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s anthropomorphic Noosphere or Jakob von Uexküll’s more inclusive Umwelt. We are invited to encounters with the composer, encounters with the performer, encounters with the environment and encounters with ourselves, ineffably unfolding before our very eyes and ears. A complex of connections and a myriad of relations is unveiled. There is no outside-text score.

REGRESS

Questions regarding plurality of meaning were common place in the 1960s. In 1967’s Death of the Author, Roland Barthes proposed that, “to give a text an author”, thus assigning a single, corresponding interpretation to it, was to impose a limit on that text.” His assertion was that the essential meaning of a work depends more on the impressions of the reader, as opposed to the “passions” or “tastes” of the writer. He noted, “a text’s unity lies not in its origins, but in its destination.”

Language that is susceptible to different, perhaps even incompatible interpretations might suggest an asymmetry between audiences. The language to explain the phenomenon requires a language to explain it. Infinite explanations on how to read the explanations; of how to read the score, and further explanations about how an actualisation was rendered may be required. As such, we draw maps to navigate maps with legends to explain their legends. But rules for interpreting rules provide little help because they themselves can be interpreted in different ways. In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein noted that “any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support. Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning.” 

We are reminded of the anecdote about a person who, upon being asked to clarify on what the tortoise stood, if their assertion that the world stood on the back of a giant tortoise were true, rebuffed, ‘My dear, it’s no good asking, it’s tortoises all the way down.’

AMBIGUITY

Anne Carson notes in If Not Winter, her complete translation of the incomplete fragments of Sappho, that the poet was complemented on her talent for using the impossible gracefully while simultaneously being criticised for flattering the ear shamefully. A tension between sympathies seems inherent to language. 

Ambiguities are debated and contended, perhaps now more than ever. We are prone to defend our understanding as to question our assumptions is to destabilise us. People’s arguments are often hobbled by a tacit faith in an oversimplified understanding of the principal of bivalence. In most cases this becomes conflated with good and bad, or more problematically with right and wrong. 

Not everything is polyvalent in character, but during the 1960s, post-structuralist thinkers were trying to leverage apart troublesome semantic binaries which at their extreme were exposed as problematic. It was suggested that there could be a wholeness to binaries that is greater than the sum of the two separate but related extremities. The echos of these considerations are still audible. 

Sidestepping the debate about whether maths was created or discovered, floating point numbers opened a window onto the infinity between 0 and 1. There are areas of life that suggest a greater resolution of meaning could satisfy our sympathies, if only our understanding could resolve in tandem. 

DEFINITION

Lexicographers engage in a form of field recording. Dictionaries are essential to communal sense making. The complexities inherent to defining terms can be  demonstrated where The Oxford English Dictionary currently lists two definitions for the noun, ‘definition’, while the Merriam Webster lists four. 

Etymologically, the Latin dēfīnīre meant ‘to mark out the boundaries of something and while the meaning of that core verb remains, the boundary defined bydefinition’ has been redrawn. The Latin dēfīnīre shares a root with the verb ‘finish’ (Latin fīnīre)- ‘to put and end to or, bring to a close’. From Latin, through Anglo-French and Middle English to its current form, ‘definition’ continues to metamorphose, to be defined, not away from its original meaning, but outward from it, drawing and redrawing the limitations of its boundary line, and discovering its definition.

TRANSLATION

We use tools to make our tools. We think about thinking and we describe language. We are continually circling in on the illusive central tenet of our arguments in a universe where angular motion is an intrinsic property. Meaning is still available in the warped beauty of poorly translated English on cheap t-shirts and ¥100 stationary. It works greatly in every scene including outdoor. All over the physical iconic power, even the world is eminent. You are freer than whether to use with what kind of use. Yesterday, today and probably tomorrow, today is today too. As Jim Jarmusch notes in Patterson, “Poetry in translation is like taking a shower with a raincoat on.”

POETRY

All words are metaphorical territories with their denotative meaning being situated somewhat centrally while sounds, connotation, associations and affect demarcate an amorphous field. The boundaries can be breached and the field trespassed upon to varying degrees of pleasure (and its opposites).

Listening to children form language, we remember how sound coalesces and is moulded around meaning. Depending on our exposure to certain experiences, these semantic mouldings develop at different stages in our maturation. Language is sculptural. Meaning is malleable and our sensibilities determine whether or not ours are apt to harden, or if they relain pliable. Poets keep their clay warm.

POSTMODERNISM

Philosophy, science and art are emergent properties of life that mirror reality and attempt to explain experience. All aim to understand and represent. Language is a tool that binds them and explains their connections. In Philosophy and Desire, Alain Badiou posits that postmodernism “…installs philosophical thought at the periphery of art, and proposes an untotalizable mixture of the conceptual method of philosophy and the sense-orientated enterprise of art.” We might share some of Badiou’s concerns about postmodernism, but if philosophical thought is installed within the sense making fields of art (hasn’t it always been?), it must be portable, and it is pessimistic to suppose that it isn’t similarly installed elsewhere, in other sense making fields – including its own thriving philosophical lineage. 

We all share the same stable foundations. When approached with intellectual honesty, philosophy, science and art ultimately contribute towards the same sense making project. A syncretic erasing of what we might consider as departmental horizons can be beneficial to discovering meaning through a shared pursuit. Questions towards meaning can compliment classical questions of truth. As physicist David Deutsch notes, “That the truth consists of hard-to-vary assertions about reality is the most important fact about the physical world. It is a fact that is itself unseen, yet impossible to vary.” 

CERTAINTY

Certainty of meaning is sought in reference literature. Nuance is avoided in manuals. As text scores similarly employ language to communicate what an actualisation should entail, abstraction seems antithetical to the straight semantic representation one might assume is essential. After all, a score is usually thought of as instructions where effectiveness is measured by their clarity. Simplicity of language can be a means to reduce the error of misunderstanding. Paradoxically, an economy in text can broaden the interpretative range. A score written using the more established format of semiotic pitch marks on a stave is similarly open to uncertainty. Wittgenstein noted that “There is a gulf between an order and its execution. It has to be filled by the act of understanding. Only the act of understanding can mean that we are to do THIS. The order – why that is nothing but sounds, ink marks.” 

MEANING

Perhaps the most obvious of the pandemic’s many paradoxes is that we are being asked to participate by not doing things. There is an urgency in non-participation. Seemingly innocent activities have taken on new and sometimes threatening connotations. To shake hands has been one of the first such actions to undergo a stress test. It’s not hard to imagine that shaking hands might become synonymous with pre-covid insouciance. Meaning is reformed under different conditions.

As such, a text continues to evolve.Poets and writers whom I admire, using the accepted lexicon of their age, have left unsavoury traces in their work. Sylvia Plath. Wallace Stevens. Roland Barthes’ clumsy otherness that permeates Empire of Signs. How many others might there be? Terms can spoil the passages around them. As Barthes understood, every work is “eternally written here and now” with each reading, because the “origin” of meaning lies exclusively in “language itself” and its impressions on the reader. We understand how language personifies a collective mind and embodies the sympathetic resonance of a collective heart. 

PRECISION

Like the strings of a piano, our sense making apparatuses are not always set in unison. We may be vulnerable to slippage that necessitates calibration. But even tunings change over time. We now understand that the fundamental frequency of A is 440 Hz. But A has not always been defined in this way. In his 2018 installation Continuum, Ryoji Ikeda utilised the work of philologist Alexander John Ellis; tracking the drift of A from 1715 to the present day. 

The tuning fork was invented in 1711 by English lutenist to the court, John Shore. At that time his  tuning fork registered A at 419.9 Hz. Even as late as 1879, a Steinway and Sons tuning fork registered A at 457.2 Hz. It wasn’t until 1955 that The International Organisation of Standardisation declared the concert tuning of A, or ISO 16 to be 440 Hz. This surprising fact might be matched when we consider that in Europe there is still some dispute between the period instrument movement and baroque and classical maestros that can lead to a 4Hz variation in A. In the age of quantum precision our sensibilities can still challenge our reasoning.

SINGULARITY

A graphic score still employs language as we have to make sense of what we are seeing by describing it. In La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #9, a black off-centre horizontal line printed on white card stock is contained in an envelope. Instructions for reading the score lexically outnumber the score itself. On the envelope is written, ‘the enclosed score is right side up when the horizontal line is slightly above centre.’ It would be possible to actualise the score without opening the envelope.

Scores usually have a latitude and a longitude, an X/Y axis suggestive of a location. If we consider that a point is mappable in space then a line is inherently time based. Thanks to our established writing system, it is natural for us to equate a movement from left to right with the passing of time. Text on a page is time based. Reading a text is performative. As such a graphic score such as Composition 1960 #9 represents something singular occurring in time. But paradoxically it is open to infinite interpretations.

PHYSICALITY

An experiential basis for our linguistic metaphors is hardly surprising. Languages are grounded in the same spatial understanding of the world that we are all subject to. Height is apparent in pitch. Low pitch tones – a drop of the shoulder, we’re feeling down or feeling low. High pitch – straightening of the back, feeling good, up at the crack of dawn to watch the sun rise. 

Our sagittal planes demarcate directional opposites. They are suggestive of place or location in space as well as time, and locate us centrally therein. Our notions of harmony tend to follow the same principals of balance. Consider the purity of a sine-wave, equal along an axis, or the beauty of the Rose Windows of Notre Dame – the symmetrical ideals of attractive features. 

When considering the suspended existence of Jellyfish, as Astrida Neimanis does in Bodies of Water, she notes that “buoyancy would have given rise to an unthinkably different metaphysics.” If only we could do away with the distractions of our bodies, to liberate existence and be as pure thought! Think of the associations we might be free to make outside of these Rorschach inkblots that define our modes of perception.

SUSPENSION

But we are living suspended existences. We are suspended in the middle of infinite continua. Time, space, sound and knowledge are just four potentially infinite continuums for which we are only partial to one small window. Between directional orientations, we are the physical boundary between up and down, forward and backwards and temporally between what came before and what will come after – our memories, our expectations. The infinite complexity of our exterior is matched by the mysteries of our interiors. Our sense making apparatuses are limited to suspended operational windows.

These central thresholds aren’t passive. They aren’t boundaries between opposing terms, as was challenged by the post-structuralists, they are more equivalent to effervescent event horizons, simultaneously drawing in matter and expelling light. Similarly the boundaries between disciplines are fertile. Like a reef, where the cool waters of ‘philosophy’s conceptual method can meet the warm waters of ‘the sense-orientated enterprise of art.’ As Jean Luc Nancy noted in his 2016 Four by Three magazine interview, “To appropriate what is outside of ourselves – bodies, exteriority – would be to strip them of their outside and thus of their independent nature, foreign to all assignment of property. It would be to appropriate the expropriation with which thought begins.”

DETACHMENT

We sense the etymology of the name Fluxus. It is a Latin verb meaning to flow. Before engaging with these text scores, I imagined flow to mean flowing past like a river. When considering the Balkanization of thought processes that is currently destabilising our communal sense making, to flow like a river seems too close to its etymological cousin, ‘rival’. I have come to suppose that flow needn’t suggest conflicting binaries – rival banks of the same stream. Thanks to this prolonged engagement with Fluxus event scores I have come to appreciate that flow is more akin to springs, flowing outward from intangible central places, to intangible thresholds elsewhere. 

Fluxus event scores expand our understanding of our relationships to a text. This may be extended indefinitely. Meaning may never be definitively decoupled from the written word. The meaning within a text is less important than the action it enkindles. The variety of Fluxus event scores and their actualisations define their intangible actuality not as a multiplicity of separatenesses but as a wholeness.

I have been considering the painting, Eukelade by Boo Saville as a better articulation of what I have been trying to say. Boo’s patient technique involves gently erasing thinly applied layers of paint to create mesmerising colour fields. At the beginning of August, Boo tweeted the following unattributed quote,

Detachment is not the absence of emotion, it is the process of becoming one with the Oneness that is the Universe. To be detached, is to realise that the fullness of all there is, is too much to react to with just one emotion, one thought, or any bias.

Thomas Martin Nutt